The Rites of Identity: The Religious Naturalism and Cultural Criticism of Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison [Course Book ed.] 9781400825769

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THE RITES OF IDENTITY

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THE RITES OF IDENTITY The Religious Naturalism and Cultural Criticism of Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison Beth Eddy

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2003 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY All Rights Reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Eddy, Beth, 1955– The rites of identity : the religious naturalism and cultural criticism of Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison / Beth Eddy. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-09249-4 (alk. paper) 1. Burke, Kenneth, 1897—Knowledge—Religion. 2. Ellison, Ralph—Knowledge— Religion. 3. Criticism—United States—History—20th century. 4. Religion. I. Title. PN75.B8E34 2003 818′.5209—dc21 2002044719 British Library Cataloging–in–Publication Data is available. This book has been composed in Goudy and American Gothic Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ www.pupress.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

TO IDA WALLER POPE

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. . . all symbolism can be treated as the ritualistic naming and changing of identity. . . . Kenneth Burke, Attitudes toward History

Here upon this stage the black rite of Horatio Alger was performed to God’s own acting script, with millionaires come down to portray themselves; not merely acting out the myth of their goodness, and wealth and successes and power and benevolence and authority in cardboard masks, but themselves, these virtues concretely! Not the wafer and the wine, but the flesh and the blood, vibrant and alive, and vibrant even when stooped, ancient and withered. (And who, in face of this, would not believe? Could even doubt?) Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments xi CHAPTER ONE Identity and the Rites of Symbolic Action 1 CHAPTER TWO Kenneth Burke’s Natural Pieties of Identity 25 CHAPTER THREE Catharsis and Tragedy: Kenneth Burke’s Rhetoric of Sacrifice 57 CHAPTER FOUR The Spiritual Utility of Comedy 80 CHAPTER FIVE Ralph Ellison and the Vernacular Pieties of American Identity 99 CHAPTER SIX Ellison’s Tragic Vision of Sacrifice 120 CHAPTER SEVEN The Blues of American Identity: Comic Transcendence in Ellison 139 CHAPTER EIGHT Both a Part of and Apart From: The Spirit and Ethics of a Religious Pragmatism 157 Notes 173 Bibliography 195 Index 199

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation for financial support of my research and writing. Thanks also go to Charles Mann and Sandra Stelts of the Rare Books and Special Collections at Pattee Library at Pennsylvania State University for assistance and advice on archival sources. I am also grateful to Michael Burke for access to many of those archival sources. The book benefits from the kind efforts of various people at Princeton University Press: Fred Appel, Linny Schenck, Madeleine Adams, and Sarah Green. I would like to thank my teachers and mentors, Jeffrey Stout, Henry Samuel Levinson, and Cornel West, for their inspiration, instruction, and support. Some of the debt I owe to them will be apparent to my reader, but the errors I managed on my own. To my colleagues who read this manuscript and talked with me about it—David Craig, Eddie Glaude, Bill Hart, and Hannah Schell—I offer my gratitude and continued friendship. Over the years Mark Larrimore has been teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend all in one. Thanks to my daughters, Lauren and Meredith, for giving me a reason to persevere. Most important of all, my love and respect to Jim Eddy, for being there for the long haul and the short-term crunch. This book would not have happened without him by my side and involved in my life.

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THE RITES OF IDENTITY

CHAPTER ONE

IDENTITY AND THE RITES OF SYMBOLIC ACTION The skin is a line of demarcation, a periphery, the fence, the form, the shape, the first clue to identity in a society (for instance, color in a racist society), and, in purely physical terms, the formal precondition for being human. . . . It is a thin veil of matter separating the outside from the inside. —Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse Closed societies are now the flimsiest of illusions, for all the outsiders are demanding in. —Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory Identification is compensatory to division. If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity. If men were wholly and truly of one substance, absolute communication would be of man’s very essence. It would not be an ideal, as it now is, partly embodied in material conditions and partly frustrated by these same conditions. —Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives

TOO OFTEN, discussions that deal with personal identity issues, whether about race, gender, religion, or nation, descend quickly into an “us” and “them” opposition that ceases to do productive work and poisons the hopes of any participant for a satisfying resolution of conflict. Probably all of us have experienced the relief that comes from being able to get away temporarily from the conflicts we have with differing others. Playing poker with the boys on Saturday night can alleviate the ongoing domestic conflicts of married life. An Afrocentric school can educate young African Americans in a space free from the constant encroachments on self-esteem made in white supremacist environments. Churches, synagogues, and voluntary associations make space for us to have conversations and participate in activities premised upon views that we do not all share. Gentlemen’s clubs provide some with a comfortable retreat. Women sometimes find all-female classrooms to be places where conversations can finally get off the ground floor without being derailed at the

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level of definitions of terms. Although temporary separations like these are necessary to provide respite and sanity checks for the fatigued, permanent separations, even though they may be energized by a collective spirit, lead to cultural fragmentation. On the other hand, too often the only voices calling for an end to conflict have naive expectations or envision the assimilation of one party to another one without substantial change. Identities serve both as the insignia that clothe us in uniform to others’ eyes, either as friend or enemy, and as the fortresses that protect our most crucial first premises about our hopes, fears, and needs. This book highlights the centrality of identity in Kenneth Burke’s and Ralph Ellison’s cultural criticism. It emphasizes the religious language in which both men cast their descriptions of the ways societies sustain, fail to sustain, and transform human identities. I aim to show the tremendous influence of Burke’s ideas on Ellison and to show that influence both in Ellison’s embrace of and in his criticism of those ideas. Although there are similarities in the language of the two men there are also important differences in their social perspectives. On one level, I want to think about rhetoric. The relevant religious concern I address here is “not about God, but rather, about the way we use our words about God on each other,” to quote Burke.1 Burke finds rhetoric and identity to be inseparable subjects; in a section of his work titled “Identity and Consubstantiality,” he shows how the study of rhetoric is the study of the ways in which individuals are at odds with one another, or become identified with groups more or less at odds with one another. Why “at odds,” you may ask, when the titular term is “identification”? Because to begin with “identification” is, by the same token though roundabout, to confront the implications of division.2 Ralph Ellison also writes, almost exclusively, about identity. His work centers on “the great mystery of identity in this country, really on the level of a religious mystery.”3 This concern runs through his novel Invisible Man and through his essays on the novel and other American cultural forms. The mystery is this: “the puzzle of the one-and-the-many; the mystery of how each of us, despite his origin in diverse regions, with our diverse racial, cultural, religious backgrounds, speaking his own diverse idiom of the American in his own accent, is, nevertheless, American.”4 Kenneth Burke’s identity concerns focus on symbolic action, that is, on the rites that change human identity and maintain the connections holding together the discontinuities of human existence. “Our basic principle,” he states, “is our contention that all symbolism can be treated as the ritualistic naming and changing of identity.”5 Burke’s concern with rituals of rebirth, purification, and initiation should signal his potential importance to the study of religion and to the social psychology of identity. He opens up a world

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of local resources; as Stanley Edgar Hyman, his friend and critic, put it, a Burke reader often has “the sudden sense of a newly discovered country in his own backyard.”6 Both Burke and Ellison show “how greatly the ‘Americanness’ of American culture has been a matter of Adamic wordplay—of trying, in the interest of a futuristic dream, to impose unity upon an experience that changes too rapidly for linguistic or political exactitude. In this effort we are often less interested in what we are than in projecting what we will be.”7 I plan to spell out the details of their mutual preoccupations with identity, religiosity, and American traditions. I am putting forward three major claims. First, I try to show that Kenneth Burke was a major, perhaps the major, intellectual influence on Ralph Ellison. I will support this claim by presenting a substantial quantity of textual evidence that can be confirmed by anyone willing to do a close reading of the work of both men. Ellison’s writing virtually drips with the language of Burke’s literary and cultural criticism. To be sure, other analysts of Ellison’s work have noted the influence of Burke. But no one, to my knowledge, is talking about the extent of that influence. Burke is given a footnote or a paragraph at most in book-length treatments of Ellison’s work. The irony is that Burke and Ellison thought and wrote about precisely the sorts of identity formations, transformations, and preservations that help explain scholars’ neglect of the connections between the two of them. Obviously, the two men have racial identity differences. But to notice a profound intellectual resemblance between the two men is not to whitewash their racial differences. It is instead to make both the differences and the similarities all the more highly charged with importance and moral ambiguity. Second, I claim that the two men belong to an American tradition of religious naturalism and that George Santayana is an important link in the chain that takes them both back to the “parentage” of Ralph Waldo Emerson. By religious naturalism I do not mean reductive materialism, or scientism, but rather the understanding of religious traditions and experiences as naturally available to human beings without the attribution of any special supernatural powers to any human ideals. Two of the three topics that organize the structure of my investigation have been chosen to mirror Santayana’s naturalistic religious emphasis on piety, spirituality, and the comic. Third, I hope to show that this tradition has usable resources, ones rightly cast in religious language, for understanding what is currently true about human identities and differences. These same resources also help us to live gracefully within those contemporary constraints, even while imagining and negotiating toward a bit more of what ought to be true about the same. These resources grew out of a culture aspiring to be democratic—one composed from the beginning of mixed races, genders, religions, and ethnicities that all made sizable contributions to it. This American culture holds the simultaneous

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achievement of justice and equality to be a higher human ideal than social stability; in my view, it need offer no apology for that priority. Yet this culture at the same time holds in tension resources for acting effectively when practical necessity calls for working within conditions of social inequality and power inequity. It confronts, rather than evades, the tricky interactions between human powers and human ideals. I emphasize this American particularity, not out of any nationalistic piety toward the country where I live, but out of my own “parochial preoccupation” to adopt what I’ve inherited and turn it to the critical evaluation of where I am in the attempt to brighten that corner a bit.8 Both Burke and Ellison highlight the unsung contribution vernacular culture makes to rites of identity in a specifically democratic society. In so doing, they help ameliorate elitist tendencies in cultural criticism and make a normative claim. “Antagonistic cooperation” as an exemplary attitude, one drawn from Emerson and elaborated by Burke and Ellison, can further help sustain democratic cultures involved in identity conflicts. This interpretation highlights a humanist emphasis on “comic” ways of interpreting and performing symbolic actions and cautions against an overly tragic and redemptive interpretation of social rituals of sacrifice. My own approach is in part a response to a received view of Burke and Ellison scholarship. Both Burke and Ellison are usually read within the disciplinary context of the study of literature and rhetoric. Kenneth Burke has been studied by many fine scholars such as William Rueckert and Greig Henderson; I owe much to their analyses of Burke’s thought.9 But although I am indebted to these venues of scholarship, I would point out the limitations of such a narrow disciplinary focus. Neither Burke nor Ellison thought very much in disciplinary terms; in fact both men were more inclined to flaunt those boundaries, to the consternation of their peers. Fred Inglis (whose own intellectual history of Clifford Geertz sheds much light on these interdisciplinary connections) called Burke a “philosophic–historiographic–part Marxist–part pragmatist literary critic.”10 Yet scholars continue to read Burke primarily in the context of literature and rhetoric. John Callahan writes of an Ellison who worked on autobiographical essays, literary essays, music criticism, and cultural criticism and throughout these multiple tasks articulated a thesis that “the American ideal is equality, the American theory pragmatism, and the American style the vernacular” and that the search for identity is “the American theme.”11 Yet Ellison is most often studied solely within the history of the American novel, or, more narrowly yet, the history of African-American literature. To place either man in so narrow a context doesn’t do what each thinker invites the reader to do. To read them with the breadth of interpretive context that they invite would take a reader into both the history of religious thought as well as the realm of American pragmatism. Both Burke and Ellison were driven by large concerns at once political, ethical, literary, and spiritual.

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Meanwhile, while Burke and Ellison have been studied within an overly narrow disciplinary framework, something else has been going on in the field of American thought. Not so long ago, the concept of American pragmatism would evoke the names of Charles Pierce, William James, and John Dewey as the major contributors to its canon. But the scope of American pragmatic thought has expanded greatly in the last two decades. Thanks in large part to the work of Richard Poirier, Cornel West, and Stanley Cavell, students of American pragmatism can see that the tradition they are studying needs to go back at least as far as Emerson to tell the tale they want to tell. Hence, all the work that shows Emersonian influences can now be seen as likely connected in some way to the scope of American pragmatic thought. Poirier has illuminated the breadth of Emersonian literary influence within a wider pragmatic American thought. West has shown how the religious thought of someone like Reinhold Niebuhr has family resemblances to American pragmatism. He also points to W.E.B. Dubois in an expansion of a potential canon of American pragmatism that can encompass American cultural criticism concerned with matters of race. In sum, the canon of American pragmatic thought has rapidly expanded past the scope of those few classical American philosophers. In this expanded context, Giles Gunn has paid particular attention to Kenneth Burke’s work. I am trying to go through the door that Gunn’s work has opened: The time is ripe for Burke and Ellison scholarship to enter this newly expanded field of American pragmatic thought. Both Burke and Ellison, I believe, would be pleased to be read not just in the context of literary disciplines, but also within the interdisciplinary realms of moral, religious, and political thought. My own aim, then, is not so much to further the scope of contemporary Burke scholarship inside a received disciplinary framework as it is to make Burke’s thought available to scholars in other disciplines who seem less familiar with it and who might find it relevant. Burke can help to fill in some intellectual genealogies that could benefit from all the historical continuity they can muster. To know one’s own intellectual, disciplinary, and institutional history will likely take one outside familiar disciplinary terrain, which, Ellison would be quick to remind us, was never as defined and delineated as it appears in retrospect. I could say the same about Ellison scholarship. I am attempting to take the excellent Ellison scholarship that is already out there and point out its relevance to scholars who are not studying Ellison already. I particularly want to take the implications of Ellison’s thoughts about scapegoating and show them to be part of a usable past tradition of pragmatic thought to which American moral philosophers and culture critics might turn. In short, I am not trying to be either a Burke or an Ellison scholar, but rather to add Burke, Santayana, and Ellison to a family tree. I hope that this complication of the genealogical

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picture will make for an expanded conversation, as any addition to a family tree should. Few academic scholars of religion concerned with American religious thought currently notice Burke’s relevance to the discipline. This is unfortunate; if solidarity informs what sense of community we have, then the central concern with identity of these two men would help us fill out the uses, abuses, and limitations of human solidarity and would highlight the stakes we have in our withholding of solidarity when we decide to do so. Although Ellison is currently in less danger of academic neglect than Burke, he is being claimed, I believe, by critics who do not interpret him as he asks in his essays to be interpreted. To paraphrase his invisible man, he has “been called one thing and then another”; I’m making my best attempt to call him what he seems to call himself. By making Burke invisible in Ellison’s work, critics deny it the universality of appeal that Ellison tried so hard and so consciously to achieve as a standard of excellence in craft and art. Burke and Ellison especially show some of the reasons why Americans can’t “get past” racial divisions or, by analogy, religious and gender divisions in American identity; they offer a plausible explanation of what human “sacrificial motives” have to do with the matter and why those motives persist, as I will show in detail in later chapters. Ellison shows why lynching is a perversion of the best of human capacities into the worst.12 Burke does the same for historical forms of anti-Semitism and provides similar examples. Ellison’s insights about scapegoating will add to a religious discussion about sacrifice, but will also show that religious identity is mediated in the same ways as other forms of social identity. Any academic discipline concerned with identity construction has much to learn from a discussion of sacrificial motives in the study of religion. Likewise, the study of religion has much to learn from those who think about the politics of racial, national, gendered, and ethnic forms of identity that might seem more “secular,” but which are as subject to “sacrificial motives,” as Burke and Ellison define them, as any other human social grouping. Scholars of American religious thought and scholars of African-American literature have spaces within the academic study of religion. But that house has many rooms and fewer hallways in which to chat. Scholars concerned with what Ellison and/or Burke had to say as cultural critics ought to be interested in the ways that these two revealed connections between ethical concerns and aesthetic forms of appeal in literature, art, and music. Social scientists who study religion may find Burke’s refusal to separate analysis from value concerns disturbingly revealing and “postmodern” long before its time. Religious philosophers and philosophers of religion looking to avoid an exclusively Christian theological framework may find the religious naturalism of both men congenial and may find that it offers ways to make historicist and structuralist philosophical outlooks speak to each other.

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Along with the field of literary criticism, pragmatism has also left a significant imprint upon the social sciences and philosophy. Clifford Geertz is an intellectual pragmatist who has had an influence upon the study of religion as large as the influence of Richard Rorty or Cornel West, yet he is seldom thought of as a major contemporary proponent of pragmatism in the same way as they are.13 Clifford Geertz puts forward a view of religion as a part of a whole cultural web of ideas. Religion is the part of that web of ideas that deals with threats of impotence, meaninglessness, and injustice. Religions keep trying to patch up the webs and keep them intact in the areas most damaged by these experiences. For Geertz, it is not so much a matter of figuring out which or whether religious beliefs are true as it is understanding how they work to hold things together. For Geertz, religion is a bit like a human artwork, in that we interpret each others’ artwork. But this artwork has very real social effects, so understanding peoples’ religious productions is more dangerous and fraught than a stroll through an art museum. Geertz uses unfamiliar examples to reshape familiar interpretation; he juxtaposes the unfamiliar with the totally familiar in ways that begin to reproach, caricature, or accuse “us” rather than “them.”14 Filling in the detail of the unfamiliar example with thick description tends to make it more relevant rather than less. Geertz demonstrates how to generalize within cases rather than across them. These methods have important moral and philosophical implications in the study of religion. People thinking in a philosophical and ethical way about religion along with pragmatists such as James are not, by and large, the same group of people who are thinking about Geertz in a social scientific way. But perhaps a greater familiarity with Burke can change that in the future. There are other contemporary contributors to the broader culture of pragmatism who deserve to be better known than they are by scholars of religion. Along with literary critics such as Giles Gunn and Richard Poirier, rhetorical critics such as Wayne Booth and Hayden White have relevant contributions to make once the conversation takes on a less philosophical/theological tone.15 Burke and Ellison help highlight the connections between the study of rhetoric and pragmatism. Both groups are concerned with the social implications of relativism, the educational and spiritual needs of a democratic culture, and the proper modes of public address in a civil, pluralist society. Both groups worry whether the antifoundationalism common to their schools of thought will fuel political activism or quietism. Burke and Ellison offer points of view on these issues. Both men are political activists who stop short of endorsing martyrdom. Both offer conflict-laden conversation as a politically useful and manageable aid to democratic culture. Burke and Ellison can help us get past the categorical impasse of pious students of religion versus critics of religion. Sometimes it seems as if the designation of one’s scholarly work as “theology” or not determines whether one is placing oneself in the pious or the impious, “hostile to religion” cate-

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gory. But this is a bad use of the word theology. Both Burke and Ellison showed how inheritors of any tradition that serves to shape up character can and should act in both pious and impious ways. Morally speaking, they claim that we need to be both pious poets and impious critics. They show us how a “both/ and” heritage of thinking can ethically serve us better than an “either/or” heritage of thinking. The best of American pragmatists have always worked to undo dichotomous thinking by showing what those dichotomous categories cover up. They show us why our best moral resources will tend to fall into the gaps of dichotomous either/or thinking, and urge us to see the social world, its languages, and games in spectrums rather than dichotomies. By accepting that we are always both “a part of” the languages and traditions we inherit and always to some degree “apart from” them, given the individuality of our experiences, we keep those traditions alive, not as natural kinds of human religiosity that can be specified essentially, but as traditions of historical continuity that help us remember the good and bad of our past while hoping for the vitality, growth, and success of our future inheritors.

RELIGION AND ITS MODERN CRITICS Burke wants to bring his Emersonian pieties into conversation with critiques of religion instigated by or implied in the works of Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche.16 “I think I see (beginning with Bentham) the psychological devices for integrating ethical-esthetic-social-political judgments. I think I see a way of reapplying the ‘genealogists of morals’ (Bentham, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Veblen) in ways alien to typical nineteenth-century ‘process-thinking.’ Through ‘meanings,’ or ‘Gestalten,’ it seems to me, we open up a new way of exhortation which avoids both ‘pure logic’ and ‘pure sentiment’ as the means of suasion.”17 Burke gives an account of the process of interpretation that can handle both scientific and religious sorts of interpretations and can make them both seem humanly worthwhile. He does this in order to take various modern critiques of religion seriously without allowing them to debunk the worth of human religiosity. By showing how all considered interpretations of life are partial accounts that abstract certain outstanding characteristics and take them for wholes, he shows how such partiality becomes both their strength and their weakness. He attempts to develop a “prosaic” criticism for poetic religion: “[A]ll the resources of prose thought must be developed in order that the poetic can be given its only genuine safeguards. That is: only a thorough body of secular criticism, secular thought ‘carried all the way round the circle’ can properly equip a society against the misuse of its most desirable aspects, the poetic or religious aspects.”18 Burke wants to integrate a pious appreciation of elements of human religiosity with the various debunking modes of criticism emphasized in the

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nineteenth century. By bringing the human symbolic bridge-building of poetry and poetic religion to bear upon the mechanistic harshness of critical thought in order to allow space for the possibility of surprising human cooperation,19 he hopes to allow for social changes in terms of natural, vegetative development.20

ACTIVE VIRTUE, CHARACTER, AND THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR DEMOCRACY Both Burke and Ellison take debunking modes of criticism to be less than useful to the furtherance of democratic ideals. Democrats need to build bridges rather than create chasms between “us” and “them.” In Burke’s words, the perspective of the debunker “does not endow mankind with the dignity, or the hope or the tragedy which most persons feel that it actually possesses.”21 When critics debunk, Burke thinks that they fail to do justice to the mix of motives that underlie every social action. Likewise, Ellison claims that even the moral failures of people participate in virtue.22 Our weaknesses have a strength built into them, ready for reappropriation; likewise, our very strengths subject us to the “trained incapacities” of our particular “genius.”23 Custom acclimates us to look for and see certain things but also blinds us to what would be apparent to others differently accustomed.24 Typically, people act in ways that display their altruism while simultaneously feeding their egoism. Hence, the egoist;is likely not to be “purely” an egoist; that is, he or she is not essentially egotistical, but likely has altruistic motives mixed into egoistic acts which, when properly redirected, could help hold together democratic societies. Debunking the egoist burns that bridge to cooperation. Democracies need people with the right sorts of character if they intend to survive. But this character is not the passive acceptance of a traditional role. The sort of character Burke and Ellison aim for requires active rather than passive virtue. Active virtue is dramatic. It is more than taking on a role with certain requisite character traits; it is the conscious wearing of a mask and the projecting of a possible self-identity. Ellison quotes W. B. Yeats to make the discrimination: “Active virtue, as distinct from the passive acceptance of a current code, is the wearing of a mask.”25 He continues, “In Yeat’s sense, ‘masking’ is more than the adoption of a disguise. Rather it is a playing upon possibility, a strategy through which the individual projects a self-selected identity and makes of himself a ‘work of art.’ ”26 Further, active virtue is dramatic because it requires both social cooperation and participation in social conflicts. This kind of virtue requires protest at crucial moments, but not just any sort of protest. It requires protest that aims at the transcendence of differences. The difference between active and passive virtue shows in Ellison’s response to Irving Howe, who charges him with not being identified with the “victim”

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enough in a critique he wrote of “protest” writings. Ellison defends his position: “My goal was . . . to transcend. . . . The protest is there not because I was helpless before my racial condition, but because I put it there. If there is anything ‘miraculous’ about the book it is the result of hard work undertaken in the belief that the work of art is important in itself, that it is a social action in itself.”27 In his response, Ellison pits the protest of the victim against the protest of the agent. Identification through shared victim status is not enough to act responsibly in a democracy. Ellison writes of a vocal drunk outside his apartment who disturbed his writing: “Identification, after all, involves feelings of guilt and responsibility.” The drunk failed to inspire his identification: “I felt in no way accountable for his condition. We were simply fellow victims.”28 On the other hand, active identification goes beyond passive co-victim status. A singer, who also disturbed Ellison in his apartment as he tried to write, achieved what the drunk could not. Ellison explains, “in listening I soon became involved to the point of identification. . . . If she sang badly I’d hear my own futility in the windy sound; if well, I’d stare at my typewriter and despair that I would ever make my prose so sing.”29 The singer and Ellison shared an aspiration that facilitated their identification. In Burke’s and Ellison’s view of active virtue, identity is necessarily what one does, not simply who one is. It involves habits of character, but “character” here means something like “character” in a novel.30 These constantly reevaluated habits culminate in actions whose end is the repair and maintenance of democratic culture. In particular, Burke and Ellison give us good reasons to employ pragmatist traditions of thought, the better to avoid scapegoating, a perversion of the best of human sacrificial motives into the worst of human social behaviors. They show how we perform our religious lives; how we enact them in rituals, exhort acceptance of them with our rhetoric, and set the stage for them with our language games—all to performative purposes. Both Burke and Ellison premise their ritual and symbolic view of social life on the view that symbols link the world as we imagine it to the world as we live in it. The world, they would both agree, is at least in part a product of the ways we write about it, dream it, and wish it, despite its constant recalcitrance.

BURKE AND STRUCTURALIST THOUGHT ON IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE Like structuralists and poststructuralists, Burke is concerned with the formal elements of symbolic activity. Organization by form is what ritual, drama, and rhetoric (three of the ways Burke analyzes identity) have in common. Further, Burke would agree with structuralists and poststructuralists that imagination,

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as one human capacity among others, can allow for the free play of signs against each other and need not depend upon the philosophical notion of “substantiation.” But for Burke, communication puts the brake on the free play. The human imagination can handle and make use of signs with absent referents. The imagination can even playfully (or not so playfully) “kill off” signs for difference in order to make identity more “substantively” meaningful. Thank goodness for playful human imaginative capacities, Burke would say. But imagination unfettered by any desire or need to communicate with others is a symptom of something amiss in the play that takes place between solitude and society. It fuels narcissism, and Burke criticizes this pathological tendency, which he takes to be dangerous to social beings. Therefore, Burke shares much of the framework for thinking about identity and difference with his structuralist and poststructuralist friends. However, as Clayton W. Lewis rightly points out, “one can reduce Burke’s language conception to arrive at [Paul] de Man’s and [Hillis] Miller’s, but one cannot expand in scope de Man’s and Miller’s to arrive at Burke’s.”31 Burke attends to linguistic structures that shape various understandings of identity and difference, but he doesn’t see anything particularly “deeper” than anything else about them. They tell a critic something worth knowing, but not everything worth knowing. By examining the structural relationships in a piece of literature, a critic can gain some relevant knowledge about the author or the “poet” of the writing. The “absent other”—the sign that is not one32—Burke could embrace this as someone’s real wish, and, as such, its study could make available important information to understand in a social context, insofar as we critics (and we are all critics) want to help or hinder making particular wishes come true. For instance, Ellison adopts Burke’s thought on these matters of imagination when he assesses white southern culture in the United States. He writes that “while the myths and mysteries that form the Southern mystique are irrational and even primitive, they are nevertheless real, even as works of the imagination are ‘real.’ Like all mysteries and their attendant myths, they imply . . . a rite. And rites are actions, the goal of which is the manipulation of power.”33 Structural analysis helps illuminate what other members of our society wish to accomplish with words. But it neither tells how the whole world is nor demolishes the social value of the wish in the very revelation of it. For Burke, the structural relationships within any symbolic act—relationships imparted by an author who is him- or herself an actor—have a social and historical context, a scene, which they aim to influence through a conscious or not-so-conscious strategy. Burke writes not about literary “deep structures,” but about personal and social linguistic habits of thought and action, some helpful, some hurtful, which have a history that others might wish to take to be timeless and unchangeable “deep structures” if we let them get away with it by our silent assent to their view.

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Burke’s author/actors cannot extricate themselves from the scene in which they perform, so they cannot rise above that scene as its priests who mediate between the realm of literary language and everything else. Of the structuralist and poststructuralist schools of thought Lewis writes, “The work of the critic becomes analogous to the work of the priest; in [writers’] failures the poet and critic observe the religious mystery at the center of language.”34 Burke, in his later writings, does not try to “valorize literary language.”35 He analyzes vernacular signifiers along with literary and philosophical high culture. Similarly, Ellison writes, “ ‘Language is equipment for living,’ to quote Kenneth Burke. One uses the language which helps to preserve one’s life, which helps to make one feel at peace in the world, and which screens out the greatest amount of chaos. All human beings do this.”36 Throughout his works, Ellison aimed to show “how elevated styles of speech related to the spoken vernacular.”37 The two men have no discernable intention of replacing a “metaphysics of presence” with a “metaphysics of absence.” Harold Bloom, even though he writes an introduction to a collection of essays on Ellison that on the surface seems admiring, displays this tendency to valorize the mystifying elements of literary language. Neither Burke nor Ellison would appreciate his efforts on this score. Bloom makes Ellison an honorary member of a club to which Ellison would not, I think, want to belong. Though Bloom refers to Ellison as “both pragmatist and transcendentalist,” after the manner of Emerson (that much of the legacy Ellison would claim), Bloom’s clear preference is for the more mystical interpretation of Ellison’s work. Ignoring Ellison’s tendency to demystify language with comedy whenever he can, Bloom portrays Ellison’s main importance as being predecessor and bridge to the work of Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, he claims, crosses over where Ellison would not into “the apocalyptic Zone where we may yet live again (if we live),” and steps into Pynchon’s “Kabbalistic vision that he calls ‘sado-anarchism.’ ”38 “Bloom rightly observes this as the step ”that Ellison is too humane and humanistic to have taken,39 “but he allows Pynchon’s vision to consume roughly half of the space allotted for his commentary on Ellison, certainly something of a backhanded compliment as the introduction to a book about Ellison. It is not that poetry mythically (and hence timelessly) precedes religion and informs it rather than vice versa, as Bloom maintains, but that beauty (of all sorts—not just literary eloquence) has been historically entwined with goodness at least since Plato, and with some degree of self-consciousness in the construction since Edmund Burke’s thoughts about the sublime and the beautiful. Bloom also attends to Kenneth Burke’s writing, handing him the closest thing to a compliment that a “strong reader” could muster: “[W]hat I think is least understood by others in my own work is the rather extended concept of trope that I employ . . . that goes beyond trope as expounded by any rhetorician, ancient or modern, though here as elsewhere I happily acknowledge the example of Kenneth Burke.”40

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EMERSONIAN IDENTITIES What Bloom admires about both Burke and Ellison is the way he takes them to exemplify an Emersonian American religion that, in his interpretation, is a form of Gnosticism with a negative theology of self-reliance. Further, he claims, it is a literary religion. I too will claim that both Burke and Ellison self-consciously belong to an Emersonian tradition that is one important element of American religious thought among others, but I see no reason to accept the additional baggage of the Gnosticism Bloom proffers and some reason to accept that members of a democratic culture ought to worry about it. First of all, the sentence that might be taken as the theme of Invisible Man— “I yam what I am”—which Bloom would interpret as a rejection of all “created” identities, is uttered by the novel’s protagonist in a moment in which he reclaims his continuity with his own this-worldly past. The “yam” is important. The same reclamation of continuity with one’s past takes place in Ellison’s short story “Flying Home.” In their restored continuities, both pieces lack what Bloom thinks to be the American difference, the drive to establish discontinuity. Clearly, Ellison is up to something that can restore broken continuities, when called for, by serving as a bridge to the past as well as to the future. Bloom acknowledges Burke’s explicitly Emersonian use of “bridging” as transcendence “through love of the farther shore,” but Burke sees that bridge as one toward human communion, hence the point of love, while Bloom sees that bridge not as a connection with, but as a negation of, society with all natural beings. “The farther shore . . . is no part of nature,” he writes, “and has no room therefore for created beings.”41 In saying this, Bloom pays homage to his mythic grounding in a story about what came before Creation, one that influences him and steadies his sense of identity. Neither Burke nor Ellison has any ax like this to grind; they both aim at the good of human communion. They “bridge” gaps by pitting one categorical understanding of language metaphorically against another one. Eloquence, or the sublime, serves the end of making identifications out of divisions in Burke’s and Ellison’s view.42 Ellison writes that “the novel’s medium of communication consists in a familiar experience occurring among a particular people, within a particular society or nation . . . and achieves its universality, if at all, through accumulating them in patterns of universal significance. . . . [T]hrough the eloquence of its statement, that specific part of life speaks metaphorically for the whole.”43 The part tells about the whole, and alters its categories, as necessary. A story about conflicting natural sources of human well-being and historically changing environments and senses of identity would be sufficient grounding for the “bridging” they do. A narrative that would exemplify this process would look more like a novel than a myth; it would look more like Towards a Better Life or Invisible Man, for example.

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Further, Bloom reads Emerson as one who embraces a perspectival “perfection.” “What we are, that only can we see. . . . Build therefore your own world,” he quotes from Emerson.44 From what? I’d ask. Burke, by contrast, urges us to “earn our own world” by doing pious work on our inheritance, as I will explain in chapter 2. Ellison explains a bit of Burke’s revised “perfection”: Words that evoke our principles are, according to Kenneth Burke, charismatic terms for transcendent order, for perfection. Being forms of symbolic action, they tend, through their nature as language, to sweep us in tow as they move by a process of linguistic negation toward the idea. . . . As a form of symbolic action, they operate by negating nature as a given and amoral condition, creating endless series of man-made or man-imagined positives. . . . In this way, Burke contends, man uses language to moralize both nature and himself. Thus, in this nation the word democracy possesses the aura of what Burke calls a “god-term.”45 Burke describes the drive to perfection as the tendency to “moralize” the “amoral.” But Burke’s “morality” is ambivalent and contrasts with amorality rather than with immorality. Humans are motivated, he claims, in part by symbol systems that organize hierarchy and use status incentives.46 People form concepts of supernatural relations by hypostasizing the abstractions of social symbols, these now-“substantial” creations being more perfectly what they are not (because symbolic and essentially negative) than animal nature (essentially positive) could ever be. Symbolic supernatural relations are analogous to the social hierarchies that metaphorically shape them. Humans strive to encompass situations of need in ways that define the situation so that “perfection” equals the fulfillment of their needs. Hence, symbol systems tend to create “perfect” enemies to make catharsis effective; this catharsis is only possible because the economy of language permits such perfection. Further, humans are driven by their “terministic” compulsion to carry out symbolic possibilities toward their perfect end up to the limits of their resources.47 “Perfection,” for Burke, encompasses both the best and the worst of human capacities. Fortunately and unfortunately, it is unachievable for particular humans. Imperfectability’s lack of finality consists in fallibilism, not in mysticism; it is a caution, not a mode of worship. But if Burke and Ellison do not match up as participants in the Emersonian American religion as described by Bloom, they still owe debts and bear family resemblance to Emerson. Burke explicitly claims Emerson, Walt Whitman, and William James as predecessors in Attitudes toward History (1937). He echoes several Emersonian themes: that the rhetorical play in the relations of parts and wholes does religious work,48 that the contrast between the idea and the false performance engenders comedy.49 But both Burke and Ellison are Emersonian critics critical of Emerson. As such, they take Emerson’s metaphors, run with them, and take them to task. Sure you can eat the world, they

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both challenge overly sentimental Emersonians, but can you digest it all? Does it nourish you or does it make you gag? Is it medicine or poison to your body? Both Burke and Ellison stand on the edges of an “aesthetic tradition of American spirituality.”50 As marginal Emersonians, they can see both inside and outside; they can both appreciate and critically evaluate what the tradition has to offer. Both critics adopt Emerson’s visual metaphors. Like Emerson, Ellison knows that he does not see immediately. He must necessarily see, as he writes to Burke, “the universe through the racial grain of sand.”51 But particularity of vision does not eliminate the need for universality of communication, as far as Ellison is concerned. When questioned about his stance as African-American writer, Ellison responded that “there was never any question in my mind that Negroes were human, and thus being human, their experience became metaphors for the experiences of other people. . . . The role of the writers . . . is to structure fiction which will allow a universal identification while at the same time not violating the specificity of the particular experience.”52 Both the metaphoric approach and “the universe in a grain of sand” are Emersonian. Ellison makes metaphors reveal the better to help us see. Burke, too, claims that “alternative metaphors are as valid as you make them so by the rounding-out.” He goes on to say that a metaphor is “not formally justifiable or attackable—its sole value is in what you show can be done with it.” “Let each partisan fill out his program,” he continues, “and in the course of doing so, they will evolve a margin of overlap.” What the filling out should reveal is the “stuff that the A’s can borrow from the non-A’s, and v.v.”53 Whereas Emerson thought that the beauty of nature was hidden from unredeemed eyes, Burke and Ellison challenge this equation of beauty and divinity. Both claim that sometimes the ethical lines up neatly with the aesthetic, but sometimes the two work in tension with each other. Beauty in concert with the good can make the good seem even better, but the beatific vision of something morally troubling can tempt human beings to divinize what ought not to be taken as divine. Sometimes the ruin is not in our own eye, pace Emerson. Not all transparent eyeballs are our own, nor are any of them truly transparent. In Invisible Man, the narrator has an eyeball encounter of the comic kind: “I stared at the glass, seeing how the light shone through, throwing a transparent, precisely fluted shadow against the dark grain of the table, and there on the bottom of the glass lay an eye. A glass eye.”54 On rare and comic occasions, the eyeballs of powerful people can roll out on the table for all to see. Granted that lucky distance of alienated identity, we can see the rawness and redness of another’s eye as the ugly thing it is.55 Sometimes those “eyes” are blind. Under those circumstances, we can stop morally blaming our own eyes when the world looks ugly to us but beautiful to almost everyone else and realize that in some instances the good fails to coincide with the beautiful. When

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we discover that the eyes of some leaders are blind and their vision flawed, communion as an aspiration to shared identity—to be a brother or even to be a servant to this particular master—does indeed become a troubling goal. Burke and Ellison owe some of their critical leverage on Emerson to Santayana. Along with Emerson, James, and other Americans that stand out, the ambivalently American philosopher of religion George Santayana greatly influences Burke in particular. Santayana gave a twist to Emersonian transcendentalism that appealed to Burke in its moral critique of what Santayana had called “the higher optimism” of transcendental Nature-worship and its embrace of whatever is as good. Santayana’s naturalism provided Burke with space for a moral critique of nature that could give “the highest honor to the highest, not to the strongest, things”56 while duly acknowledging the efficacy of material powers. As Emersonian culture critics, both Burke and Ellison inherit that tradition’s tenseness and anxiety about the sometimes-too-literary means of the critic and the questionable efficacy of the critic’s agency for social change. But Ellison, unlike most other American thinkers in an Emersonian pragmatic tradition,57 never did fit comfortably into mainstream, middle-class American society. Ellison gives not only lip service but substantive content to the Emersonian study of “the literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, [and] the meaning of household life” by the American scholar.58 Burke, though white, male, and middle-class in identity, also advocates the study of literature of all sorts, from essay to newspaper ad to folk proverb, not as literary elitism but as “equipment for living.” Ellison, contrary to Bloom’s interpretation, emphasizes continuity with one’s past, but not without plenty of angst and resistance of the temptation to “kill off” those attachments by establishing a discontinuity. Ellison’s identification with Emerson is overdetermined by his very name, Ralph Waldo Ellison. As a boy, he was teased about the name Waldo. “I did not destroy that troublesome middle name of mine,” he writes; “I only suppressed it. Sometimes it reminds me of my obligations to the man who named me.”59 It is not clear whether Ellison means his father, who reputedly named him (and died when he was three), or the American man of letters who “fathered” the critic. Neither without critical evaluation, Ellison might answer. “[T]o embrace uncritically values which are extended to us by others,” he explains, “is to reject the validity, even the sacredness, of our own experience.”60 In his essay “Hidden Name and Complex Fate” he writes, “I could suppress the name of my namesake out of respect for the achievements of its original bearer, but I cannot escape the obligation of attempting to achieve some of the things which he asked of the American writer.”61 But how does Ellison allow the man who thought that the Negro belonged to the “fossil formations” to serve as a father figure and bestower of name and trade?62 In part, he does so by turning the metaphor to a figurative discussion

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of “coal” as a resource in Invisible Man and by advocating the more palatable Emersonian premise that the Negro was “an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization.”63 He transcends Emersonian difficulties with Emersonian resources. He cannot digest all of Emerson, but he can find nourishing parts there. Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, like his essay “Hidden Name and Complex Fate,” charts his debts to and criticisms of Emerson. The novel tells the story of a young man who, after many false starts, finds out who he is. Ellison describes the form of his story: “Each section begins with a sheet of paper; each piece of paper is exchanged for another and contains a definition of his identity, or the social role he is to play as designed for him by others. But all say essentially the same thing: ‘Keep this nigger boy running.’ ”64 The theme of rejecting identities assigned by others is characteristically Emersonian. But embedded in the work is implicit criticism of Emerson.65 In particular, Ellison plays with Emerson’s essay “Fate,” in which Emerson meditates on matters of race. Emerson thought that the black race was destined to death and that the “imperial Saxon race, which nature cannot bear to lose,”66 were “proud believers in Destiny.”67 As the narrator of Invisible Man drives Norton around, Norton instructs him in Emersonian self-reliance and matters of destiny. “I am a New Englander, like Emerson,” he explains. “You must learn about him, for he was important to your people. He had a hand in your destiny.”68 When questioned by the narrator, Norton explains that he funded the narrator’s college because he believed that “your people were somehow closely connected with my destiny,”69 a lesson he takes from Emerson. Norton has high hopes that he can look forward to a pleasant fate, and he tells his driver, “I hope yours will be as pleasant.”70 “Self-reliance is a most worthy virtue,” he admonishes the young man. “I shall look forward with the greatest of interest to learning your contribution to my fate,” he tells the narrator, extracting a promise from the confused young man that he will inform Norton of his fate someday.71 Ellison’s construction of Norton’s advocacy of “self-reliance” in relation to his request to know “your contribution to my fate” is in itself ironic. But the young man, if he doesn’t know Emersonian self-reliance, has learned the college’s lesson about its trustees: that “[y]ou have yours, and you got it yourself, and we have to lift ourselves up the same way.”72 But as Emersonian critic of Emerson, Ellison turns his own essay against him. “Fate,” Emerson had claimed, “is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought,”73 and straight through the fire of thought is precisely where Ellison aims to take Norton and the narrator in the course of his novel. The narrator’s first apprehensions about Norton’s version of fate show when he broods, “I was thinking of the first person who’d mentioned anything like fate in my presence, my grandfather. There had been nothing pleasant about it.”74 Ellison will teach his reader this lesson that Emerson taught him: “Once

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we thought, positive power was all, now we learn, that negative power, or circumstance, is half.”75 Half is within the self, half outside its powers. It matters where one is—and what is the scene of the action. Norton makes an appearance near the beginning and near the end of Ellison’s novel. It turns out that Norton, who knows his life rather well, does not know his way around underground; as it also happens, a lot is going on down there. At the outset, the narrator drives Norton around; by the end of the story, Norton meets the narrator in the subway. When Norton inquires as to whether his young driver reads Emerson, the narrator is embarrassed by his unfamiliarity.76 At the end of the novel, it is the narrator’s turn to ask Norton, “Aren’t you ashamed?” In the earlier episode, the narrator finds himself on an unfamiliar road; in the later scene, it is Norton who is lost. In the first scene, Norton tells the narrator, “Yes, you are my fate, young man. Only you can tell me what it really is.”77 In the epilogue, the narrator tells Norton, “I’m your destiny, I made you.”78 In the former scene, the narrator wonders why he should know Norton. In the latter scene, Norton asks the narrator, “Why should I know you?” “Because I’m your destiny,” the invisible man answers. Norton does not know where he is when he is underground. Ellison wants to show that “to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.”79 It is the narrator who gets the cathartic moment bought at terrible cost in the final meeting: “seeing him [Norton] made all the old life live in me for an instant, and I smiled with tear-stinging eyes. Then it was over, dead.”80 Knowing one’s own identity depends upon knowing not only one’s self rather well, but also the scene—the environment—outside the scope of personal will and agency. But with this novel, Ellison criticizes not only Emerson in Emersonian terms, but also Burke in Burkean terms. If we take Burke at his word, Ellison succeeded in making Burke and his friends step back and see themselves in a less than flattering light. Hints that Ellison is speaking to Burke personally can be found in his text. For instance, on the initial drive with the narrator, Norton can see neither the oxen nor the people laboring alongside them for the trees.81 (Burke’s first book was titled The Complete White Oxen; trees are Burke’s symbol of proprietary maleness.) Norton does, however, concede that the trees are good timber (an implicit Burkean criticism by Ellison of the mix of the utilitarian with the pious motives present in Burke’s tree-loyalty, a matter that will be treated at length in chapter 2) as he gazes at the long ash of his cigar. Burke, of course, gets the message; in a letter to Ellison, Burke claims that Ellison helped him and his colleagues to see the elements of “Nortonism” in themselves. 82 If Emersonian critics were to strive to see earliest as if no one had ever seen before them, this was “a Kantian ‘as if’ ”83 that both Burke and Ellison took to be safe only when practiced as a totally self-conscious performance and

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pretension of an actor who consciously wore a mask and projected a character. Neither Burke nor Ellison held much truck with starting anew or with conversion metaphors. Ellison does write: “The American creed of democratic equality encourages the belief in a second chance that is to be achieved by being born again—not simply in the afterlife, but here and now, on earth. Change your name and increase your chances. Create by an act of immaculate selfconception an autobiography.”84 But he does not write this without irony, as will become more apparent with the fuller examination of his work. The false discontinuities of “conversion” struck both men as disingenuous. The conversion metaphor inherited from Emerson they both will use, but to ends that highlight all the elements that stay the same when “everything changes” and the identities of people are reborn.

SYMBOL-USING ANIMALS Burke claims that man is the symbol-using animal; he consistently deconstructs and reconstructs this dualistic term dialectically. At most times he emphasizes how symbol use aids human animals, but at other times he shows how human identification with the rest of the animals ought to temper symbol uses that would “perfect” humans right out of their this-worldly existence. When asked once, Burke described his own understanding of his work as the integration of symbol use with the needs of the animal that uses them. While individuality is indeed constructed collectively and culturally, he is reported to have said, it is also constructed bodily and thus separately. However connected we are socially, Burke maintained, we experience those connections in separate nervous systems.85 Because humans are “symbol-using animals,” they have symbolic needs and biological needs that cannot be assimilated to a mutually exclusive dualism which can then be reduced to one of the elements that is the essence of the two. Humans hold some needs in common with other animals, such as the needs for food or shelter. But humans also have symbolic needs, such as the need to transcend individuality when socializing a loss or the need to distinguish oneself from a group in order to be elevated within a social hierarchy. Burke takes biologic need quite seriously, for all symbolic needs are predicated upon adequate satisfaction of “animal” needs. In a note to a friend, Burke confided that if symbolism didn’t figure in something so real as the operations of a tear duct then he needed to start over again.86 Concerned with holding on to human ideals, but no metaphysical idealist, Burke would no doubt dismiss as laughable any account of symbolic action that didn’t include the animal actor.87 Whatever else symbolic action may accomplish or erase, it cannot erase the very flesh—the nerve and muscle—of the actor.88

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Although Burke defends the importance of individual bodily perception (“my toothache being alas! my private property”) and the ultimate separateness of the individual who dies alone,89 his entire corpus of writings on identification affirms it to be a process undertaken by social animals and a necessity for their association. For Burke, identity is thoroughly social. He writes, “The so-called ‘I’ is merely a unique combination of partially conflicting corporate we’s.”90 Though this individual is marked by its own psychological processes and actively holds together whatever sense of ego it has, this ego, for Burke, has irreducibly social, or corporate, components. The biologically significant fact of separate nervous systems contained within separated skins does not, for Burke, turn identity into something private or idiosyncratic, however difficult it may be to assimilate biological separateness with social connectedness. Burke thinks that this difficulty misled past theorists of identity: [W]hen bourgeois psychologists began to discover the falsity of this notion [of autonomous identity], they still believed in it so thoroughly that they considered all collective aspects of identity under the head of pathology and illusion. That is: they discovered accurately enough that identity is not individual, that a man “identifies himself” with all sorts of manifestations beyond himself, and they set about trying to “cure” him of this tendency. It can’t be “cured,” for the simple reason that it is normal.91 But if “normal” collective associations can’t be dissolved, they can nonetheless be stretched, altered, changed, reorganized, collapsed, and reassembled when need be. When need is, what sorts of needs those might be, and the uses, abuses, and techniques of identity transformation form the moral core of Burke’s work. Being the sort of linguistic animals that we are, the language that we use requires an economy in order to be fit for one purpose or another. For instance, a map is a codification designed for the purpose of getting us where we want to go, but it is woefully inadequate as a description of the type of flora we might find along the way, if that is what we want to know.92 Those details get left out. The symbol-using ability of human animals gives them the ability to conceptualize—to glean general theories from particular accidents in order to project and generate possibilities. The human usefulness of conceptual ability has its flip side, though; the ability to conceptualize creates the liability to draw wrong general theories about specific happenings and makes the rhetorical manipulation of people through symbolic acts possible. Still, symbol systems function usefully precisely to the extent that they do leave out detail. Therefore, Burke’s phrase symbol-using animal is cautionary, not congratulatory.93 As Ellison describes the liability Burke points out, “all men are the victims and the beneficiaries of the goading, tormenting, commanding and informing activity of that imperious process known as the Mind.”94

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Language-using animals need to know that language has to describe things in terms of that which they are not; negativity is intrinsic to language. This moralizing power of language separates it from the amorality of other parts of nature; Ellison writes of “the power of the negative, that capability of language which Kenneth Burke has identified as a symbolic agency through which man has separated himself from nature.”95 Because symbols abbreviate, they help “transcend” motion and matter because they leave out the material constraints and details of the things referred to by symbols. On the other hand, nature has only positives. A negative admonition—“thou shalt not”—entails a positive image. Ethical terms, claims Burke, have this polar nature. To effectively use words, humans must understand that words are not the things they stand for. The language constructed by humans separates them somewhat from their own natural needs as animals insofar as it leaves out details pertinent to other purposes we might have.96 Ellison, echoing Burke, describes language as “the identifying characteristic of a symbol-using, symbol-misusing animal. It is through language that man has separated himself from his natural biologic condition as an animal, but it is through the symbolic capabilities of language that we seek simultaneously to maintain and evade our commitments as social beings.”97 We cannot even know differences without first isolating a common point of departure—no contest without common rules, no war without the commonalities internal to the warring parties, no different eye colors without possession of the thing called “eyes” in common to determine what it is we are considering with the word. Morris Cohen, in a letter to Burke, found these commonalities difficult to appreciate. He writes: In regard to the question of polarity, let me call your attention to the fact that by polar opposites, I mean categories or predicates which are mutually exclusive, so that man is not the polar opposite of animal, etc., nor is business the polar opposite of industry, nor for that matter is “language” the polar opposite of the “universe.” Two categories are polar opposites if they seem to be mutually exclusive and one or the other seems to be the necessary predicate of our universe of discourse. Thus, unity and diversity or plurality, the ideal and the real, what is and what should be, the concrete and the abstract, are genuinely polar. Now, of course, there is a sense in which there is a unity between every pair of polar categories, like the unity of the two combatants in a fight. There would be no fight unless both of them were involved. But the important point to me is that this unity does not mean identity. The North and South poles are different, even though one could not exist without the other. Of course, the principle of polarity applies to language also but it is primarily a logical principle which serves as a caution to prevent too hasty solutions of cosmologic or general philosophical problems.98

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Breaking down polarities is not always to the point. Sometimes people want their symbols to establish mutually exclusive differences, so that one side of the polarity can be named as essential, or “the necessary predicate.” In such instances, Burke’s inclination to bridge the gap comes as an annoyance. For Burke, “the pairs are not merely to be placed statically against each other, but in given poetic contexts usually represent a development from one order of motives to another.”99 He changes polar dichotomies into spectrums. People use symbols to exhort each other and to obtain cooperation in social situations. The right sorts of symbolic actions can moderate guilt and loss and can make the agent more comfortable in more or less chaotic situations. Ellison claims that “whatever the assigned function of social institutions, their psychological function is to protect the citizen against the irrational, incalculable forces that hover about the edges of human life like cosmic destruction lurking within an atomic stockpile.”100 People need approval of their self-identity, hence they need to induce agreement with their “perfected” petitions in others, thinks Burke, due to their own guilt or lack, in order to socialize those shortcomings. Ellison concurs; “I suspect,” he writes, “that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance—but it must be acceptance on his own terms.”101 He continues on the need for affirmed identity, “You might know this [your identity] within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.”102 It must not only express the identity of the writer but also capture and hold an audience if it is to rescue the writer from the separation from others he or she feels. Art, for Burke and Ellison, is necessarily rhetorical. Ellison claims: “[I]t is not within the province of the artist to determine whether his work is social or not. Art by its nature is social. And while the artist can determine within a certain narrow scope the type of social effect he wishes his art to create, here his will is definitely limited. Once introduced into society, the work of art begins to pulsate with those meanings, emotions, ideas brought to it by its audience, and over which the artist has but limited control.”103 As symbol-using animals, people use words, but words also use people. Cliofus, a character in Ellison’s short story “A Song of Innocence,” explains the phenomenon: “They say that folks misuse words, but I see it the other way around, words misuse people. Usually when you think you’re saying what you mean you’re really saying what the words want you to say”104 But as Mark Busby notes in his interpretation of the story, “Nonetheless, through words Cliofus finds stability for both himself and Severen. The words, Cliofus says, are ‘what makes me me.’ ”105 Just as humans can use or misuse words, they can be used or misused by them. Audiences interact with “artists.” Ellison tells how the artist, in this case the novelist, interacts with the audience, in this case the reader: “We repay the novelist in terms of our admiration to the extent that he intensifies our sense of the real—or, conversely, to the extent

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that he justifies our desire to evade certain aspects of reality which we find unpleasant beyond the point of confrontation.”106 Nothing about the sociality or the rhetoricity of symbolic activity guarantees that we all end up for the better. In this social understanding of religious rhetoric, which bears a family resemblance to Emile Durkheim’s methods of interpreting religion, without the Kantian overtones, “God” is the perfected object of the petition; what impedes the petition becomes demonized. Fortunately, claims Burke, different schemes get in each other’s way due largely to limits in resources. Comedy often ensues, as chapter 4 will examine.

STRUCTURE AND “METHOD” For the purposes of an investigation of Burke’s thoughts on human identity and its transformations, his work of the 1930s and 1940s contains the material most relevant to my purposes. During this period, Burke’s personal concerns with his own identity and the push and pull of his identifications with other people and groups shape all he writes. The economic changes of the Great Depression force Burke to face a number of vexing personal questions about his vocation as a writer, his political identity, his argumentative and agonistic personality, and his lifestyle. During this decade Burke changes from a writer of fiction to a critical essayist, divorces his first wife and marries her sister, leaves life in the middle of urban New York and settles on a permanent rustic lifestyle in rural New Jersey, conversant with but consciously distanced from the publicists and editors of the city. Burke’s moral reflections during this period on the shape of human identity and his own, I would argue, orient the rest of his life’s work. I have organized this discussion topically around Burke’s and Ellison’s use of the terms piety, sacrifice/tragedy, and the comic. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 discuss Burke’s use of these three terms respectively; chapters 5, 6, and 7 examine Ellison’s use of the same terms. In all of these chapters I will set up the connections and differences in the thought of these two men and draw them out. Along the way, I will support my second claim about the tradition of religious naturalism and its background common to both Burke and Ellison. In chapter 8, I will sum up the examination, make some more specific suggestions supporting my third claim about the usability of the legacy they leave us, and suggest potential contemporary conversations in which Burke and Ellison might participate. My methodological machinery is minimal and eclectic. On the issue of methodology, I take Burke, Ellison, and myself to be nourished by American pragmatism. Burke counts Emerson, James, and Santayana as predecessors. This particular strand of American pragmatism tends to take more seriously the religious activities of human beings as vital to their well-being than do

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some other branches of pragmatism or other modern critiques of religion, while dodging the more metaphysical commitments of religious traditions. Pragmatists, in general, tend to be suspicious of loyalties to any one methodology to the exclusion of all others—loyalties, in their eyes and mine, rightfully belonging not to methodologies but to helpful or edifying results for human lives. My argument will stand or fall by the pragmatist’s standard that Burke articulated. Its “value is in what you show can be done with it.” I hope that my expositions and interpretations of the work of the two men will be suggestive. Either my suggestions will seem useful or they will not; I make no real attempt to disable competing points of view. Further, the evidence I will present is text-centered. I rely mainly on close readings of primary materials written by both Burke and Ellison. Though I show places in which Ellison gives direct credit to Burke for particular ideas, the bulk of my evidence is not so highlighted and depends upon a background knowledge of Burke’s thought, so that an Ellison reader can recognise a Burkean idea when she sees it. I have not relied upon archival evidence of shared meals and social engagements, of mutual friends—Shirley Jackson and Stanley Hyman, of interactions at Bennington, in New York and New Jersey, but that evidence is also available to the curious who seek it out. The history I have concentrated upon is more intellectual history than anything else. The test of a point of view is not in its introduction but in its filling out. Filling out my reading of Burke’s and Ellison’s point of view on matters of piety, sacrifice, and comedy is the aim of the next six chapters.

CHAPTER TWO

KENNETH BURKE'S NATURAL PIETIES OF IDENTITY If that day comes when all humanity is busied with its prosperity in human terms, and the miraculous thread of prayer is broken, then will our ingratitude have snapped the continuity of existence. In ages of dwindling piety, let adept worshippers keep long vigil, lest there arise a fatal moment of lapse when no thread of prayer joins us to our vital sources and the props and underpinnings of the universe are thus removed. —Kenneth Burke, Towards a Better Life Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. —Exodus 20:12 Deny thy father and refuse thy name; ............................... ‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy; Thou art thyself, though not a Montague! What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! What’s in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet. —William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

WHAT MAKES a Montague a Montague? What is it that Montagues owe and to whom do they owe it? Why do Montagues owe whoever it is they owe? What kind of story would explain the debt? What kind of story would undermine it? Where are the limits to what Montagues owe each other? Juliet’s questions, and mine in this chapter, critically probe issues of human identity. To what do names refer? Do they refer to anything in nature? Maybe Juliet is going down the wrong road with her questions. Is it irrelevant whether Montague refers to a part of a person? Perhaps Juliet should ask what Montague does. What difference does being a Montague make? Shakespeare’s tragedy is,

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among other things, a meditation on the pious elements of identity. He proposes critical questions about how classically understood identity contributes to and detracts from the living of a good life. Maybe Montague refers not to an anatomical part of a person, as Juliet hypothesized, but to a specific bit of personal history. If that turns out to be the case, we’d then need to ask what makes one bit of history relevant and another bit irrelevant. Why is the moment of Romeo’s conception by Lord Montague more relevant than a moment of personal conversation at a party the day before? The name would certainly seem to designate the importance of the former event rather than the latter—hence Juliet’s frustration. Which bit of history is essential? Which bits are secondary? Perhaps piety is a way of securing continuity with something in our history. The quotation from Kenneth Burke that opens this chapter does not, in itself, make clear what he thinks piety is. What it does make clear is that for Burke, piety involves concerns other than those with “getting ahead,” sustains connections important for human vitality, and forestalls disaster. What is the Burkean sense of piety that does this? The subject of piety, of course, predates Burke or Shakespeare. Thomistic wisdom held that piety was a species of justice. Piety described a set of special cases of giving what was due. Socrates and Euthyphro could not establish even that much with clarity. Was piety what the gods commanded or was there some other quality that made what the gods commanded pious? Let’s try another tack. When we see human behaviors that we call pious, what kinds of actions are we seeing? Acts of exaltation, praise, recognition, deference, flattery, gratitude, admiration, obedience, imitation, submission, and giving of privilege all seem pious. Are all these kinds of acts just? It depends, one might answer. If piety is a species of justice, and if justice demands giving each person his or her due, before we could determine what any person is due, we would need to know who he or she was. We would also need to know who the person rendering piety was. So for those who hold this Thomistic view of piety, concerns with it are going to be inseparable from concerns about identity. Others see piety less as a matter of justice than as a matter of doing what the gods command. This view downplays the moral component of piety in favor of an authoritative component. In the monotheistic view, piety is due to the ultimate authority, God. Or in the classical Greek variant that Socrates discusses, piety is due to the gods. Individual persons are due piety insofar as they partake in the authority or the divinity of God/the gods. How do we know the extent of any person’s participation in the authority or divinity of God/the gods? Again, we’ll need to know who that person is and that person’s connection or lack of connection to God/the gods. Identity matters again. Burke ties understanding of who we are to understanding of piety. Though he will show that the ideal of justice is relevant to piety but separable from it,

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and that the power of authority is also relevant but separable, one aspect of piety is always present in his account. Piety involves a person’s relation to his or her past. People certainly do perform just acts (as well as injustices) that aspire toward the good of their futures as people with particular sorts of identities. Many people take the larger portion of their sense of who they are to be tied up in their hopes for the future. We may be the people who await Jesus’ return, or the triumph of the proletariat, or the rescue of the planetary ecosystem, or the coming of the Messiah, but all of these are hopes for the future. The specific subset of pious concerns, instead, involves our attitudes toward our history, for Burke. We do not choose our pieties in the same way as we do our aspirations and hopes. They are water that has already passed under our bridge. Piety is not the only concern that goes into identity for Burke, but it is at the very least a thread of it. For Burke, identification, as a component of symbolic action, allows actions with pious motives (loyalty, sacrifice, propitiation, expiation, expressions of gratitude—all forms of surrender or deference to an authority) to mingle with motives that aim for social status (the exercise of authority over other members of the social group). In other words, while explicitly doing what needs to be done in order to obtain the help we cannot provide for ourselves, we can also manage to help ourselves implicitly by association. For example, Burke tells of the person who “identifies himself with some corporate unit (church, guild, company, lodge, party, team, college, city, nation, etc.)—and by profuse praise of this unit he praises himself. ”1 Thus piety for Burke figures into the mix of human motivations; it rarely, if ever, appears “pure.” Burke’s account of motives emphasizes the way they come mixed in human beings. Attempts to reduce an action to one essential motivation, although sometimes rhetorically useful, almost always distort the mixed motivations that inform the social situation. A story of deeds motivated by gratitude rarely notices the way giving thanks, while ostensibly separating the thanker from the one thanked and emphasizing the distance between them, also aims toward a new and closer identification with the beneficent party—an identification from which the beneficiary stands to gain. Piety coupled with status incentives motivate people to identify with the powers from which they are separated—to make an identification out of a vital and critical difference. Before proceeding to an elaboration of what Burke’s natural piety is, it might be helpful first to understand what it is not. It is not another name for theistic belief and practice. Piety, in Burke’s view, may well overlap with the place theological traditions hold in a person’s life, but not necessarily. A person who adheres to a particular religion identified with this God or those gods may or may not be pious. The identification Burke draws between piety and theology is not an identity—it slips. Rather, piety has to do with an attitude toward history—one’s own history. Insofar as people live within a world in-

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formed by the acceptance and recognition of that history and orient themselves vis-a`-vis its authorities, which may or may not be gods, those people are pious. A new way of putting things together suggested by an outsider will be impious insofar as it breaks older linkages in order to persuade or convert. Any “attempt to reorganize one’s orientations from the past would have an impious aspect,” he writes.2 That would include religiously motivated reorganizations, or conversions.3 The evangelist with his good news, insofar as it is news, he claims, impiously asks us to alter our orientations. Further, piety strictly speaking is not ethics; knowing that an act is pious is insufficient for knowing whether the act is good for us. The goodness (or badness) of the act, always for us as social beings, must be determined on other grounds. Burke uses the example of a startled bird that flies away, leading the flock to fly and follow it, as an example of social obedience carried to the animal limits of human good sense, humans being a special case of animals. He points out that for the flock, this act can orient or disorient, can guide or misguide, depending on what startled the bird, the bird’s prior experiences, and other contingencies that go into determining the avian “ethics” of the act. Past “orientations” of the flock and its leader, or by analogy the social group and the individual, determine pieties; the current exigencies detailed in the example shape “ethics.” Questions of piety, he claims, are related to but separable from questions of rightness or wrongness.4 I will argue that Burke is part of an American tradition of religious naturalism. George Santayana, a religious naturalist5 who in Reason in Religion had given an account of religion as part of a life of reason that relied on no powers other than those naturally available to human beings, treated piety as a natural human disposition that might include, but was not limited to, the understandings of piety offered by religious traditions. Santayana’s naturalized account of religious piety along with Freud’s psychologized one form the two major influences on Burke’s account of natural piety. How, more precisely, does Burke’s natural piety owe a debt to and maintain continuity with the work of Santayana? I will argue that Burke draws from Santayana’s religious naturalism, his account of human spirit, and his understanding of religion as an interpretive activity. Burke takes his definition of piety very nearly verbatim from Santayana and has an understanding of prayer that bears a family resemblance to Santayana’s. Further, Burke finds in Santayana’s work understandings counter to those of Nietzsche and Marx on the value of habit, human productivity, and gender norms that serve his own differing critical purposes. Santayana’s naturalism begins from the premise of a nonprovidential universe consisting of matter in motion: He maintains that “Nature is immense, that her laws are mechanical, that the existence and well-being of man upon earth are, from the point of view of the universe, an indifferent accident.”6 Human beings that live within this natural environment are both “the product

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and the captive of” this “irrational engine.”7 Undefeated by the lack of control over change such a universe presents to the person living within it, Santayana finds ways to live with the necessity. “What is there,” he challenges, “so dreadful in mutability? What so intolerable in ultimate ignorance? We know what we need to know, and things last, perhaps, as long as they deserve to last.”8 However daunting the environment may seem and however hostile to our purposes, he claims, the world does sustain, at least for the moment, a vast vegetating mass of living existence of which humans are a part. Santayana draws lessons from the character of this vegetating life that does somehow find sustenance. Living things come “rooted like a vegetable to one point in space and time”;9 these are the natural conditions that bring human beings all the goods that they have. Such graces as come our way stem from our contingent attachments to the world as living and finite beings, and this inherent natural contingency ought to inform our understanding of human reason. Even affection between parent and child “is based on the incidental and irrational fact that the one has this particular man for a father, and the other that particular man for a son. Yet, considering the animal basis of human life, an attachment resting on that circumstance is a necessary and rational attachment.”10 In this view informed by religious naturalism, contingency is one of the premises of reasonableness, not its catastrophic demise. The pieties that stem from life in this kind of a universe are natural ones for Santayana. “This consciousness that the human spirit is derived and responsible,” Santayana explains, “that all its functions are heritages and trusts, involves a sentiment of gratitude and duty which we may call piety.”11 In other words, we live, not by the guidance of Providence or the indifference of natural selection in its turn, but by the watchful nurture of parents, friends, teachers, civil governments, cultures, associations, and institutions (and for only as long as they do nurture). We are rooted to and dependent upon the luck of the draw, ecosystems, laws of gravity, and particular pieces of land that sustain us and to which our relationship might someday change. Thanks to these particular and not eternally guaranteed attachments, we get by and flourish physically and spiritually in whatever ways we can.12 Santayana’s variety of materialism and religious naturalism does not disallow the existence of human ideals. But he does insist that those ideals be distinguished from powers. Apart from the exercise of their own material powers, humans cannot make life more ideal nor can disembodied ideals move matter on their own. By making “a modest inventory of our possessions and a just estimate of our powers” we can assess what resources we may have and what resources we lack: We can abandon “our illusions the better to attain our ideals.” Through the use of reason we can imagine ideals and assess our powers. Whether we have the power to attain our ideals or not, “any reasoned appreciation of life is bound to be a religion, even if no conventionally religious elements are imported into the problem.”13

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This understanding of a naturalized religious life informs Burke’s natural piety. Burke rhetorically urges his reader to accept new meanings for old terms from inherited religious vocabularies, not breaking piety toward old meanings, but certainly stretching those meanings in order to cover changed sets of circumstances. He sees no point in wiping the slate completely clean just because environments and contexts change from time to time. Instead he wants to sort and sift, hanging on to what he can. This is piety; this is also Burke’s version of the Emersonian art of poetry. Poets are in the business of making new language out of old through the use of metaphors and other symbols. They breathe new life into language by disclosing connections we may have categorically overlooked in our habitual use. “[I]f we are all poets,” Burke writes, “and if all poets are pious, we may expect to find great areas of piety, even at a ball game. Indeed, all life has been likened to the writing of a poem, though some people write their poems on paper, and others carve theirs out of jugular veins.”14 Burke thinks that a look at human piety ought not to be confined to the strictly religious sphere, especially when the deepest moral convictions, the most cohesive social attachments, and the preponderance of symbolic actions that shape the identities of a great many people occur, at the moment, in more “secular” spheres, for better or worse. “[P]iety [is] a response which extends through all the texture of our lives but has been concealed from us,” he writes, “because we think we are so thoroughly without religion and think that the ‘pious process’ is confined to the sphere of churchliness.”15 However, this secular reading of religious life needs a safety valve that Burke thinks traditions based upon avowedly sacred myths did not. Theologies, which appealed to a God both “ultimately complex and ultimately simple, did not need to worry about the consequences of taking a part for a whole as a simplification strategy. Naturalistic religion, however, needs reminders that parts are not wholes and that the complex is not the simple,” Burke warns.16 The comic, as we will see in chapter 3, serves that function for Burke. Burke does not worry that identification with a sacred hero such as Jesus would deteriorate into narcissism in the same way that identification with a soccer star might; dangerous excesses of narcissism possible in the latter identification could, by theological fiat, never be achieved in the case of the former one. He writes: “Heroism loses this property of humility as soon as the ‘divine’ emphasis gives way to a secular emphasis. The secular hero is, by definition, a hero whom one can emulate and even surpass. Hence, insofar as the ideal of heroism becomes secularized, we hold that a corresponding shift to comedy must take place.”17 If heroes sacred and secular can both serve as heroes with whom pious people identify, how are we to recognize divinity when we come across it in a naturalized religion? How can we know that our gods are good? Burke faces this issue when he examines the technology he thinks modern society reveres and worships. He writes a friend: “Am I, or am I not, correct in saying that

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one should have an ambivalent attitude towards technology? Am I, or am I not, correct in saying that when technology is equated with progress (as per the simple ‘higher standard of living’ racket), you have erected technology into a God? (I.e., as per my notion that only ‘divine power’ is, by definition, unambiguously good, whereas any human or material power is a power for either evil or good.)”18 Powers should not be confused with ideals. Nothing about Burke’s and Santayana’s understanding of natural piety guarantees that the object of pious action is necessarily divine, though it is not Santayana’s or Burke’s intent to undermine divinity—quite the contrary. Their understanding of divinity privileges its ethical dimension over its dimension of power. We need, they both think, to understand and recognize the material ways in which power works even when the source of that power does not work toward the materialization of a good ideal. Likewise, we need to recognize that ideals are good even when they disappear from existence for failure to be enacted by any existing material power. We need to keep both what the gods command and the good in our range of critical vision, knowing that piety toys with both powers and ideals at different moments. Sometimes we find ourselves worshipping at the altar of power and at other times we worship at the altar of the good; on both occasions we are likely to think, if we let down our critical guard or silence our critics, that we are worshipping God. Sometimes we will be worshipping divinity and sometimes we will be kidding ourselves. Attempts to forestall a mutiny at sea may include placating sacrifices, but those sacrifices do not make the mutineers or the power they wield divine. According to Burke and Santayana, how a person frames the world depends upon how that person draws “the line between ‘friendly’ and ‘unfriendly’ ” in his or her environment.19 Those lines, too, tend to have a lot to do with personal identity and past experiences. Fear of the external, according to Santayana, motivates people to religious expression from the most physiological level. That which falls outside of a will we can control tends to threaten life as we would wish it, though such factors also at times can sustain life as we would wish it. When we can recognize the occasionally sustaining powers outside our control, we can then see Santayana’s second basic motivation for religious attitudes: need and dependence. So long as we think these external powers we need or fear display a regularity, we can read their causes and effects, living amongst them through the uses of magic or science. But, insofar as we take them to be arbitrary or subject to suasion, he thinks we practice religion as we make our appeals to these powers for help when we are at a loss to help ourselves. In Santayana’s view, which looks to the various social sources (family, associations, institutions) and nonsocial sources (natural resources, benign physical laws) of human well-being and doing, piety consists in “reverent attachment to the sources of [one’s] being and the steadying of . . . life by that attachment.”20 The sources of our being are both positive helps and restraints from potential harm. Driven back to basic fears and needs,

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people try to propitiate the powers in their way, using expressive means to attempt to communicate with them and to persuade them. They render poetic interpretations of their experience tied to the practical possibilities they see for living well in the world, expressing the way they wish life would be while performing acts of persuasion that attempt to bring other powers than their own around to their view of things. They perform sacrifices of parts of their goods to their gods: Such sacrifices may be made in attitudes along a continuum ranging from overflowing gratitude for unmerited favor, through an intention to act justly by giving one the part that one is due, to the hope of placating a demonic force. People owe piety to their contingent attachments in the world as well as to the universe itself, which for the moment sustains them. “Great is this organism of mud and fire,” Santayana writes, “terrible this vast, painful, glorious experiment. Why should we not look on the universe with piety? Is it not our substance? Are we made of other clay?”21 Alluding to Santayana’s elaboration of the concept, Burke describes piety as the yearning to conform with the “sources of one’s being.”22 Though his description resembles Santayana’s, in his use of the word conform it subtly alters Santayana’s treatment: Santayana never suggests that conformity or imitation is the only proper expression of piety nor does he understand piety as a mimetic quest for identity. Aside from a worked-out philosophy of religious naturalism, Santayana also provides Burke with an account of human spirit that can help make a difference in the world without resorting to an understanding of human ideals that gives them power in and of themselves without material actors to put them into effect. The efficacy of human spirit in improving human lives cannot be directly causal; it must avoid seeming like science when in fact it is more like poetry. However we come to know the workings of human spirit, it cannot be by the same ways we justify scientific knowledge. Santayana provides Burke with a way to short-circuit the scientific obsession with epistemology. Rather than prolong the arguments about how far skepticism need go in order to obtain justified knowledge upon which to act, Santayana gives away the game. Appearances may be merely appearances, Santayana claims, but they are at least that—and he proceeds from this supposition of the worst-case scenario. Following Nietzsche, Santayana claims that appearances are not “merely” appearances as opposed to more “real” essences, as they were for Plato, but instead, even though limited, they are the only ground for action that animals, including the human kind, have. Appearance and essence do not stand in dualistic relation for humans who must necessarily act upon animal faith.23 Appearances, though perhaps only a dream, are all we know of the material world on which we depend, Santayana would add. Having granted the worst, Santayana recoups the value of the life of the spirit in the material world. Having performed the act of ultimate skepticism by yielding to the epistemologists, he constructs a way out for spirit that reforms the remaining bits and

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pieces into something whole and ideal. If we must suppose our way through life acting on less than justified faith, he claims, we at least do so in a world filled with other supposers like ourselves; to incorporate Burke’s vocabulary, the individual act of animal faith multiplied out to the scale of society becomes the social scene constructed materially based on suppositions similar to ours. An increase in the quantity of acts of animal faith changes their quality—act becomes scene of action. Therefore material powers—the only kind there are—amongst which we must necessarily live, will always surpass our powers to “know” them fully. Humans are not merely machines with status-driven engines, useful toward the end of churning out historical process. They can imagine other possible worlds to live in and transcend deterministic materialism. Santayana writes: “We are a part of the blind energy behind Nature, but by virtue of that energy we impose our purposes on the part of Nature which we constitute or control. We can turn from the stupefying contemplation of an alien universe to the building of our own house, knowing that, alien as it is, that universe has chanced to blow its energy also into our will and to allow itself to be partially dominated by our intelligence.”24 Spirit bears the moral fruit of material life in Santayana’s philosophy. Spirit grows out of, but is not reducible to, material conditions. Burke points out that the concept of natural fruition can emphasize the ways the fruit is grounded in material existence or alternatively can highlight the ways fruition transcends its own limitations through new growth. Though spirit has animal, hence material, origins, spirit can transcend the limits of material existence; we can imagine more essences than can exist and we are free to do so. These imaginings have a stability that matter in constant motion does not. The spirit has space and capacity for free play; it doesn’t have to be a slave to utility. The spirit finds compensations for the material limitations imposed on it in the freedom of poetic religion as another world to live in. In “Ultimate Religion,” Santayana writes that “power flows in part through our persons; the spirit itself is a spark of that fire.” That the other world to live in often happens to masquerade as the world of material powers we do live in is “a natural effect of perspective.” The illusion of partial perspective “turns our little spark for us into a central sun.”25 But the beauty of this other world for Santayana, Burke reminds us, is compensatory, and here Burke cannot be quite satisfied with Santayana’s otherworldliness. Santayana thought that people could clear space for poetic cosmos within chaos but could not make chaos into cosmos: “In the bosom of the intractable infinite,” Santayana wrote, people could still distinguish “the work of human reason—the cosmos of society, character, and art—like a Noah’s ark floating in the Deluge.”26 But the value of an ark, Burke might have suggested to Santayana, with all its poetic resonances, is not just cosmetic and not merely compensatory. Whatever small differences human spirit could

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make in the world, according to Burke, had the chance of being real ameliorations. Even if not accountable in terms of a utilitarian science, those potential ameliorations were nonetheless values that might move human agents.27 In addition to an account of human spirituality that could make a difference without having direct utility, Burke also borrowed Santayana’s notion of religion as a form of interpretation. In Reason in Religion, Santayana argued that religion is a reasoned interpretation of experience and urged a hermeneutic ideal in which people might understand all languages even though they spoke but one. Likewise, Burke wants to work out a hermeneutics that calls for “the placing of special stress upon the kinds of hermeticism, or stylistic mercureality, that are got by the merging of categories once felt to be mutually exclusive.”28 He invokes Hermes, the god of both boundaries and the commerce that crosses and violates those boundaries. Where sacred and secular have customarily been held as mutually exclusive, Burke uses language that shows how ball games and barroom banter are more like religious rituals than different from them. Where people tend to separate altruistic motives from egoistic ones, Burke shows how both “styles” of acting come already mixed up in human behavior. He hints at the sequestered and sealed-off qualities “hermeticism” implies in the context of talking about the possibilities for communication with others. He calls up Mercury, Hermes’ Roman counterpart, while advocating radical transigence of form and style as communicative tools for the messenger and translator. Every carefully chosen word of Burke’s style emphasizes his approach to the problems of merging and exclusivity—of external fear and internal need. Changing strategies of interpretation led by considered stylistic choices in writing will help him reconcile outside and inside. This interpretive truth Burke aims for is poetic truth. To repeat a point, Burke claims that a pious person is a poet of sorts; she makes a poem of her life by importing today’s perceptions into yesterday’s significances, borrowing yesterday’s terms to name today’s phenomena; her every act, like every word of a good poem, echoes the relationships of the past and shapes an unfinished life in process toward the unfinished form of an aesthetically coherent whole. As far as Burke is concerned, not only is a poem a poem, but a critique of a poem is a poem, critique differing from poetry only in the different set of pieties that motivate it. Both embody interpretive strategies that relate present to past. Burke makes these “opposite” forms—poetry and criticism—meet through identification. Both are rhetoric, the use of weighted words in symbolic action, and rhetoric, he thinks, will appear whenever people truly care enough about what they are saying to try to communicate that significance to others. Both pious poetry and pious criticism exemplify “an attitude by manipulating the symbols of experience—each is an attempt to ‘socialize’ the individual by recourse to the lore of the group.”29 No matter how polemical or differentiating a person’s rhetoric may be, the use of words held in common

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and the urge to communicate betrays the need to belong, to identify, even behind the mask of denial. When I react furiously to some position you hold, I demonstrate that I care passionately what your position is on this matter. My resistance to you is pious; it is driven by the desire to stay in conversation—to sway you from what threatens me. If I walked away and shrugged, I would be behaving impiously; something vital would be severed. The mask of denial of identification performs not an act of separation but an incipient act of separation. My anger, in the instance above, is a warning and a threat. Incipient acts are, in Burke’s lexicon, attitudes; when we care about who we talk to and what we say, when we have any sincere concern for how our acts effect other members of our community, he thinks our pious language conveys our attitude. For Burke, attitudes are often more important than words. For example, in a letter to Austin Warren about C. K. Ogden’s and I. A. Richards’s work, Burke explains: “The ‘attitude’ of these men seems to me much more fruitful than their work itself,”30 referring to their aim to consolidate or coordinate nineteenth-century critical methods rather than add to the already overflowing methodological bin. Or, to use the vocabulary of piety, rather than proliferate new pieties with which to criticize and reject old ones, Burke appreciates what he takes to be their attempt to bring the already existing multitude of pious orientations to bear upon each other—the effort to integrate the old with the new by merging poetic and critical vocabularies in order to accept as much as possible—a very “pious” project. A vocabulary motivated primarily by an attitude of pious acceptance rather than rejection aims to convey in language both the descriptive and the hortatory aspects of words. No account of language limited to its cognitive content—words, grammar, syntax—will be fully equipped to explore the aspects of language that interest Burke, that is, how people use words on each other. As Santayana had put a similar sentiment, a “scientific man” may be able to “put some aspect of the truth into technical terms,” but what he does “hardly deserves the name of philosophy so long as the heart remains unabashed, and we continue to live like animals lost in the stream of our impressions.”31 Burke too takes this to be so; he claims that “transformations from one orientation to another involve not only intellect, but also emotions.”32 Writing to Malcolm Cowley he explains: I cling to a kind of empirical test of this sort: I take it that the really profound efforts at communication will show marked rhythmic, ritualistic qualities. Our newspapers are not rhythmic and ritualistic because the reporter does not profoundly give a damn what he is saying. Mere statement is essentially the behavior of insincerity, or superficiality. When one is stating his deepest convictions, he will inevitably attempt to surround them with the poetic, or religious, allurements. For my own part, I shall remain forlorn unless (a) I can find a way of writing again in the way of the Declamations,

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with improvements, and (b) I can pursue such efforts in a field which does not land me again into a realm of terrors. Anything else is a damned lie, and I do not like to be a liar.33 All human beings, Burke claims, when they use language emotionally engaged and with care, are poets. Poets use words to symbolically manage their conflicts and solicit cooperation. Humans strive to encompass situations of need in ways that define the situation so that “perfection” in terms of their symbolic vocabulary would be the fulfillment of their needs. Burke’s understanding of secular prayer bears a family resemblance to the understanding of prayer Santayana articulated in Reason in Religion, but Burke’s prayers move away from Santayana’s renunciation, pessimism, quietism, and mortification and move toward melioristic rhetoric. Like Santayana, Burke thought people prayed for help when they could not help themselves; prayer was “a desperate effort to work further and to be efficient beyond the range of one’s powers,” according to Santayana. “It is not the lazy who are most inclined to prayer,” Santayana writes; rather, “those pray most who care most, and who, having worked hard, find it intolerable to be defeated.”34 But Burke’s view of prayer is more strictly social. Using symbols, Burke explains, people exhort each other in order to obtain cooperation in social situations. Burke views secular prayers as performed verbal acts that aim to persuade a specific human audience to the pray-er’s view of the world with implications for the audience’s active response. That is, in order to socialize my uneasiness, I must describe the situation, whatever it is, in such a way that the description eases my uneasiness—perhaps I will rename things in order to reshape the world more into accord with my needs or fear-induced wishes. But I must also articulate the situation in such a way as to make you desire to understand and accept my description, and for this purpose, I must do better than renaming. I must craft my prayer in such a way that I create enough desire to understand on your part to energize your efforts at interpretation. Burke could easily have agreed when Santayana claimed that “every artist is a moralist, though he need not preach; like Orpheus he tames the simple soul to his persuasive measures; he insinuates his preferences and his principles, he teaches us what to love.”35 As such, prayers provide potential spiritual constructions that build needed or merely desired cooperation and resources into the proposed social norms. These proposals aimed at the comembers of one’s society also seek to mitigate social fears and bring them down to an acceptable level; “prayers” are appeals in part to the larger society, which the individual cannot control and on which the separate person depends for a sense of security. Although such “secular prayers” bring the spiritual aspirations of a person onto a social stage as a performance, Burke’s ironic approach to these prayers makes it impossible to take the goodness of these proposals for the broader society for granted; thus he takes spirituality with a grain of salt. Santayana had suggested

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that pretense to material efficacy made prayer ridiculous;36 Burke merely turns that comic quality into an advantage and admits that prayers addressed to other human powers in the universe sometimes do work, whether for good or for ill, whether the prayer is undertaken as a conscious means to an end or as an end in itself without conscious motivation by material interests. Burke further obtains from Santayana’s naturalized Catholicism a way to restore some of the premodern goods that he thinks the spirit of capitalism kills.37 The differences between Santayana’s materialism and Marxist materialism are significant for Burke; he uses them to separate the goods he sees in Marxist critiques of capitalism from what he takes to be Marxism’s slavery to scientific rationalization. Scientific rationalization, as Burke understands it, emphasizes mastery over finitude through technology, assigns value in universal terms of money, values only what sense experience suggests exists, and dwells too much upon epistemological justification for its acts. In a technological age in which the currency of value is utility (monetarily construed), artistic activity, backed into a corner, must defend its right to exist through a counterclaim for the value of uselessness.38 Lost in the translation, according to Burke, is the Greek understanding of the higher value of human activities undertaken at leisure as ends in themselves (and dependent upon coexistence of a slave society, one ought to add). As Nietzsche said of classical antiquity, the Greeks felt a difference between the value of liberal action and the value of activity compelled by the needs of survival; they drew strong distinctions between nobles and slaves, distinctions no longer clear in a technological age.39 We no longer realize, according to Burke, when we have become slaves to the need for status in our material existence. Although in another possible version of history Marx might have decided that class struggle should be the means to a classical ethical end of enough leisure to pursue a good life of unalienated work, he chose instead to sanctify the idea of class and made class struggle into something akin to a religious vocation understood as an end in itself. Marxist “theology,” adopting the terms of the enemy “spirit” of capitalism, understood economic status as the sole evaluative vocabulary. But to take the reductive materialism of Marx as the only sort of materialism one might think through, according to Burke, is to miss the different materialism of Santayana, who piously held on to his premodern vocabulary of values. This older vocabulary had been “useful” to humans because it helped them find deep satisfaction amidst conditions of social dependence. Dependent creatures might rest their heads upon the breasts of their mothers, finding deep satisfaction and rest from struggle even in the presence of powerlessness. Instead Marx takes away all passively available goods as ends unto themselves, displacing those goods with a sacred calling to produce history. In his emphasis upon human productive action to the exclusion of passion, according to Burke’s reading of Santayana, Marx made the mistake of confusing ideals and powers insofar as the science of dialectical materialism tried to coerce essence into existence in a

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finite world through a technological understanding of material power. Santayana’s counteremphasis is on the material power of nature and the relation between spirit and nature. Marxist ideology as the counterpart of capitalist ideology shares its reductive account of human values; hence the urgency and assertiveness of its calling to class struggle and its utilitarian justifications of value. Because this joint system of values induces human beings to abandon what joys they might find even in the midst of conditions of dependence, it also propels humans into the struggle for status. No longer can the minimal necessary labor required for happy coexistence with natural powers in a natural environment count as worth one’s while; the value of a chosen life lived simply and close to nature with material needs and finite wants met is untranslatable within the ethos of scientific rationalization and its variety of materialism. The energies of spirit can only find proper expression in the tribalistic calling to class consciousness and in its struggle to make history. The price of philosophical luxury and nobility of spirit under these conditions becomes extremely and unnecessarily high—too dear for all but the richest members of society.40 Finally, Burke takes what he thinks of as the passive and feminine qualities of Santayana’s spirituality to be the correct antidote for the aggressive reductionism of Freud’s and Marx’s critique. Burke claims that Santayana has put together a variant of Platonic philosophy, but one in which essences do no productive work. Santayana’s essences have no power to generate a metaphysics: They are individualistic, without progeny, they are not seed, they are not biologically useful. They rest—they are.41 When Santayana defines human action in the world of mechanical motion as action based upon animal faith, the sorts of acts that count in this world are the acts of living, sentient beings performed in the service of sustaining and appreciating that life. Consciousness in this realm serves the practical purpose of staying alive. The ideal world of spiritual essences, its dialectical opposite, would then be full of passive beings—passive either because the goals of action have been achieved or otherwise stopped. Spiritual life in this other realm need not be useful; it can be playful. Spiritual passions, practically and biologically useless in the field of animal action, constitute the action of the spirit. Elsewhere Santayana writes: “In submitting to power, I learn its ways; from being passive my spirit becomes active; it begins to enjoy one of its essential prerogatives. For like a child the spirit is attracted to all facts by the mere assault of their irrational presence and variety. It watches all that happens or is done with a certain happy excitement.”42 Where the material powers of the human animal end, the activity of the human spirit begins. The end of everyday “acts of faith” had been in cessation of motion, in rest; the end of passion—of spiritual intuition—is in contemplation of and preparation for death. Thus can the naturalistic Christian “live a dying life” and practice mortification, making a virtue of necessity through practice and thus

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living “a long life of euthanasia.”43 But however worrisome Burke finds this religious philosophy of life devoted to mortification to be, he takes Santayana’s poison, in the proper doses, to be medicine for patriarchal bias. Santayana’s spirit is childlike in its relation to an all-powerful nature. The childspirit, unconcerned with and undriven toward future generation, dies having made peace through mortification in the arms of the mother. Burke is more concerned with manipulating the future than is Santayana, but like Santayana he accepts that the universe, whatever its material powers, is a source of our well-being; “we must in any case learn to live with it, whether it be our parent or our child.”44 Burke’s reading of Santayana is colored by the other great influence on his understanding of piety, Freud. Piety, for Burke, is not only loyalty to the sources of our being, but more generally and at times more directly to his point, the sense of what properly goes with what—the sense of the appropriate.45 Along with Freud, Burke thinks that early family relationships set up systems of propriety and property that organize the way people decide what goes with what, who belongs to whom, and where ultimate allegiances lie. Burke, in his early attempt in Permanence and Change to think through natural piety, considers it on the model of purity and contamination. Pollution, in this view, can rub off through knowingly associating with the impious, as Euthyphro suggested.46 Piety, in this schema, builds the systematic understanding of clean and unclean, sacred and profane, proper and improper. Burke thinks it is no accident that the words proper, propriety, proprietary, appropriate (in its adjectival and verb forms), and property all share the same root. All deal with systematized hierarchies of ownership in which property rights are upheld by proper moral conduct and habits of propriety. Nonsystematic mixing of categories violates the taboo: Burke follows Freud in his assessment that “[t]aboos are imposed in order to secure against thieves the property of an individual, his fields, tools, etc.”47 Purity consists in keeping like with like; clean altars should be approached with clean hands, but unclean altars (and Burke thinks there are unclean altars) need to be approached with dirty ones.48 Yet even in this earliest attempt to explain natural piety in terms of purity laws and taboos that cohere with Freud’s thinking, a tension ultimately productive in Burke’s own thought shows. At one point in Permanence and Change, Burke appears to accept a progressivist scientific bias that sees religious piety as a form of regression—as a pathology. For instance, of regression Burke writes, “any intense experience is regressive in one respect: It is more characteristic of childhood simplicity than of adult complexity. In maturity our experiences are usually mixed, lacking the purity they may have in childhood when the range of response is more limited. ”49 If a critic holds with the premise that this intensity and regression are pathological, then “growing up” would seem to demand that pious simplifications be exchanged for the com-

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plexities of adulthood. Burke, however, seems less willing than Freud to equate maturity, impiety, and moral health. Elsewhere in Permanence and Change, he writes that to act with piety requires an agent to “accept the full childhood implications of his adult performances”—to take seriously the need of expiation for symbolic offenses.50 A person might “symbolically offend” by hiding her more unreasonable, irrational, or contingent loyalties, which she continues to entertain in private, under the cloak of offering emotionally neutral language for public presentation, out of fear of rejection or censure. In such a style, bias is not eliminated but covered up. Note how Burke in this instance has moved the burden of moral responsibility from impiety, where Freud left it, back to piety, whence it came. Burke suggests that being responsible involves owning up to pious biases as much as it involves the willingness to entertain critical questions. The “grown-up,” he suggests, must learn to take seriously regression and the needs it signals and to be responsible to the pieties—the contingent attachments and the intensity they provoke—of the child. The kind of naturally pious “childishness” Burke defends is Emersonian: “To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.”51 I do not think that Burke ultimately intends to glamorize regression, its wishful thinking, and its inability to entertain complexity by eulogizing it as piety. He intends instead an Emersonian adjustment of “inward and outward senses.” But in Permanence and Change this is not yet clear. Burke claims that his first attempt to deal with the troubles and suffering caused by regressive behavior, behavior he finds both vital to well-being and potentially troublesome, looked to purify weighted vocabulary by aiming for an emotionally neutral language. Burke takes this tactic, which he attributes to Jeremy Bentham, to be the equivalent of “castrating” one’s vocabulary. In this father-son, gender-identified, homosocial vision of the interaction between the individual and society, the penance required for peace with the social authorities is the complete removal of rhetoric and all “partial” individualistic motivations. No interests can be taken to be weightier than others; all must be measured in the same objective and utilitarian balance of interests. But ultimately Burke rejects this strategy because he comes to the realization that it paradoxically sacrifices the emotional attachments it aims to preserve. Desires to identify with the father reduce down to the options of killing him (in order to take his place) or being killed (actually, castrated, which amounts to the same thing in a patriarchal vision) by him. Burke calls this dead end a “bachelor” vocabulary and later develops a less exclusively masculine, more “comic” way to preserve the rhetorical use of language without resorting to

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“castration.” Once he does this, the identity issue at stake ceases to be “either I’m a man or I’m not.” In his essay “Freud and the Analysis of Poetry,” Burke presents the later results of his intellectual struggle with Freudian culture criticism. Burke’s earlier starts at this work, both in Permanence and Change (1935) and Attitudes toward History (1937), articulated his encounter in process. In this 1939 essay, Burke articulates the strengths and weaknesses of Freudian vocabulary, and evaluates its potential to serve his own “dramatic” model for criticism.52 Burke thinks that Freud “cashed in” on frankness by developing a “methodology” of frankness that to some extent protected him from the usual costs of being honest.53 By socializing human sexual motives into a system of thought, Freud cloaked his insightful personal admissions and observations that might be humiliating in another format with the authoritative aura of science; by doing so he turned a potential liability into an asset. Burke approaches Freud’s terrain by considering the relationship between the sacred and the humiliating, or the “ecclesia” and the “cloaca.” Usually, Burke says figuratively, we erect our churches over our dirty sewers. (What more fitting place, he asks, given that they sanctify or make clean?) We rarely, if ever, examine the relationship between the church and the sewer; rather the beauty of the church compensates for the risk of ridicule the dirtiness of the sewer imposes. But Burke credits Freud for mingling the two fields of action—for looking not to compensate for the sewer by doing cosmetic work, but rather for looking to separate the necessary connections between the two fields of action from the superfluous waste to be eliminated. If there are sacred natural pieties to be discerned within the terrain of Freud’s “family romance,” Burke aims to find them. If there are due “loyalties to the sources of a person’s being” to be found in Freud’s sewer, Burke aims to retrieve those pieties by tracing them back from the sewer to the source. Freud, according to Burke, tries to turn sewer work into salvation work by lending salvation work a “sewer” vocabulary.54 Despite what he takes to be the unpromising prospects of Freud’s attempt to work unlovely materials into something lovable, Burke argues that Freud’s appeal tends toward the artistic rather than toward scientific motives. Burke notes that Freud seems to be not so much concerned with accuracy of the details of how things are (and hence, seems not so driven by the motives of a scientist) as he is concerned with human salvation or rescue. Freud uses the unlovely not to castigate or kill, but rather to socialize human guilt and loss of dignity.55 Burke wants to determine how far the chart Freud developed to order and systematize the symbolic acts of neurotics can be used to help understand the symbolic acts of poets and, by implication, how far Freud can contribute to Burke’s own moral and humanistic soteriological project.56 Burke worries that Freud’s method uses an essentializing approach rather than a proportional one; he claims that Freud tends to take parts for wholes. Burke complains that anything not an essential part of human motivation is

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for Freud a sublimated version of the essential part, that is, an epiphenomenon. Burke takes this essentializing move to be an ideal of scientific explanation.57 Consistently, the qualities Burke finds most admirable about Freud are congruous with Burke’s “Freud the poet” metaphor; Freud’s less admirable qualities Burke relegates to his role as scientist. Burke claims that the earlier, more “medical-materialistic” writings of Freud do not take the symbols of dreams seriously enough to determine motivation. Instead, the essential motivation of all human action considered in these works, derived from the material demands of the human body, comes already determined by fiat in the medical-materialist method. These bodily materialist causes of human expression announce themselves to persons in the wish-world symbols of their dreams; the dreams are an epiphenomenon of that biological substrate. Burke, affronted by the mind-body dualism of this approach and by its reductive account of human motivation, cannot accept this part of Freud’s thought. Burke can make no use, literary or otherwise, of symbols subject to a reductive medical-materialist method. However, he finds the psychoanalytic technique of free association much more useful to critics because it looks for meaning to the relations between parts rather than to the parts themselves, valuing the internal structure of the work as a vital clue to its meaning for the person who composed it, but saying little, if anything, about its reference to an external social context. The models Burke develops for understanding the artistic artifact include dream, prayer, and chart.58 In the course of the essay he manages to flesh out these terms by drawing analogies to magic, religion, and science. Against the background of Freud’s appropriation of James Frazer’s terminology in Totem and Taboo, Burke pairs the three heuristic models—magic, religion, and science— with the categories of wish, symbol, and name, spinning out the differences and similarities he has with Freud’s ideas while he plays out the metaphors. He first rejects the progressivist bias that makes science the culmination of the triad. Instead he claims that science is more like magic than it is like religion. The child’s world is a magical wish-world—a stable one that can be moved to one’s own ends provided one knows and uses the right kind of magical incantation. Scientific rationalization, like magical thinking, relies on models of cause and effect and works to acquire the knack of mastering those causes, hence their effects, through incantations or technologies, as the case may be. On the other hand, religious rationalization takes the arbitrary into account; it deals in propitiation, humility, obedience, ingratiation, and inducement and calls for suasive power rather than mastery. Both magic and science look to a stable world of cause and effect that can be manipulated with the proper “machinery.” But Burke thinks that religion, unlike magic and science, needs to persuade rather than cause and has to consider the possible recalcitrance of things. Recalcitrance, be it the nobility of slaves or not, cannot be wished away from a world that has a degree of randomness built into it.59

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Burke finds a literary analogy to infantile regression: “In so far as I speak the same language that I learned as a child,” he writes, “every time I speak there is, within my speech, an ingredient of regression to the infantile level.”60 Living within language, he argues, always keeps us tied a bit to where we learned it. Where pious continuity or continual development in language has been maintained, there is no jarring conflict between then and now. But if there has been some sort of radical discontinuity, rather than gradual language development, stress or pressure may induce something like clinical regression. His animal model for continuity is the chambered nautilus, which adds to its shell as need and growth require; the model for discontinuous regression is the hermit crab, which drops one shell when it needs to in order to scramble and find another one.61 However, Burke notes that continuous processes can lead to a discontinuity: Continuous changes in quantity can lead to a change in quality. A continuous change in body size leads the hermit crab to “rename” his source of protection as a source of confinement, leading to a radical discontinuity in terms of the means of protection.62 Burke suggests that Freud’s set of terms or names be understood as a working vocabulary or as a dictionary. If one finds the terms inadequate, one should come up with better terms, not merely try to refute Freud’s terms. Refuting a “term,” argues Burke, doesn’t really make sense; names, in and of themselves, don’t define. Rather, one refutes the connections between terms or the adequacy of the name for some use.63 In Permanence and Change, Burke looked at piety in terms of loyalty to fathers. In Freud’s account—supposedly “impious” since he emphasizes modernist critical motives—as in Wordsworth’s understanding of natural “piety,” the child is indeed father to the man.64 Burke at first aims to bridge the gap between impiety and piety by highlighting Freud’s emphasis upon the longing for attachment between fathers and sons. If a pious person violates childhood pieties in order to meet utilitarian needs, the person must atone for his acts. Burke gives the example of cutting down trees for firewood as a symbolic parricide. Taking care of material interests tends to violate poetic symbolic needs, when trees figure for fathers, and requires symbolic expiation. I believe that Burke also has in mind the natural piety divorced from proprietary concerns that Emerson wrote of in “Nature”: “It is this [poetic sense] which distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet. The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.”65 Emerson, however, says nothing about trees figuring for fathers. That is Burke’s Freudian reinterpretation of the passage about piety. In this particular reinterpretation, he manages to turn a passage

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from Emerson that flies in the face of property rights into a new interpretation that shores up patriarchal property rights. In Burke’s view, material animal need might compel a man to commit all sorts of impious symbolic outrages, causing him to cut down the trees that metaphorically figure as his social sustenance in order to gratify his immediate needs for warmth by his fire, but this symbolic offense against the paternal source of his past (and future) wellbeing could perhaps be mollified with the right kind of poetic expiation. Where the scientific rationalization had gone too far in emphasizing utilitarian values, technological dominance, and pursuit of progress, the religious rationalization could serve to stabilize systems of human (in this case read male) cooperation. Burke claims that adults, removed from the family home, maintain their piety by transferring their personal father piety to father-government.66 But by 1939, Burke concedes: “for a long time, under the influence of the Freudian patriarchal emphasis, I tended to consider such trees as fathers, I later felt compelled to make them ambiguously parents.”67 Burke points out that Freud tends to see human life in terms of fathers and sons. Burke notices that when Freud thinks of individual psychology he orients toward the father; when he thinks in terms of social psychology he orients toward the brothers. Women, not full-fledged members in Freud’s family, are little more than the exchange currency between men.68 Freud takes exclusive attention to male humanity to be worth more than it is because he takes the part as a god-term that defines and entitles the essence of the whole. Burke finds Freud’s vocabulary still worth the purchase—parts being at least parts—but not at Freud’s price. He discounts the patriarchal bias; fathers and sons are worth paying attention to, but not worth that much.69 To “discount,” Burke paints a comic picture. Burke first claims that in times of transitional confusion, people tend to set up rebirth rituals for themselves, in which they change their identity by being “reborn.” But in order to be reborn convincingly, asks Burke, don’t mother figures need to enter the symbolic picture? The scene minus the mother is the dream of gender-pure descent from fathers to sons in a cartoon wish-world composed exclusively of fathers giving birth to and feeding their tiny all-male offspring. Burke thinks that restoring the mother to the symbolic picture will complicate Freud’s essentializing strategy; affection as a biological, hence material, necessity can then become every bit as real a motivation as sexual desire and not merely an epiphenomenon of it or drapery over it.70 But if the mother is to be restored to an active role in the family drama, we ought to expect that needs and rebellions that call for rituals of rebirth will enact matricides as well as patricides, argues Burke. Indeed, Burke points out that one way to rename a ritual of rebirth that totally changes identity is to call it a ritual of suicide, for it requires the killing off of the previous self and all its connections. Rebirth is the optimistic (or “eulogistic”) term for the same drama that suicide names pessimistically (or “dyslogistically”).71 This drive to

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absolutism in identity change is for Burke analogous to the drive for purity. Burke’s friend, David Daiches, once warned Burke that “one must beware of mixing up categories.” Burke’s notes show his response: When they are logical categories, yes. But when they are purely descriptive ones, slogans for pointing broadly in the direction of something, shouldn’t we, rather, use as our paradigm the Occam formula, thus: “categories should not be mixed beyond necessity ”? If one is simply evolving two categories for the concept of growth, ex cathedra, not without reference to empirical materials, one might have them pure, or unmixed as Hitler would [claim?72] the “blood-strains” of “Semite” and “Aryan.” But is not growth itself a mixing of categories, a synthesis of ingredients that shade off into politics, drama, economics, ethics, history, biology, sociology, etc.? Could one possibly describe empirical instances of growth, mental growth, without psychology? And is not the ideal of maximal categories ultimately but an antipsychological ideal?73 The tendency to mix categories, according to Burke, is not necessarily the tendency we need to fear most. Not all symbolic rituals are so absolute as rituals of rebirth in the changes of identity they enact. Burke reminds the reader that the “great danger of analogy is that a similarity is taken as evidence of an identity.”74 After using Freud’s language to discuss rituals of rebirth that involve changes of identity, he uses Freud’s terms condensation and displacement to illuminate rituals that involve changes in degree of identification rather than absolutely different old and new identities. Burke believes that the scientific/utilitarian point of view and the subject—object dualism intrinsic to its method take human rituals, such as a tragic play, and turn their participants either into passive spectators of an active world, in the scientific model, or into practitioners and victims of magic, in the magical model in which the tragedy serves as the incantation. In either case the tragedy serves as the means that will cause the end or the need to be fulfilled. Burke suggests instead the religious model, one that has more play between the subject and object and a less causal relationship between means and ends. His “tragic performance as prayer” model allows the audience to partially identify with the nobility and elevation of the tragic hero. The dramatic tragedy serves somewhat as a means to the end of sacrificial catharsis, but also as an end in itself insofar as the partial identification of the audience with heroic nobility serves to dignify and memorialize the concerns and conflicts that the audience brings to the performance.75 Oedipus Rex is cathartically sad not simply because a man puts out his eyes; the drama works as a cathartic partly because plenty of viewers like to imagine themselves as rulers, enjoy imagining incestuous experiences, and take pleasure in daydreaming about killing a parent. The audience identifies with the actors. Romeo and Juliet is cathartic not just because we end up with two dead

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bodies, but also because we fervently wish to be young, beautiful, and transgressively in love again, enough so that we identify with the tragic heroes. Likewise, the acting performers are dependent upon the audience’s response to energize their performance and to call out their best efforts, as any professional actor will attest. Burke thinks that Freud operates within an aesthetic ideal widespread in his time: art as self-expression.76 This particular aesthetic pictures half of a whole process; the artist blurts out for the sake of blurting out or, in Burke’s memorable phrase, gains “catharsis by secretion.” The expressive aesthetic neglects the receptive aspects of art and ignores the artist’s need to socialize the expression. The dream model, the model of the poet who spews out symbols, connecting them to unconscious motives without concern for the coherence of the symbols with each other or at least without any concern that such coherence be understood by an audience, need not deal with reception, but the prayer model Burke advocates requires a hearer. The poet needs a censor, claims Burke, borrowing Santayana’s language from an essay on the relation of dreams to poems.77 Perceptions, fanciful and sincere as they are, according to Santayana, need to be connected to their background, the passions, through the process of dreaming. The poetic dream or the dreamlike expressive poem makes personal perceptions the most pertinent aspect of our attention. “To be more literal,” Santayana suggests, “would require training, and a painful effort; it would require the art of reading and discounting dreams.”78 Burke aims precisely to become that more literal poet Santayana imagined in his soliloquy and in “Ultimate Religion,” the poet who could integrate dreamexpression of wishes with the powerful recalcitrance of the existing world. Burke argues that the censor anticipates the resistances of the relevant other—piously significant to the poet because the poet needs that acceptance and fears its lack. Hence the prayerful poet will need to concern himself not only with conveying the content of his wishes to his reader; he will also need to attend to matters of form that are the common ground for the contestations between them. If the artist or “pray-er” hopes to draw the reader in close enough to help him bear his burdens and to take a share in his losses, he will need to give shape to his shapeless dreams.79 If he loses that hope of socializing loss, the poet will turn to invective in order to express his incipient repulsion of the audience about to be changed now from friend into enemy.80 When incipient repulsion becomes actual—when threat becomes separation—the thread of piety is broken. Burke shows how even Freud, with his charting vocabulary, is still more pious than he knows. We seek to name a thing, claims Burke, in order to bring it under control within a system of names or a vocabulary. Yet a name, being a linguistic thing, can only name by reference to what the thing named is not. But, Burke continues, the point of naming is precisely to extend a vocabulary to include something that the vocabulary has heretofore excluded. Hence, a

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name is paradoxically both that which the thing it refers to is not and, at the same time, the index that points to that thing. We know the various things that we need to name by living in their midst and by seeing those things as active or passive participants in the action of our lives. Were our lives not involved with the thing requiring a name, we would not feel compelled to name it; if I rarely encountered snow in my life, I would hardly need more than one name for it in order to characterize its impact upon my life. But because I need a name appropriate to the way or the many ways the “thing” acts in my world, the name I assign will reflect my attitudes toward it; namings are “essentially” enactments, according to Burke. In Permanence and Change, Burke looked at psychoanalysis through the metaphor of conversion. By using a metaphor, he avoids structuralist dichotomies. Within the metaphor lies a contradiction Burke wants to explore; conversion connotes both radical change, hence impiety, and religious devotion, hence piety. So is psychoanalysis either an impious rationalization or an alternative piety? This is just the dichotomy Burke wants to avoid. Viewed from a distance, “psychoanalytic piety” would seem to be a misnomer; Burke claims in Permanence and Change that psychoanalysis is rather an impious rationalization that provides a new, more tolerable terminology of motives. It “effects its cures by providing a new perspective that dissolves the system of pieties lying at the roots of the patient’s sorrows or bewilderments. It is an impious rationalization, offering a fresh terminology of motives to replace the patient’s painful terminology of motives.”81 But even psychoanalysts have to retain some element of a patient’s former perspective that can be appealed to in order to reorganize a conversion downward. The psychoanalyst, as nominalist, tends to have the trained incapacity to see the limitations of word magic. Changes in name, whether of roses or motives, do not change every aspect of the thing renamed, however much the surrounding things, agents, and connections realign. Nor will simply calling a skunk-cabbage a rose make a skunk-cabbage arrangement on one’s dining room table appealing. Burke maintains that the psychologically sick “patient, with pious devotion, had erected a consistent network of appropriatenesses about the altar of his wretchedness, the thoroughness of the outlying structure thus tending to maintain the integrity of the basic psychosis. Yet the discomfiture itself laid him open to the need of new meanings, hence offering the psychoanalyst a grip within the terms of the psychosis itself. For one can cure a psychosis only by appealing to some aspect of the psychosis. The cure must bear notable affinities with the disease: all effective medicines are potential poisons.”82 Rather than allopathic medicine, Burke advocates and practices homeopathy. In other words, though psychoanalysis aims to be a purely critical enterprise, one that scientifically adheres to the ideal of morally neutral vocabulary and that practices the proliferation of ever more detailed renamings and new categorizations in order to clean things up, the pious contaminants of immanent

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criticism mar the purity of the practice. Human beings, according to Burke, learn their first pious orientations, their first language, in conditions of total dependence and parental piety, without the alternative pieties that provide critical vocabularies. Burke writes, “If one has learned to use words uncritically, as he normally does during the informative years of his life, and usually does in many areas of his vocabulary throughout his entire life, no matter how sharp and accurate the critical instruments he may on occasion bring to the use of one specific word or group of words—if one has done this, necessarily, his reliance upon such vocabulary must have gone much deeper than would be touchable by a mere critique of language.”83 Burke thinks that even the attempt to create not merely a critical, but a piety-free language or a neutral vocabulary cannot escape this regressive tendency to the emotionally loaded and hortatory language of total childhood dependency. “There would at least be a tendency,” he writes, “for even this sophisticated language to satisfy by covert means the same demands that ordinary (‘prayerful’) language satisfies. It is a possibility that no terms can be purely ‘description’ free of emotional weighting, devoid of hortatory aspects (‘commands to others and the self’). There is even a possibility that a language lacking such attributes is not merely a ‘non-moral’ one, but a ‘demoralized’ one.”84 Burke has moved from describing psychoanalytic language in terms of impiety to a description of it as pious. He writes, “whatever he might think he was doing, the psychoanalyst ‘cures’ his patient of a faulty identification only insofar as he smuggles in an alternative identification.”85 Hence, Freud’s vocabulary for renaming humiliating motives, “impious” in its intent to bring under control through the systemization of a new vocabulary, always carries with it a waft of the needs that prompted the renaming. Though Freud speaks the language of scientific rationalization insofar as he draws a chart, Burke shows that the categories of dream, chart, and prayer overlap more than Freud thinks—bad news if one aims to purify language through the systemization of categories, but good news for a would-be translator. And remember, Burke thinks that Freud’s motives look more like those of the poet (in his aim for human rescue) than those of the scientist (who aims for simplification through essentialization). Burke’s prayer model takes human wishes and communicates them in ways that cannot avoid taking into account the material and linguistic constraints of the listening community— the community that, within those constraints, may well turn out to be recalcitrant to those expressed wishes and the community that has the power to socialize or not socialize any resulting guilt or loss.86 Whereas Freud aims to hook wishes (that is, the dream) up to categories of names that bring them under control by trying to chart them in a new systematic vocabulary, Burke wants to modify Freud’s project by emphasizing its rhetorical aspects—the way Freud’s language, like all living language, tends toward the prayer. He does this, I think, in the hope of further materializing human wishes, albeit discounted ones if necessary.87

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Concerning the ritual aspects of symbolic action, Burke appeals to the “Freud” whose most pressing concern is human rescue; he shows how Freudian language neglects the importance of ritual. The Freudian analyst, claims Burke, tries to break down a repetitive pattern in the patient. This obsessive drive of the patient reflects both an inherent human urge to repeat and a human neediness, thinks Burke. The obsessive person ritually reenacts his or her sacrifices at the altar of the problematic piety. But repetition does not always signal pathology, according to Burke. Often we repeat in order to remember history, but sometimes we repeat in a desperate drive to erase a troubling past. Burke takes the drive to repetitive ritual behavior to be vital to human well-being; it is part of piety. The analyst breaks down the “systematic pieties” of the patient through the use of “systematic impiety,” all too often with the unfortunate result that the patient is left cured of the problem but also “cured” of piety; the analyst cures the maladaptive obsession by ending rites altogether rather than changing altars.88 Psychoanalysis, when it cures of piety, according to Burke, ends prematurely. The person in need of rescue and of cure begins a ritual process but does not complete it. The rite ends at the breaking point and the would-be communicant walks out dazed into a world turned upside down—a world in which everything is no longer what it seemed to be before. Or to change metaphors, conversion takes place, but conversion of the Saul-Paul sort.89 The scales fall from the patient’s eyes and reversal happens. What was absolutely good is now absolutely bad and vice versa. This premature conclusion, thinks Burke, fails to do the hard and dangerous work of reconnection and integration of multiple pieties with all the loss and uncomfortable remembrance that this work entails. The half-rite, claims Burke, thinking of Nietzsche, leaves one in a liminal world. A human soul could die there, dragging a body down with it. I take Nietzsche to be pertinent to Burke’s thinking on piety and conversion in part due to Burke’s references to Nietzsche found in his drafted response to a letter from James Daly. The letter to Burke had discussed the “pieties” and “impieties” of a mutual acquaintance. The friend under discussion was clinging to a critical piety of the “pure science” kind. Burke described his friend’s conversion experience by allusion to both the thesis-antithesis-synthesis model of dialectics and to Nietzsche’s speech “On the Three Metamorphoses,” with its metaphoric reference to the camel, the lion, and the child. He paired thesis with camel, antithesis with lion, and synthesis with the child. Burke’s notes show that he thought the mutual friend was stuck in the antithesis mode. “[H]e cannot be ‘whole,’ ” scribbled Burke, “until acquiring and incorporating an adult synthesis of his childhood patterns.” Burke continues: “Steps 1–2 not very difficult. A simple reversal of values of the Saul-Paul sort (in this case, the Paul-Saul sort). But of course, it does give one a ‘perspective by incongruity,’ hence a ‘method.’ Steps 2–3, the dialectic stage, is much more dangerous and difficult—and for those who have been intensely the camel and the lion it may be disastrous. It was to Nietzsche.”90

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The differences between Nietzsche and Freud illustrate would-be piety juxtaposed with impiety. Freud may have been quite good at renaming situations of difficulty; he moved with ease from pious “camel” orientations to impious “lion” ones. But renaming, in terms of Burkean piety, is a shortcut to transvaluation. By merely renaming, one loses the poetic power of piety. By using “perspective by incongruity” Burke creates a new identification between things that have been previously dissociated. Burke’s approach works from the premise that the critic retains a fundamental kinship with the enemy. Or in other words, Nietzsche, like Freud, wants to rename values and change moral valances, so that skeptics and critics become saints, not sinners. But Nietzsche, unlike Freud, revels in ritual. His Zarathustra wants to ritualize the transvaluations of his day that already exist in unritualized, neutral, technical language. In order to ritualize the transvaluations that Burke thinks change makes necessary, Burke borrows Nietzsche’s trick—“perspective by incongruity.” Incongruous terms juxtaposed with each other violate the proprieties of previous linkages and enact impiety, but at the same time the impious act reveals previously unnoticed pieties that may or may not be practically important toward living meaningful lives.91 One has to wade into the lot and pick through them. To demonstrate his point, Burke suggests that we imagine a scenario: Insert Matthew Arnold, with all his class-oriented assumptions about “taste,” into a scene at the local pub amidst the vulgarities and “tastelessness” of the gashouse gang. Arnold stands out from his cultural surroundings like such a sore thumb, his very presence in this context makes apparent what was not so apparent before—that the gang has its own system of appropriatenesses, its own morality, which Arnold demonstrates in the violation of them.92 The incongruity reveals an alternative piety we may not have noticed before; it shows the gang’s piety. Or think back to Burke’s phrase, mentioned previously, about accepting “the full childhood implications of adult actions.” That phrase is a classic example of a Burkean “perspective by incongruity.” We expect to be told to accept the full adult implications of childish actions. But the incongruity of the terms coupled with a familiar form forces us to at least consider a transvaluation of our values. Perhaps there was some good worth our piety that we lost along the way toward becoming adults, the phrase suggests. The aphoristic rite Burke performs makes a space for turning the practically necessary impieties of the day into the pieties needed tomorrow. To conclude his treatment of Freud, Burke tries to integrate insights drawn from Freud with Marxist thought. Burke shares Santayana’s concern with “material conditions and that irrational substratum of reason without which reason would have no organs and no points of application.”93 Burke adds the category of nonrational to Santayana’s reference to the irrational.94 Burke wants to mesh the material needs of living and the power of material constraints with the Freudian “substratum” of reason and tries constantly to translate one into the other. Not only do mental ideas, wishes, and choices matter,

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but so do material need and power. What often presents itself as an opportunity to make pious choices can over time become reinforced by material constraints—ruts, he not nicely calls them. Other people and the very material powers they wield can constrain. Some choices can bring about enforced piety. “Spared the trivial lapses [in piety] that might otherwise have interrupted his devotion to the character of his offense” (his “offense” being his sacrifice at the altar of his piety), Burke explains, the pious person, “at times of weakness and doubt, when his own convictions are not enough to sustain him, . . . is kept under discipline by the walls of his monastery (that is, by the ruts which his experience itself has worn).”95 Wishes can influence choices, choices repeated can become habits, and habits, once other lives are built up around them, can in turn become material necessities. This is Burke’s response to the rational materialism of his Marxist friends: Put your part of criticism together with Freud’s into something closer to a whole. Burke thinks Freud shows Marxists the limits of their rational, universalizing vocabulary, which fails to take into account the power of human persuasion that relies at least as much upon personal appeals to less-than-universal human emotional contingencies that spring from their contingent identifications as well as upon more formal appeals. In turn, Marxists show Freudians the limitations of dreams and prayers in the face of material constraints on choice—the ruts and train tracks of public existence.96 Burke explains how proper attention to the public rite helps keep ideals and powers in balance. Ritual action, argues Burke, can give material body to spontaneous community and can help routinize its charisma until performance of the next rite. The language of the body—the gesture—is the first limited language of the child, a language that at least the loving mom and dad do not pretend not to understand. Bodies, engaged in ritual through gesture, provide access to the earliest pieties humans have: the piety to mother and father in the face of desperate human need when we cannot help ourselves. Bodies are where matter and language meet. This most pious language is the language of the newest members of the human community. Ritual, which brings gesture and body, along with words, into communicative action, brings the personal into relationship with the public and hence makes that language social. In it, people speak like children rather than like uncritically pious ascetics on the one hand or like impious critics on the other. The public rite, Burke beseeches, helps make and keep the personal social. Though Burke wants to maintain the thread of piety, he also knows that “there are many situations in which, to meet some new purpose, we must do violence to an older schema of propriety.”97 A piety merely takes some need as a focus around which a person can selectively put together a self and organize character around an altar. Presumably Burke, who was employed for a time as a social worker to drug addicts, thinks that a piety toward a need for laudanum, for instance, might present a person with enough troubles to justify apostasy

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on ethical grounds. The apostate needs to choose a less troublesome altar, one that does not make him sick, and needs to reconstruct linkages to the new piety. Burke’s correspondence with friends indicates that just such a personal experience of apostasy led to his own concern with impiety and piety. A piety becomes problematic when one’s debts don’t rest easily with one’s aspirations. A given source of one’s being can both hurt and help in differing ways, sources being the mixed sort of things they are. Sometimes the source of sustenance from the past undermines all hopes for the future. A mother who can’t let her child go at the appropriate time would provoke such a problematic piety. An Ivy League education might be a problematic piety for a working-class scholarship student. A father who beats his children causes a problematic piety. The business that grants the sizable paycheck may become a problematic piety once a person becomes its wage slave. During the period when Burke’s novel Towards a Better Life (1932) was being written his personal life was bitterly unhappy. At this time, the fabric of both his past purposes and his society’s were coming unraveled. Writing in 1929, immediately before, during, and after the market crash leading to the Depression, Burke deals not only with the possibility of personal destitution; his writing career, his domestic life, and his religious world all simultaneously reach a point of crisis that threatens to leave him without the thread of continuity he so wants to connect him to his former purposes. He seriously worries about his finances; he confides to his friend Malcolm Cowley: “I was in town recently, and a pall of forebodings fell upon me. And after the cocktails and the beer had worn off, even before I had gone to bed, I all inside me sobbed, and I said I can’t conceal it, I am getting frightened.”98 In addition to financial difficulties, Burke continually vacillates between his original desire to write fiction and a growing realization that he tends to write critical essays. And despite what he prefers to write, he is increasingly compelled to take whatever writing assignments will pay the rent. By 1933, his marriage to Lily Batterham will have ended in divorce; he will marry her sister, Libby Batterham, in the same year. In this, his only novel, Burke aims for self-analysis in order to work through his ambivalences about the changes being thrust upon him by the institutions and habits that, up to this point, have made his life recognizably meaningful. This work attempts to socialize the losses so rapidly being forced upon him. He sees the project of writing his novel as a way of reorienting himself and reinterpreting his world. Asking Cowley to send him copies of the copious letters Burke sent him over the years, he explains: “I count on them to complete the unclean job of orientation upon which I am engaged (I mean that, regardless of this fiction which we are to turn out, I am interested in looking over my story, to see whither I am, or was, going).”99

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In a 1935 letter to Perce Winner that reflects upon this unhappy period, Burke writes, “Have you read my ‘Towards a Better Life’? ” He explains to Winner the “many kinds of misfortune converging upon me at once, my marital difficulties, extreme financial distress, quarrels with my friends, and basic uncertainty about my art.” He continues: “I started working hard to get myself out of a mess. This work was done in both external relations and in internal readjustments. At first, realizing how I was spoiling my relations with other people by my use of a ‘weighted vocabulary’ (in drunken brawls I was getting into vicious arguments where I used rhetoric vigorously, with results that in the end I was simply aggravating my troubles), I tried to revise my machinery.”100 Towards a Better Life is a consciously self-referential piece of fiction. He describes the process that led up to writing it: “It was in my fiction, Towards a Better Life, that I followed Nietzsche to the Nietzschean conclusion.” Before the novel, Burke claims that he first turned to Bentham and the “demoralized” utilitarian vocabulary Bentham advocated as a solution. Burke explains, “Coming upon Bentham’s theories of speech, I saw, with their help, how inadequate methods of expression were making trouble for me. At that point I tried to ‘castrate’ my vocabulary.” Burke writes to Winner that he discovered evidence of his own subconscious attempt at symbolic “castration” in the middle of the writing process. He writes: I then made a further discovery. I discovered that there was a romantic error involved in my analysis of vocabulary. I took verbal weighting too simply as a question of “power.” . . . I noticed that there is also a sentimental weighting of words—and just as the first kind makes for an aggravated cult of combat (Nietzsche’s dilemma) so the second makes for the most civilized and humanistic aspects of living. Hence, I could once against [sic] accept “weighted” words and feel a rational justification in using them. Such a “communicant” aspect of words (as one senses them in satisfying love-relations with a woman) I identified with Communism. And by extending the concept of poetry until it covered all aspects of life, I could then restore “weighted words” in all aspects of life. My “altar of submission and surrender” is nothing other than my recognition (which my pigheadedness long delayed) of the fact that we must fully take into account the recalcitrance of external factors (“what things will do for us or to us”).101 It was the limits of power and the experience of impotence that forced Burke to realize that rhetoric could serve to create a human refuge and socialize human loss as easily as it served to manipulate others for gain. There is a recurrent country hillside motif in Towards a Better Life. Emerson had looked out upon the hills of the countryside and had seen the fields of Miller, of Locke, of Manning and had also seen the entirety of the landscape that no one possessed.102 When Burke, through the unlikeable character of

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John Neal, looked out on those fields and hills in his fiction, he saw his cattle. When Neal, Burke’s alter ego, takes his lover, Florence, to see the fields, Neal’s reaction is far from Emerson’s: “As we stood above the valley looking down upon the trim grain fields, there was great comfort in the displaying of my acreage. ‘And the herd?’ Florence asked me, ‘the herd also is yours?’ ‘The herd also,’ I answered.”103 When Neal looks at his field, he sees his herd. When Florence sees the same field and herd, she sees something different and describes it for Neal: “I understand why it appeals to you,” she told me, in her breathy, teethy diction; “The droop of a horse’s head, as he stands in the field at haytime, corresponds with the droop of the hay bulging from the wagon he is hitched to. The cowpaths curve, not by accident, but by law, adapting themselves with modulation to the contours of the land which they traverse, while the frequency and gentleness of their turning suggests the leisure behind their development. The stream which runs through the valley progresses by yielding.” And I repeated after her, “by yielding,” since the words of a sudden seemed like a revelation to me.104 Cow paths had until then been for Neal something to sneer at. Cow paths guided herd morality through habit. It took time to develop cow paths and they more often yielded to the terrain they traversed than they altered it. They were weathered, as was the landscape itself with its rounded hills softened by past storms. Cow paths got cows where they wanted to go eventually, but they didn’t provide as aggressive a way to get there as, say, a tractor would have. Cow paths were natural; they were not machines. Burke elsewhere, however, allowed that machines contained elements of “the cow path”: Every machine contains a cow-path. That is: there are embodied somewhere in its parts the variants of a process that remains simply because the originators of the machine embodied this process in their invention. It has been retained, not because it has been criticized, evaluated, and judged to be the best possible process, but simply because no one ever thought of questioning it. And it wasn’t questioned because it was never even formulated, never given explicit verbalization. If the original inventor used a variant of reciprocating motion in one process of his machine, for instance, improvements may have been designed that simply introduced new variants of reciprocating motion. Once you name this, by the “efficiency” of abstractions, you are equipped to ask yourself whether the basic process might be altered: could you change from a reciprocating motion to a rotary motion, and would the change be more efficient by reason of its advance from the cradle to the wheel? Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t: in any case, you have a “cue,” a “lead,” for criticism and experiment. As it stands, the process is a “cow path,” in pious obedience to its secret grounding in the authority of custom.105

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Machines—technologies—critical methods, like John Neal, are prone to drive full steam ahead until they reach the limits of their powers. They hunt out every unquestioned habit in order to question it in the interests of greater efficiency. Vestigial habits that no one has ever really put into words, let alone thought to question, need to be named so that criticism can be cued. But the altar of utility undervalues these “cow paths,” or areas of pious obedience. The technological orientation, unlike the pious one, (1) assumes the situation under question to be amenable to control, when it may in fact contain uncontrollable and recalcitrant factors, and (2) leaves unexamined the “utility” of the “cow path” as pious habit, so that any balancing of the utility of human technology versus that of human habit has to beg the question.106 There is a time for tractors and a time for cow paths. When you hit rock walls, cow paths are a lot more useful than tractors, Burke comes to believe. He has worked to square the ideas of Emerson, Nietzsche, and Freud on piety and ends up at the altar of recalcitrance in his novel. This newly reformulated piety of Burke’s demands some rethinking of the roles of both “slaves” and “cows,” if he is to give each their due. It also calls for an attitude toward history that refuses to erase any of it in order to purify it. John Neal ultimately refuses the sort of sacrificial rituals in which “the supplicant becomes a new man, denying such untoward yesterdays as are still recorded in the upbuilding of his tissues—I will not allow that things can be so erased. I will consider all past happenings as preserved in the present; and what is to be undone, will be undone only by our heaping a vast future upon it.”107 I have shown that Burke’s thoughts on piety owe a little to Emerson and Nietzsche and a lot more to Freud and Santayana. I have emphasized the following points: 1. Burke thinks of piety as an attitude toward history. All of one’s history counts; none of it gets to be relegated to the trash bin of accident. History, according to Burke, cannot be essentialized into a metanarrative, but it must be acknowledged, accepted, and given its due, even when it cannot be affirmed. 2. Piety honors an inheritance, according to Burke, but one that must be earned, ethically speaking. Pieties must be made one’s own by putting on hip boots and wading in to separate the beautiful from the unlovely, the heirloom from the waste. 3. Conversion, as an abrupt shift from one set of pieties to a completely different set, is not a model of change in self-identification that Burke wishes to pursue. He advocates partial alterations of identity through ritual rather than rituals of rebirth/suicide. 4. Names alone cannot solely determine pieties, but they are a part of the story that needs to be reckoned with. Everyone’s history is more complex than his or her name lets on.

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5. Though a sense of the divine and a sense of justice may influence a person’s pieties, those same pieties can also be self-protective and selfserving. Socrates wanted to know the essence of piety; that is, he wanted to know “what is characteristic of piety which makes all pious actions pious.”108 He never succeeded in establishing a definitive answer to his question, though he did succeed in making Euthyphro play the fool for pretending to know. Burke suggests that the essence of piety is unknowable since piety can and does overlap with impiety. The relationship between piety and impiety is not a categorical dichotomy, but rather a spectrum with piety at one end and impiety at the other. Justice is relevant to the distinction but not determinate of it, he suggests, but justice enacted “on the ground” requires a lot of thought about identity—about who we are, about who others are, and about what goods are owed to whom. The overlap of piety and impiety, the gray area we all traverse as we come to know who we are, makes for a lot of human tragedy, as the Prince of Verona would no doubt attest.

CHAPTER THREE

CATHARSIS AND TRAGEDY: KENNETH BURKE'S RHETORIC OF SACRIFICE [M]any mysteries must be slain (or must be goaded by humble methodic pride, in pious impiousness, to slay themselves) before men can hope to cease goading one another, and being goaded by one another, to the tragically wasteful slaying of one another. —Kenneth Burke, “Symbol and Association” Art, truth, and death turn everything to marble. —George Santayana, “The Tragic Mask,” in Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies

NEARLY EVERY DAY as a graduate student, during my treks from the religion department to the library at Princeton, I passed a statue in the courtyard next to the chapel. Abraham and Isaac is a blackened-bronze sculpture by George Segal which depicts two men facing one another. Their clothes suggest the nineteenth century; one man stands facing the other holding a knife tip out at groin level. The other man kneels before the man with the knife, while the knife tip points directly at the place where his heart would be beneath his naked chest. The kneeling man’s hands are bound behind his back, and significantly so, since the kneeling figure seems to be physically the more muscular of the two. The bindings on the hands make all the difference. I am told that the statue was commissioned as a memorial to the student protesters against the war in Vietnam and the subsequent invasion of Cambodia who were killed by the Ohio National Guardsmen at Kent State University in 1970. According to anecdote, the sculpture ended up at Princeton when officials at Kent State found the subject of the memorial too inflammatory and refused the piece they originally commissioned. The statue’s presence on my daily rounds has kept the subject of sacrifice in the back or the forefront of my meditations for the past several years. Passing it as a daily rite, I am reminded of the multiple scenarios it suggests: the biblical story of father Abraham who offers up his son as a divine sacrifice; the vague hint at the institution of American slavery suggested by the figures, the ropes on the hands, the phallic knife, the Civil War–era clothing; and the killing

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of the college-attending “sons and daughters” by the military “fathers” in Ohio. What recurrent obsession of the human psyche does this sculpture depict? What do these stories, mythical and historical, say about conflicts internal to identity groups, be they conflicts within Yahweh’s chosen family, between participants in a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” or between twentieth-century U.S. citizens engaged in and arguing about an unpopular war? To what god are these sacrifices, real and imagined, offered? The story of the father that very nearly killed the son out of some sense of divine necessity need not stand, of course, as the only story deeply rooted in the western cultural psyche. At least as influential as the Akedah story is the Oedipus myth, in which the son unwittingly kills the father. Persistent as these tales of intergenerational slaughter are, they clearly provide my inherited culture with the opportunity for some profoundly needed catharsis. Kenneth Burke claims that preoccupation with these tragic, sacrificial stories shows the degree to which “the cult of the kill” is rooted in the most fundamental needs of symbol-using animals such as humans, yet he also worries that the cult of the kill as reflected in some interpretations of our favorite sacrificial stories pervert the broad “sacrificial motive” that permeates human society.1 In this chapter I aim to interpret Burke’s thoughts about sacrifice and its connections to identity in light of his Aristotelian and Emersonian inheritances. This is particularly tricky; it is difficult to determine whether Burke has an unambiguous position on processes of victimage and it is unclear whether he thinks victimage can ever be eliminated from the psyche or whether it can at best be merely mitigated. But even if I cannot totally eliminate that ambiguity in Burke’s thought, I maintain that reading Burke only in light of Aristotelian aesthetics without noticing the Emersonian transformations Burke performs upon these Aristotelian inheritances amounts to a misreading of Burke. It matters that Burke takes what is a substantially metaphysical aesthetic and bends it, for ethical reasons, to pragmatic religious ends. I hope to show how Burke uses the idea of “essence” in utterly un-Aristotelian ways as a trope and in so doing undermines a nature/culture dualism, complicates the religious quest for purity, and to a degree implicates “divine mysteries” in the maintenance of social and property hierarchies. Which mysteries Burke thinks should be slain will, I hope, become more apparent, as my Emersonian reading of him proceeds.

SACRIFICIAL MEDICINE: ALLOPATHIC AND HOMEOPATHIC As I have stressed previously, according to Burke, symbolic action bridges the symbolic nature and the biologic nature of human animals.2 When Burke looks to Aristotle on catharsis in order to clarify the symbolic action in tragic

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and sacrificial rites, he notes that both laughter and tears are biologic indicators of catharsis;3 as an action that is simultaneously a biologic end and a spiritual fulfillment in itself, the shedding of tragic tears links the spiritual symbol work of stories to the animal nature of the human beings with tear ducts who tell them over and over. When a social group of humans share a common biologic reaction (say that they assemble to watch and weep together over a tragedy), the differences between the individuals that form the group are at least for a moment overcome in a biologic sense of unity which restores the sense of solidarity within the group. Having a victim in common provides catharsis to the group; Burke claims that victimage is central to the sense of cleansing by catharsis: “If imaginative devices are found whereby members of rival factions can weep together, and if weeping is a surrogate of orgastic release, then a play that produced in the audience a unitary tragic response regardless of personal discord otherwise would be in effect a transformed variant of an original collective orgy (such as the Dionysian rites from which Greek tragedy developed). Here would be our paradigm for catharsis.”4 The Greek word katharma from which catharsis is derived conveys the connotations of cleansing that Burke wants to point out. He defines katharma: “that which is thrown away in cleansing; the off-scourings, refuse, of a sacrifice; hence, worthless fellow. ‘It was the custom at Athens,’ lexicographers inform us, ‘to reserve certain worthless persons, who in case of plague, famine, or other visitations from heaven, were thrown into the sea,’ with an appropriate formula, ‘in the belief that they would cleanse away or wipe off the guilt of the nation.’ And these were katharmata.”5 Catharsis, as cleansing, is at least in part a biological process for Burke, akin to the practice of medicine in the healing it provides. On some level, Burke maintains, ancient Greek society understood cathartic symbolic acts as medicine. He writes: “A synonym for katharma was pharmakos: poisoner, sorcerer, magician; one who is sacrificed or executed as an atonement or purification for others; a scapegoat. It is related to pharmakon: drug, remedy, medicine, enchanted potion, philtre, charm, spell, incantation, enchantment, poison.”6 But as with every medicine, dose and disease make all the difference between medicine and poison. What heals can potentially harm if given in the wrong situation or in the wrong dose. Cathartic rites, at one end of a continuum seen as social medicament, may at the other end be social poisons. The continuum, according to Burke, runs from “food” to “medicine” to “poison.” Further, medicines may act on the body through fundamentally different processes. Homeopathic medicines cure by providing, under carefully controlled circumstances, a small dose of a potential poison that inures the treated to greater damage—a “hair of the dog” approach. Burke in other instances uses the lightning rod as a metaphor for homeopathy; by attracting or invoking a small but real danger under carefully controlled circumstances, a greater danger can be safely channeled off. Allopathic medicine works antagonisti-

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cally as an antidote to a specific poison.7 Burke fears that adherents to “the cult of the kill” may lose their grip on what he takes to be the homeopathic nature of sacrifice. When interpreters take killing rather than sacrifice to be the center of sacrificial stories, they risk poisoning the society that those same stories normally protect from mass murder in the same way that a lightning rod held in the hand on a stormy night can kill the one it ought to have protected if rightly used. Too much thoughtless fascination with lightning can make the protections of a lightning rod lethal. For instance, Søren Kierkegaard’s version of the Abraham and Isaac story in Fear and Trembling wrongly makes the kill the essence of the story, thinks Burke. Kierkegaard places his emphasis upon elements of the story that he creatively adds to the Biblical account (the analogy of a mother who blackens her breast to wean her child), notes Burke;8 on the other hand, Kierkegaard fails to integrate crucial parts of the Genesis story that are in the traditional text (the part in which Abraham is allowed vicarious sacrifice that spares his son Isaac.) For Burke, the point of the story is decidedly not vindication of the kill any more than lethality is the point of lightning rods.9 Readers of Fear and Trembling, says Burke, “in their awareness that man’s way is through conflict, are invited to think that the cult of the kill is not a lower morality,” he claims, “but a higher one, even a religious one.”10 To be sure, Kierkegaard is not alone in this way of understanding dialectic: if Kierkegaard’s dialectic is guilty of overemphasizing victimage, dialectics other than Kierkegaard’s also have their victims. To a lesser degree and on a much less lethal plane, Plato’s dialogues “sacrifice” one of the speakers as a victim to the truth that emerges from the dialogue “in the sense of being proved wrong,” the error of the “sacrificed” being “a necessary part of the ultimate truths in which the dialogue, ideally, culminates,” explains Burke.11 But when murder (as a partial image) stands in the stead of dying in a theory of sacrifice (as the more general idea that includes multiple kinds of dying), according to Burke, “things have become quite reversed; and whereas sacrifice is the very essence of peace, it becomes instead the essence of war, with men piously persuading themselves that they are never so comforted as when contemplating a blood-bath.”12 In a story that involves dying, either “sacrifice” or “the kill” may ambiguously be taken as the key to interpretation; “one or the other of this pair may be stressed as the ‘essence’ of the two,” he writes.13 But to talk about a choice of stress and “essence” in the same sentence is surely odd. We will need an Emersonian interpretation, not an Aristotelian one, to make sense of it. Burke thinks that an emphasis on purgation or purity in stories about sacrifice leads them to emphasize various forms of killing over more socially benign forms of sacrifice. Tragic catharsis involves “some kind of splitting, a ‘separating out.’ Something is to be dropped away, something retained, the whole history thereby becoming a purification of a sort,” he writes.14 But the sort of

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peaceful sacrifice Burke wants to recommend—that is, overcoming a difference by subordinating it to a sameness that requires dying to parts of one’s present self for the sake of an imagined future—would involve including what was formerly not-self as self; such a symbolic act might easily arouse feelings of identity contamination and would be an endlessly renewable task, an unfinishable one. “[G]enuine peace today,” he claims, “could be got only by such a dialectic as risked ‘contamination’ by the enemy. Or rather, by such a dialectic as sought deliberately to give full expression to the voice of the enemy, not excluding it, but seeking to assign it an active place in an ultimate order.”15 War, as the killing of strictly external enemies, would seem to be a simpler solution or, as Burke would say, a cleaner and more “perfect” one than sacrifice—one that seems to offer a psychologically satisfying sense of finality. But Burke is highly suspicious of this human tendency toward perfecting symbols. Though war seems to be allopathic medicine, Burke wants to show why even war, correctly interpreted, is homeopathic. Homeopathy breaks down the dualism between disease and cure. According to Burke, the seemingly allopathic methods of military medicine, on closer examination, are not pure antagonism either; war is ultimately a disease of cooperation—a perversion of communion.16 In Burke’s redescription, motives of cooperation and conflict come mixed in military activity. Nothing serves better to unite a group of individuals under a unitary purpose than a war: “It is the moral side of war which draws [people] to it,” writes Burke, “the fact that it brings their group together, if only for the dismal purpose of slaughtering or oppressing a common foe.”17 One could choose to define the essence of war as either conflict or cooperative effort; to see war as a “special case of peace” makes killing the accidental part of war and cooperative sacrifice for the good of the whole the more essential element.18 But at the point of having performed that mental maneuver, other activities for promoting group cooperation seem more efficient than war, which is precisely Burke’s point. By changing the “essence” of the Abraham and Isaac story from “the kill” to “sacrifice” more generally, Burke can come up with a reading different from Kierkegaard’s. Burke’s reading emphasizes two points: (1) Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice for the sake of divinity, and (2) divine permission to substitute a vicarious victim in such a way as to minimize tragic impact.19 From these two emphases, Burke forges an interpretation of the story that reinterprets “the kill” as willing and reasonable self-sacrifice that owns internalized impurities for the common good of society and emphasizes substitutions that allow word magic or frank theatrical metaphor to do the work that the literal taking of human life otherwise might have done. Burke maintains that “man is endowed physically and mentally with a combative equipment, that socialization is a device for converting this combative equipment into cooperative channels, but when the cooperative act is frustrated—as it is under capitalism—the original unsocial aspect of the combat-

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ive equipment is brought forward.”20 Perfect catharsis would arise from a sense of universal love, claims Burke. But since our society frowns upon the physical expression of love unless tightly controlled in property relations, tragedy in its appeal to and physical embodiment of pity for a hero serves as a secondbest substitute for love. Pity, considered in this light, is a bastard relative of a love-relation. Though contaminated with motives of elevated social status, it moves people closer together instead of farther apart. Tears of pity give socially acceptable bodily expression to something like love that might not be acceptable if expressed outside of tragedy.21 “[T]ragic catharsis through fear and pity,” claims Burke, “operates as a substitute for catharsis through love.”22 Burke relies upon the cooperative aspects of tragic conflict. He wants to reclaim the love-relation aspects of rhetorical strategy and to emphasize the ways word magic can bring together just as easily as it can tear asunder. He admits in A Rhetoric of Motives: [R]hetoric is par excellence the region of the Scramble, of insult and injury, bickering, squabbling, malice and the lie, cloaked malice and the subsidized lie. Yet . . . we can, without forcing, find benign elements there too. And we should find these; for rhetoric also includes resources of appeal ranging from sacrificial, evangelical love, through the kinds of persuasion figuring in sexual love, to sheer “neutral” communication (communication being the area where love has become so generalized, desexualized, “technologized,” that only close critical or philosophic scrutiny can discern the vestiges of the original motive).23 Tragedy provides catharsis because it allows for delegation of one’s burden to a sacrificial vessel, the tragic hero. Theatricalized tragedy is pleasurable because one can at the same time both suffer (through identification with the hero) and not suffer (because the play is, after all, a dramatic performance and not real). It provides all of the benefits of suffering with none of its painful drawbacks. “The tragic pleasure requires a symbolic sacrifice,” writes Burke, “or, if you will, a goat.”24 Read cooperatively and charitably, tragic catharsis is a giving—a giving-up of some part of the self through identification with the hero. Burke explains that “the delegation of one’s burden to the sacrificial vessel of the scapegoat is a giving, a socialization, albeit the socialization of a loss, a transference of something, deeply within, devoutly a part of one’s own self.”25 But with a change of focus, in some instances this self-sacrificial “gift” looks more like caricature than tragedy, because in using the tragic hero as a scapegoat, the audience member of a tragedy “delegates the personal burden to an external bearer” and “gives up” only the parts of the self that resist selfrecognition.26 Read suspiciously, until self-sacrifice is made conscious, one’s “gift” to a scapegoat turns out to be one’s trash.

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SCAPEGOATS AND INTERPRETIVE CHARITY By projecting an internal conflict onto an external symbolic bearer of that conflict and by then symbolically eliminating the scapegoat, a person could avoid recognizing a self-identity contaminated by internal conflict. Neatly and “in accordance with the usual workings of the scapegoat mechanism,” Burke writes, “offensiveness which is situate within is hunted without.”27 If we had only symbolic natures and not animal ones as well—if we really were the fully dualized creatures our cravings for purity make us wish we were—scapegoating would seem to provide a perfect (or, to use Burke’s vocabulary, “terministic”) solution to the problem of internal identity conflict. But in describing scapegoating as a psychological process of projection, I run the risk of overpathologizing the scapegoating move—something Burke would have wanted to avoid. Ever “charitable” in his interpretation of dramatic catharsis by victimage, Burke would not want to describe scapegoating as a process to which some symbol-using animals are prone and other such creatures immune. For Burke, scapegoating lies fairly close to fundamentally human ways of thinking that help orient us to our world.28 “[T]o call it scapegoat when we mean by the term some special way of functioning not common to all men,” he writes, “would be like designating as scapegoat the food-bell linkage of Pavlov’s dogs, the bar-rabbit-furriness linkage of Watson’s infants, or the configuration-food linkage of the Gestalt experiment.”29 People, like other animals, necessarily associate effects and causes, rightly or wrongly, in order to function in the world and to have hypothetical bases of truth upon which to act. At times, scapegoating may only signal an associational error in thinking. The effect to be explained gets associated with the wrong cause, causing people to select faulty means for solving their problems,30 problems that ultimately come back to haunt those same people by requiring repeated cleansings. This principle of charitable interpretation marks all Burke’s acts of social criticism and differentiates him from debunking-style critics. It is not that no person has malign motives, in Burke’s view, but rather that the critic should always strategically interpret “the malign as an inferior idiom of the benign, rather than interpreting the benign as the malign deceptively refurbished.”31 In this way, a critic can preserve a fundamental kinship with the enemy while preserving the means to transcend that enmity. Though it sometimes shakes one’s demands for purity to the core to do so, Burke refuses to demonize what he criticizes; “a monstrous or inhuman character does not possess qualities not possessed by other men—he simply possesses them to a greater or less extent than other men,” maintains Burke.32 The difference is not qualitative but quantitative. Perhaps the most stringent test of Burke’s principle of charity can be read in his 1939 essay on Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Burke thinks that Hitler’s “Battle”

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ought to be analyzed and studied rather than dismissed. Because it exists and functions, he claims, it demands to be understood, and understood in a way that works hard to make it intelligible, whether or not one sympathizes with the piece or in the end lines up with its attitudes.33 The lines of communication with Hitler need to be kept open. That is, we need, as readers of Mein Kampf, to let it communicate with us so that we can understand and critically engage its rhetorical strategy. It deserves to be understood, continues Burke, because historically as “medicine” it was effective. Hitler was able to diagnose the disease of his culture and supply an effective remedy that allowed him to rally many people to his cause. It behooves those who wish to prevent the recurrence of the events Hitler brought about, according to Burke, to understand how the environment in which Hitler lived and the actions he performed meshed to successfully move large numbers of people to “the kill” he suggested. We are subject to the same symbolic grammar as they and that identification demands recognition if our cures are to be effective. “A people trained in pragmatism,” he warns, “should want to inspect this magic.”34 The same scapegoating mechanism, according to Burke, in differing variants, can account for both the Christian crucifixion story and Hitler’s scapegoating of the Jews. The scapegoat can be either the personification of good or the personification of evil; purifying symbols in either terministic direction works. In less “perfected” forms of victimage, such as tragedy, the vessel may be ambivalently both good and evil. The choice of a scapegoat, though not central to the symbolic action, is not completely arbitrary either. “Four kinds of victim are ideally distinguishable,” Burke theorizes, “though in practice they variously overlap: (1) There is the victim chosen because he is most blameless (the Christ-principle of victimage); (2) the victim chosen because most blamable (the villainy principle); (3) the victim as the result of a tragic flaw; (4) supernumerary victims, ‘expendable’ for the good of the plot as a whole.”35 “The most troublesome supernumerary victims, in modern eyes,” Burke writes, “are the member of Job’s family, who are sacrificed incidentally to Job’s trials.”36 Burke tries to show that Hitler uses appeals to fundamentally religious longings to rally folks to his cause. It is not the longings themselves that are pernicious, but the particular errors, deceptions, and refusals of identification that do the work in his ritualistic appeal. Such tactics may work to provide catharsis in the short run, Burke suggests, but in the long run, having underanalyzed the causes of trouble, they eventually undermine what they attempt to establish.37 If Burke’s “monotheistic” emphasis is right, scapegoating can be effectively criticized using the ethical vocabulary of the scapegoaters. Burke describes Hitler’s anti-Semitism not as a calculated plan, but as a naturally-grown response to Hitler’s own sufferings. Driven to theorize on economics from his own experience of poverty in Vienna, according to Burke, Hitler came to see Marxists (Jewish ones, in his mind) not as allies who might

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help to solve the problems of poverty he was experiencing, but as enemies who refused to take the particularities of his own suffering from poverty into account in their rhetoric. The allopathic Marxist arguments that silenced him by overpowering him, foreclosing any chance for identification, filled him with rage. By renaming Jews as enemies, he was able to accept confrontationally what he had to reject when silenced. As a move from rejection of the world and that part of it which silences him to acceptance of a world where all his ambivalence of identity can be placed upon an external victim, this redescriptive transformation has the religious overtones that accompany the conversion from rejection to acceptance.38 A scapegoat materializes an idea and gives body to “something vaguely feared and hated.” Multiple and divergent anxieties and effects can be “condensed into a single principle, a devil,” explains Burke, “giving the audience as it were flesh to sink their claw-thoughts in.”39 Burke describes how Hitler unified his followers and gave them a common identity by providing them with a common, single foe, the Jew. This “devil” needs to be a single foe, not many, so that the “evil” that the foe represents can be essentialized. Only by assuming the scapegoat to be the “essence” of evil can the enemies of one’s enemy be assumed to be friends, whether or not they really share any “accidental” good in common. A common materialized foe helps “perfect” the conflict and lends it force.40 Rhetorically, a scapegoat functions as a synecdoche in that it represents a whole with a part.41 Consistent with the employment of a scapegoat as a synecdochic representative, an effect can be made to stand in the stead of a cause, or vice versa. Writing about Coleridge’s use of the albatross in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as a scapegoat for Coleridge’s own internal conflicts, Burke describes his switching of cause and effect through the use of this device: “If the Albatross is put there to be killed, it could be said to ‘participate in the crime’ in the sense that the savage, after a successful hunt, thanks the quarry for its cooperation in the enterprise. In being placed there as a ‘motivation’ of the Mariner’s guilt, its function as something-to-be-murdered is synonymous with its function as incitement-to-murder (recall that among the functions of synecdoche is the substitution of cause for effect and effect for cause).”42 Long before Rene´ Girard suggested it, Burke explained how, in lopping off a marginal part from the group to provide a common enemy in order to reestablish a unity of identification, a scapegoat carries off the negative qualities of an ambiguity internal to a group, leaving it solidified and, for the moment, cleansed.43 But unlike Girard, Burke points out that the “lopping off” is never so perfect a process as it would pretend to be. To understand Burke, imagine Girard deessentialized. People who cleanse themselves through use of a scapegoat must first identify with the scapegoat. It is a vicar, a substitute, for themselves. They must divide themselves from the scapegoat, loading their sins

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upon it and then alienating the scapegoat from themselves. The remaining members of the group are then reunited, having been purged of their sins. Hence, scapegoating involves (1) an initial identification, followed by (2) a division of the scapegoat from the group, and finally ending in (3) a renewed sense of unified identification within the group. A criminal may meet group needs for a scapegoat; through moral indignation, the group cleanses itself of its own shortcomings. “The debunker,” claims Burke, “is much closer to the debunked than others are.” Scapegoats tend not to be utter strangers, but rather, marginal members.44

TRANSFORMING “ESSENCE”: FROM METAPHYSIC TO TROPE The initial identification of those purified with their scapegoat provides Burke with a method of ameliorating the more malign aspects of scapegoating. Typically, the debunker criticizes so totally that he undercuts his own ground, in other words, the sources of his own being. He has to ignore or deny or forget the necessary initial moment of identification. In quest of a kind of purity, he commits an impiety by betraying a former source of his own well-being. Burke plays pious longings for attachment off purity anxieties. But why is the language of dying so potent and pervasive within religious and psychological mythologies in the first place? To get clearer on these matters, I think we need to pay heed both to Burke’s “grammar of killing” and to the rhetorical role Burke sees that it plays in effecting and maintaining the tragic sense of life. A grammar of killing, in Burke’s schema, will show the structures common to all metaphors of the kill. A rhetoric of killing will show how a particular interpretation of killing can be used to move others. Part of Burke’s reasons for studying stories about killing so closely is normative—that is, he wants to find alternative ways of doing the spiritual work that literal killing might otherwise do. But in preparing to do this, some descriptive work is in order; Burke must thoroughly examine how killings— mythic and biological—have functioned in the past and how they currently function in the ordering of society. To examine this is not to recommend this method, but to understand its mechanics.45 Stories about killing involve various subtypes: murder, suicide, and martyrdom. The similarities in these three types matter (in each someone or something dies) as well as the differences (the types vary in their assignment of the subject and the agency of the killing); they are “active, reflexive, and passive forms of death.”46 The metaphor of the kill can represent a range of symbolic transformations. At one pole of interpretation, killing can represent a symbolic transformation from the temporal to the eternal realms. Burke suggests that “if the temporal word is the realm of the divisive, owing to all the special conditions of property

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and experience and concentration (‘fixation’) that separate one person from another, so Death can stand for the ‘divine’ realm of the unconditioned, where divisions are surpassed.”47 Killing here can suggest a change in ontological status. Or at the other pole, killing can simply indicate that a more naturalistic change has taken place; “the killing of something is the changing of it,” Burke explains, “and the statement of the thing’s nature before and after the change is an identifying of it.”48 The metaphysical status of the change being represented matters.49 Burke takes tragedy to be paradigmatic for the cult of dignification.50 By “arguing for a cause by depicting a serious person who is willing to sacrifice himself in its behalf,”51 tragedy uses someone’s death to magnify, elevate, or amplify a human motive held by either the sacrificer or the sacrificed, depending on the voice.52 Motives dignified by tragedy are “useful” to human lives in a very peculiar way; they transcend utility as normally understood. If my cause is so worthwhile to human life that I am willing to die for it, then its value is elevated above all the other values I hold that redound to my own “good life.” My cause dignifies my death (or yours) by making it more worthwhile than my life (or yours). A story about dying, claims Burke, is “an essentially magnified or perfected form, in some way tragically purified or transcended; the imagery of death reduces the motive to ultimate terms.”53 It trumps all utilitarian measures of value. Although the grammar of killing effectively elevates a cause that could not be elevated outside of such extremity, its reliance upon perfection and ultimacy for its effect diminishes the possibilities for discounting it as worth less, without being utterly worthless, when necessary. As an “amplifying device,” the tragic appeal requires “the man who would reject a little to reject a great deal. For when a priesthood has built a structure that bears upon every important aspect of a man’s social relations, they thereby make it hard for him to question the structure at any one point. Each item involves all the others.”54 Tragedy, when interpreted as in essence “the kill,” gambles in all-or-nothing terms. Structural changes tend to be demolition jobs. Within the language of ultimacy, beginnings and endings have particular importance. For instance, it is such magnified language that takes the beginning as essential to the story. An essentialized beginning allows the temporal, narrative event of “bastardy” (a condition) to interchange with an atemporal character assessment of the unfortunately-born bastard.55 An “ancestor” or temporal predecessor can be made into a logical predecessor or essence of identity. Through sacrifice, an essential lineage can be purified of its accidental participants. The temporally prior can be made to stand stead for the logically prior.56 The temporally prior father may be made to be the logically prior essence of the child.57 According to Burke, “the search for ‘logical’ priority can, when translated into temporal, or narrative terms, be expressed in the imagery of ‘regression to childhood,’ or in other imagery or ideas of things past. This

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concern with the statement of essence in terms of origins (ancestry) caused us to overlook the exactly opposite resource, the statement of essence in terms of culminations (where the narrative notion of ‘how it all ends up’ does serve for the logically reductive notion of ‘what it all boils down to’).”58 In the Aristotelian concept of entelechy, the end of the story, or by analogy the end of a life, comes to stand for the essence of that life. Narrative changes, through unity of action, unfold and develop into a whole. Entelechy “classifies a thing by conceiving of its kind according to the perfection . . . of which that kind is capable.”59 The end was contained in the beginning or vice versa. Therefore, the temporal end of a character’s life can be made narratively to convey the atemporal essence of that character’s life. For instance, martyrdom, as the end of a life, gives the essence of value to the whole of that life, or the essential fulfillment of that life in its temporal end. Or looking through the other end of the telescope, a narrative of a life that ends up as victim of a sacrifice proclaims the accidental and disposable character of that life (within the terms of the larger society) offered up to whatever or whoever is taken to be essentially divine.60 This narrative interplay between the temporal and the timeless involves a part-whole relationship.61 A fragment or a moment of the tragic narrative can be interpreted as the essence of the whole.62 Burke maintains that the cathartic process follows a typical temporal sequence: action, then passion, then learning.63 But within that sequence, any particular moment can be made to seem the whole of the story, the whole diachronic narrative being composed of fairly self-contained and aesthetically balanced synchronic moments.64 Burke thinks that stories that rely primarily on the moral indignation of the audience for their impact tend to extract a moment out of a sacrificial narrative, mistaking a part of a story for the whole of it.65 “The dwelling upon moments,” he writes, “makes possible a kind of development which threatens to obscure the functioning of that moment in the process as a whole.”66 Undermining the entire essentializing process, Burke chooses an essence different from Kierkegaard’s; he chooses the moment of substitution to be the synchronic interpretive key to unlocking the meaning of the diachronic sacrificial narrative.67 In the Akedah, Burke selects the moment when Abraham is allowed to substitute the ram for his son as the “essential” part that defines the whole and makes killing the son the accidental part of the narrative which can drop away. In Burke’s hands, “essence” becomes not a tool of ontology, but a new kind of toy with which to play. The sacrificial motive is central to tragedy in Burke’s view, because tragedy, he asserts, is the cult of mortification and resignation. Burke treats mortification more charitably than other modes of killing; through mortification, a scapegoat is avoided, since people who mortify themselves bear the burden of their own dis-eases. Burke takes the “essence” of religious sacrifice to be self-

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abnegation for the common good, which sometimes involves the “killing” off of divisive particularities. But people cannot tolerate their own burdens without occasional cathartic releases from them. The trick, according to Burke, is to find means of catharsis that somehow manage to reinstate the burdens that they temporarily relieve while avoiding a transfer of those burdens to a substitute vessel.68 Christians, thinks Burke, demonstrate the fundamentally tragic nature of Christianity when they “lead a dying life” through mortification.69 They resign themselves to their own social burdens and voluntarily become their own police:70 “if there are social barriers which one conscientiously seeks not to want to cross,” he writes, “such moralistic confinements placed upon ambition and trespass are ‘sacrificial’ in attitude.”71 The tragic hero strains at the borders of social norms. The tragedy both “recommends” the hero’s crime to his audience and, at the same time, punishes that crime.72 The audience identifies with the excesses of the tragic hero,73 yet her punishment allows for their catharsis, all the while reinstating the social boundaries that the hero transgressed. In one sense, the tragic hero does serve as a scapegoat for the audience in that she is punished in their stead. Yet in another sense, the tragic drama, as an explicit performance, is more homeopathic than the literal killing of a scapegoat. The tensions to be relieved are intensified in the drama inside its tightly controlled circumstances to allow for catharsis within a very particular set of social parameters. On the similarities and differences between tragic drama and scapegoating, Burke writes: Ostracism [or scapegoating] was an attempt to resolve in one way the same problem of civic “pollution” which the [Greek tragic] plays were designed to treat in another way. Ostracism, we might say, attempted to solve the problem of “hubris” by amputation from the body politic whatever member seemed swollen to the point of becoming a threat to the public welfare. But tragedy, in a more “homeopathic” fashion, sought to provide a remedy for the pollution by aggravation of the symptoms under controlled conditions designed to forestall worse ravages of the disease. Specifically, the tragedies would purge the State by enabling the citizens to feel pity whereas otherwise they might have felt resentment.74 The moral indignation present in the scapegoating process (which is a cathartic and fragmentary moment of the larger narrative) disappears in the tragedy replaced by a “there but for the grace of God go I” attitude and by a somewhat strained identification with the criminal by the audience. “Where someone is straining to do something,” writes Burke, “look for evidence of the tragic mechanism.”75

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WHY TRAGEDY? “Recommending by tragedy” is one of Burke’s favorite tropes. The tragedy actually adds value to a cause because it depicts people willing to be destroyed for that cause.76 Hence, social norms are stretched and changed through the tragic performance; the socialization of the hero’s “criminal” excesses through the audience’s identification with them signals an area of social morality where the norms have become ambiguous, the tragedy heralds an initial, though ambivalent, movement of the borders and limits of the social norms of the group. Further, tragic mechanisms help Burke explain the peculiar human penchant for preferring martyred failure for a cause to “wheedled” success for it. There is, according to Burke, something like a religious demand for failure in the human psyche. “Of all the inconsistencies in which the human mind is entangled,” he writes, “this confusion between ‘goodness’ and ‘sacrifice’ seems the most unavoidable. Even were we to grant with the utilitarians that our notions of the ‘good’ arise purely and simply from our notions of the ‘useful’ or ‘usable,’ the fact remains that the best argument in favor of a ‘good’ is one’s willingness to sacrifice himself for it. It is not mere ‘compensation’ that brings religion and failure together. By the ‘logic of the emotions’ the religious feeling may demand failure as its symbolic counterpart.”77 Burke points to Miguel Unamuno and his “tragic sense of life” as an example of one who, against all utilitarian reason, revels more in bloodshed for his cause than in the cause’s social success.78 Although Burke recognizes this religious “instinct” and grants that the sacrificial motive is at least as worthy of the honorific title “essential” as any other part of the religious lives of human beings, he also warns against taking “the kill” as the essence of religion. To do so, he claims, would be to make Kierkegaard’s mistake. Burke worries that by following Kierkegaard’s lead—by making the less rational aspects of religious symbolic activities sublime through mystification, under the aegis of “the Absurd”—people can unwittingly come to glamorize what they ought to accept with resignation and only as a last resort. What may be necessary mortification and renunciation at one place and time would be foolish if retained past the period in which the renunciation was temporarily required. By making a cult of the kill, whether that kill be vicarious sacrifice or suicide, people can glamorize strategies that may be the best possible actions in particularly drastic times and places; however, people may make unnecessary sacrifices when temporal lastditch strategies are held out as timeless truths. Insofar as the tragic performance provides catharsis, it relies upon transference and substitution between the tragic performers and the audience. Tragic pleasure, claims Burke, is necessarily vicarious—Burke allows no getting around that uncomfortable fact.79 The tragic hero serves as a vicar. The hero’s

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flaw brings him low enough in the social/moral hierarchy to enable the mass of the audience to identify with him. “By giving an otherwise admirable person a mere flaw in character, the playwright avoids the extremes of making him either too bad (for our pity) or too good (for our ability to identify ourselves with him),” claims Burke.80 But once the audience has established a functional identification with the tragic hero the scapegoating moment takes place— the moment that provides catharsis. Uncomfortable motives that audience members in fact share with the tragic hero, come within the situation of the tragic performance to seem wholly external to any particular audience member. What was shared by the audience and the hero becomes transferred onto the hero so as to slay “troublesome motives as though they were wholly external.”81 “What rises within,” explains Burke, writing in this case about catharsis in the tragedy of Othello, “if it wells up strongly and presses for long, will seem imposed from without.”82

CONSUBSTANTIALITY, OR YOU ALWAYS HURT THE ONE YOU LOVE The saving grace of tragedy, if it has one in Burke’s scheme of things, is its self-conscious sense of artifice. The tragic play is a performance; the stage brackets the cathartic experience. Because so bracketed, the performance can be discounted; as a performance it is worthwhile in terms of the catharsis it provides, but it is not worth moving from the level of theatrical rite to the level of social reality off the stage. Burke emphasizes the importance of “knowing that there is an element of mummery in the process of transference.”83 The mummery matters; the self-conscious knowledge of the differences between art and life keeps wish expression separate from wish fulfillment. “We tend to ask that someone (else) die for us,” Burke remarks dryly, “in order that we may live (by identification with the victim).”84 But knowing our worst tendencies is not the same as setting them up to be social norms. Just in case the tragic character of the hero Jesus could have escaped self-scrutinizing Christians, Burke reminds them that the victimage of the hero is “a variant of the symbolic cluster in Christianity whereby the victim of original sin could share vicariously in the perfections of Christ by his membership in the Church, the corpus Christi.” “The social value of such a pattern,” he continues, “resides in its ability to make humility and self-glorification work together.”85 Here again, the particular grammar of dying presents us with a symbolic opportunity. I think it is safe to assert that most humans entertain the thought of their own physical death with great reluctance; the decay and the end of control over one’s own body seem the ultimate humiliation. And yet, to entertain the sense of one’s own death dramatically, as an artful performance, allows us “the great privilege of being present at our own funeral. For though we be

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lowly and humiliated, we can tell ourselves at least that, as a corpse, if the usual rituals are abided by, we are assured of an ultimate dignity.”86 Attaining this cathartic dignity requires an odd split in the personality. A person must both be dead, in order to have a funeral to appreciate, and yet be alive, in order to appreciate it. Burke explains the mechanisms of this split and names the process “consubstantiality.” Obviously, this simultaneous being and not-being are going to pose logical difficulties.87 But Burke provides us with a substitute for a deductive “logic” of consubstantiality, offering instead one that inductively explains itself through the use of examples of human identifications. Dodging the tyranny of laws of noncontradiction, Burke writes: A is not identical with his colleague, B. But insofar as their interests are joined, A is identified with B. Here are ambiguities of substance. In being identified with B, A is “substantially one” with a person other than himself. Yet at the same time he remains unique, an individual locus of motives. Thus he is both joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and consubstantial with another. While consubstantial with its parents, with the “firsts” from which it is derived, the offspring is nonetheless apart from them. In this sense, there is nothing abstruse in the statement that the offspring both is and is not one with its parentage. Similarly, two persons may be identified in terms of some principle they share in common, an “identification” that does not deny their distinctness. To identify A with B is to make A “consubstantial” with B.88 Any one person may find herself “split at the root”—a person may have multiple and conflicting identity attachments. Because of this plurality of identifications and because human events happen over time, a logic that cannot handle multiple tracts of development simultaneously is an inadequate tool. For example, the event of childbirth itself, with its mergers and divisions, forces the issue of consubstantiality and makes it necessarily part of the grammar of symbol-using animals so long as they are to remain live-born animals. Burke writes: The offspring is “substantially one” with the parent: its history thus being a development from merger (during the Edenic conditions of the foetus in the womb) to division (at the first “biological revolution,” experienced by the offspring at the time of parturition; the “birth trauma” due to the bursting of the bonds that has been made necessary by the growth of the foetus to the point where the benign circle of protection, the “enclosed garden,” had threatened to become a malign circle of confinement); and its status as offspring of this parent rather than that keeps it consubstantial with the familial source from which it was derived.89

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The dynamics of parent/child relations are more fraught than the relations between people who are simply enemies with no sameness mixed into their differences. Burke illustrates consubstantiality with a chilling story from a friend. This friend claims often to have experienced the sense of vertigo—the fear that he might jump or fall—when exposed to great heights. But one day, the friend brought his small son up to the top of a tall building for a view. He held the child up at the edge of the building for a better look. At that moment, the father reports, he felt a very strong urge to drop the son from the building, stronger than his own urge to jump had ever been. Of course, the father did not drop the son and was deeply ashamed of his own private feelings in this situation. But his own explanation of his impulse has some resonance and goes far to explain the workings of consubstantiality. “With this child,” the father reports, “I identified myself as closely as I could possibly identify myself with someone other than myself. If, then, I threw him from the height, I could have had, simultaneously, both the jumping and the not-jumping. At least, without jumping, by the vicarious sacrifice of my son in my place, I could have had much more intensely the sense of jumping than when the fantasy involved me alone.”90 Of course, consubstantiality could be exercised in more benign as well as in malign ways. Burke offers the example of parents who take vicarious pleasure in the happiness and well-being of their children. Because those children are both “outside them and of them,” that vicarious pleasure cannot be said to be “either wholly self-regarding or wholly extra-regarding,” no matter how much an essentialist logic would wish to make it so, but an admixture of both.91 Hence, Burke takes consubstantiality to be an important element in the rites of identity, one that allows identity to transform and one that facilitates the catharsis those changes in identity necessitate. The act of eating has historically been one other ritual means for enacting the logical paradoxes of consubstantiality. As Burke points out, “totemic thought, as in the communion service,” enacts consubstantiality “by the eating of food in common. ‘Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you what you are,’ ” he writes.92 And yet Jeffrey Stout has convincingly argued that at least for most humans, eating the flesh of those with whom they are identified constitutes a moral abomination and an act of the utmost impiety, as cannibalism taboos demonstrate.93 Such taboos compose the very identity groups they serve to maintain. Eating magic, like word magic, can both compose and divide—can both identify and separate—in ways that bring opposing intentions very close together. Burke points out that ancient religious rituals operated with both a principle of division, as in “sparagmos, the rending of the god’s flesh in primitive religious practices” and a principle of composition by “ceremoniously eating of the same magical substance.”94 This possibility that identical symbolic acts can enact opposite social intentions—that rites of identity can play on consubstantiality’s ability both to

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identify and to divide—provides symbol-using animals with their greatest religious asset and simultaneously their greatest liability. Sometimes we want to bring opposites together; sometimes we need to separate them and guardedly keep them apart.

SLAYING MYSTERIES: TOWARD A HUMAN COMEDY Burke thinks that Kierkegaard’s emphasis upon the absurd in the story of the binding of Isaac does the wrong kind of verbal magic at the wrong time by confusing the sacred and the obscene. Sacred things and obscene things both deserve to be set apart; in this quality they share an identification that divides them from everyday norms. But there are also real differences between sacrality and obscenity—differences that are morally important. Mere “set apartness” cannot distinguish between the social status of the criminal and that of the saint as separations from different ends of a moral spectrum. However, the generic commonality of sacred things and obscene things can be made to do verbal work toward the end of maintaining social hierarchy. When the very obscenities of social caste can be reinforced as sacred, despite their obscenity, class distinctions get stronger. Burke explains how both high language and low language can be used to reinforce hierarchy—how “extremes can meet. To call a man very moral or to call him very immoral is at least ‘the same’ in the sense that, in both cases, one is saying, ‘This man is to be considered exceptional from the standpoint of moral consideration.’ ”95 For Burke, social hierarchy is the great imitator of divine hierarchy. Like divine hierarchy, it encompasses both diversity and identity in the same language. Its form “aims not only to infuse the many with a principle of oneness, but to specify conditions that correspond to different stages of remoteness from the one (absolute being).”96 All of the people within a society are identified with each other through a place in the one hierarchy, yet they are divided (and elevated or lowered) in their position within it. Victimage processes, thinks Burke, are intrinsic to all hierarchical order;97 they affirm the principle of social cohesion over the principle of social division.98 Victimage processes, as we have seen, can simultaneously employ contradictory human capacities for humility and for self-glorification. An aphorism Burke employs as invective against his protagonist, John Neal, in his novel Towards a Better Life, aptly captures how hierarchy plays with contradictory human motives. “You moralistic dog,” he says of Neal, “—admitting a hierarchy in which you are subordinate, purely that you may have subordinates; licking the boots of a superior, that you may have yours in turn licked by an underling.”99 Burke claims that mystery and guilt characterize and pervade social hierarchy.100 On the bottom of that hierarchy, I experience mystery when confronted with what you know but I don’t, or, more materially, when confronted with

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what you possess as property that I don’t. On the top of the social heap, I experience guilt over what I know but you don’t, or, again more materially, over what I possess as property that you don’t. When the socially high and the socially low confront each other, both experience embarrassment: over what I ought to know but don’t, what I ought to have but don’t, and what you found out that I tried to hide. Burke gives a rather mundane example of social mystery: Imagine, for instance, a husband who is unquestionably the head of the family. Each day he goes off to work as to a “mystery,” so far as his family at home is concerned. They know only what he chooses to tell them. Everything necessarily centers about him, since he is the wage-earner. Things must be so arranged that he catches exactly the right train, gets exactly the right food at exactly the right time, sleeps for exactly the right interval . . . and insofar as such requirements are not met, he must grumble mightily for his rights. Each day he goes into a world of “adventure,” his absence being in essence as unaccountable as the daily disappearance of Cupid was to Psyche. Under such conditions, might not the wife feel herself inferior? Then if, of an afternoon, she goes to a movie temple for her meditations and devotions, would there not be “medicine” for her in the picture of a husband thus lovingly put upon, a lovable old bear essentially as timid as the lion in the Wizard of Oz?101 Burke claims that rites in a “movie temple” bear family resemblances to the rites at a church altar. Burke reads Kierkegaard’s valorization of paradox in Fear and Trembling as a mystification. He thinks that Kierkegaard resorts to mystification in order to justify his rejection and injury of Regina, his fiance´e, to himself by analogizing his own mysterious motives with divine mysterious motives. This kind of mystery, according to Burke, allows private property and “privy” concerns to mimic divine mysteries, which in themselves require no help from social mystification processes to reinforce the mystery. Because social hierarchy so easily imitates divine hierarchy, the two become easily confused, thinks Burke. There are other sorts of mystery aside from social mysteries, he maintains. Burke even thinks that there is some interplay between social and divine hierarchies—points at which “the intrinsic radiance of an aesthetic object has social implications in its very essence.”102 But wholesale confusion of social hierarchy with divinity contributes to the divinization of killing and allows for malign forms of symbolic magic. At this point of interplay between social hierarchy and divine hierarchy, Burke calls for extreme caution; he writes, “we are unable to maintain our vision steadily, where this moment is concerned. Here is the point where the divinity of the ultimate ground merges deceptively with the pseudo-divinity of class relationships.”103

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CATHARSIS AND TRANSCENDENCE As I claimed previously, part of Burke’s concern with sacrificial killing is ethical. He wants to find more socially benign ways to meet the sacrificial needs of symbol-using animals. “I am trying to build up a contrast between transformation by victimage (dramatic catharsis) and transformation by dialectical ‘transcendence’ (modes of ‘crossing’ whereby something here and now is interpreted in terms of something beyond),” he claims.104 To this end, Burke mulls over an example of a poem in which the author identifies both with a character who commits murder and a character who commits suicide. He performs this thought experiment in order to ask himself, What does suicide or mortification have in common with war? Where are the samenesses; where are the differences? Burke clearly thinks that bearing one’s own burdens through mortification is better than catharsis through war or scapegoating. But how can symbolic action manipulate meanings and events in this direction? He questions Matthew Arnold’s poem “Empedocles on Etna”: “The first figure (Empedocles) is killed by suicide; the second (Sohrab) is killed by war. But by putting Empedocles and Sohrab together, as variants of one attitude in the one poetic agent who had identified himself with both figures, we tried to establish the common character of both a suicide and a warlike death.”105 He includes another example, Milton’s Samson Agonistes, in which Samson blends suicide and murder, for examination: “See what our problem is. We seem to be going in two ways at once. In some respects, we are trying to bring these poems together as instances of the same motivation; yet in other respects we are insisting that the unique context in which this motive appears in each poem make the motive itself different in [the differing] cases.”106 Burke is searching for some “poetic” means of transcendence that can provide an alternative to victimage. He wants to find an aspect of “dying,” in all its variants, that can transcend the crueler particularities of murder and war, first of all, and can, he hopes also transcend the biological poison of suicide by diluting it into some more partial or less socially deadly form of sacrifice. “You need to look for a motive that can serve as ground for both these choices,” he suggests, “a motive that, while not being exactly either one or the other, can ambiguously contain them both.” He continues: “A term serving as ground for both these terms would, by the same token, ‘transcend’ them. The battlefield, for instance, which permits rival contestants to join in battle, itself ‘transcends’ their factionalism, being ‘superior’ to it and ‘neutral’ to their motives, though the conditions of the terrain may happen to favor one faction. The principles of war are not themselves warlike. . . . [A] poet’s identification with imagery of murder or suicide, either one or the other, is, from the ‘neutral’ point of view, merely a concern with terms for transformation in general.”107 Terms for transformation can do all the practically indispensable good work for Burke

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in his own context that murder and suicide do to excess. Burke works to elaborate an understanding of transcendence that contrasts with victimage through dramatic catharsis. He takes transcendence to be a conscious reinterpretation of things here and now in terms of a there that lies beyond it. These terms he looks for would bridge the gap between the two realms; Burke claims that his understanding of transcendence does not rely on the existence of “an ultimate shore towards which we, the unburied, would cross.”108 Instead, this “other world to live in” is a consciously chosen strategy of interpretation. Burke explicitly contrasts Aristotelian-style dramatic catharsis with transcendence by dialectic. Both types of medicine, he claims, involve cooperative competition; both are concerned with matters of personality. But victimage stresses the stability of the persons or the characters who hold conflicting ideas. Dialectic instead dispenses with the formal division into characters and concerns itself with those characters’ ideas. Inconsistency in a character is more than tolerable; Burke finds it morally praiseworthy.109 Burke recommends Emerson’s essays as examples of self-transformation untainted by the socially dangerous anxiety for purity of character.110 In the interests of thoroughness, I should note in passing that Burke briefly mentions two other forms of transcendence aside from the dramatic and the dialectical. He speaks of another “non-Aristotelian kind of catharsis,” “the cathartic nature of sheer expression, the relief of getting things said (of turning brute impressions into articulate expression).”111 In other words, simply finding a voice for the first time can be cathartic. A world changed, either internally or externally to the speaker, in which one’s creations can be given form, relieves spiritual uneasiness. Likewise, the simple correction of an error can provide catharsis.112 But correcting an error and transcending a dissonance “are not quite the same,” according to Burke. Transcendence, unlike refutation of error, requires if not a Kierkegaardian leap then something akin to it that brings about a new perception of motive, which changes everything about a prior interpretation without changing or dropping away the content interpreted, in Burke’s view. Users of dialectic should not alternate between thesis and antithesis without going through the stage of synthesis, Burke writes. To do so would be to make Kierkegaard’s mistake—to valorize the Absurd. When the Absurd, elevated to the level of dialectical end product, eliminates the need for dialectical process by beating it to the punch, people tend to become “conservatively slavish to Order, morbidly fascinated by the Secret,” and “militantly envenomed for the Kill,” Burke writes. What divinity demands instead, according to Burke, is a sign that the highest goods of the particular ethos are subject to scrutiny and possible sacrifice to the common good outside the particular ethos. The ethical is not suspended; the circle of goods the ethical encompasses is made larger. Kierkegaard takes the image of killing literally for the idea of sacrifice, and in so doing, Burke would seem to imply, he commits

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idolatry. Burke writes: “Often the attempt to obey one moral injunction may oblige us to violate another. There is nothing essentially absurd in such a conflict. But it is true that, unless we are to remain undecided, the solution will require a new act of us, a ‘leap.’ To take this step, we may have to go from a principle to a principle of principles (from the dialectical order to an ultimate order of terms)—and such ‘incommensurability’ may be called a ‘leap’ from morality to religion.113 Burke is certainly and perhaps negligently vague about the ways playing with transcendence in the realm of ideas can overcome material conflicts on this side of a hereafter. Burke claims that the cult of the kill, as extolled by Kierkegaard, does not qualify as a valid case of religion trumping ethics. To articulate the difficulty of a perfect alignment between ethics and religion does not preclude calling a misfit a misfit when one sees it. A pragmatic “transcendentalism” can keep the categories of better or worse alignments. Both dramatic catharsis and dialectical transcendence cure in a similar fashion—they socialize loss. Burke quips that the Christian church was founded as a “guild of the guilty”; through original sin, individual sinners find themselves “all in the same boat” (though the principle of division would suggest that until the day the ship sinks, some travel first class and some in steerage).114 So long as the principle of composition involves a social hierarchy, and Burke holds out little hope that things could ever be otherwise, dirt will remain and demand some sort of cleansing. Burke never fully explains how dialectical transcendence brings out the human ability to mourn loss and allows for the acceptance of a certain amount of dirt. But he is clear that by whatever mechanism, dirt has to go somewhere. It cannot be eliminated; nature conserves it. “So far as the paradigm of catharsis is concerned,” he writes, “if we center for a time upon its most common associations, we might say that it contains the ‘simultaneously present’ ideas of these main moments: ‘unclean,’ ‘clean,’ ‘cleansing,’ ‘cleanser,’ and ‘cleansed.’ ” Or in other words, “the cleansing of one place incidentally involves the polluting of another.”115 Burke draws a bigger circle and takes a wider view of cleansing. When he does, he can see that catharsis develops “in two directions at once”; “while the tragic protagonist may be proceeding from good fortune to bad,” he explains, “the audience is proceeding from irresolution to resolution. . . . And just at the stage where the victim is imitating the most intense suffering, the audience is cleansed by a bath of pitiful tears.”116 Though tragic catharsis appears to clean, even its pity and fear come contaminated. The “moving-closer” of pity comes contaminated with an implied indignity of the one pitied; “in weeping for the great [the pitier] can be at once overtly charitable and covertly ‘superior.’ ”117 Further, pity antagonistically rebels “against the strong, against the organized forces of society, against conventional sanctions and accepted Gods. It is the kingdom of Heaven within us fighting against the brute powers of the world,” remarks Burke. “It brings not

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peace, but a sword.” Nietzsche had things partly right when he called pity a “craving for cruelty,” argues Burke, but he got the proportions of malignity and benignity wrong.118 Similarly, the “moving-away” of fear comes contaminated with an awe that draws in the one who fears.119 The art of tragedy and sacrifice does indeed turn everything into marble (or, in the case of my Akedah statue, to bronze). But a statue that artistically sublimates my anxieties of identification, with all their religion, race, gender, and national considerations, has important differences from a real-life execution that purges its audience through the workings of moral indignation. Though Burke ultimately prefers the moral ambiguities and homeopathy of tragic catharsis to the more “perfected” structure of the scapegoating moment, I believe he takes an ethical stand against all forms of victimage, including tragedy, to some degree. He writes (as his character John Neal) in Towards a Better Life, “Purifyings by ritual, relief by the utterance of a formula, contrivances whereby, after so many sentences, the supplicant becomes a new man, denying such untoward yesterdays as are still recorded in the upbuilding of his tissues—I will not allow that things can be so erased.”120 Burke considers comedy to be a sibling of tragedy—both he takes to be forms of dramatic victimage. But Burke also seems to imply that comedy dialectically transcends tragedy; “the analysis of tragedy,” he claims, “is itself essentially comic. For what could be more comic than consideration of the ways in which people are helped to ‘feel good’ through having wept at a fiction?”121 Whether comedy more resembles victimage or transcendence is a subject for the next chapter.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE SPIRITUAL UTILITY OF COMEDY [W]henever and wherever possible, one should write comedy. . . . I keep uneasily coming back to the thought that, with the cult of tragedy, maybe you’re asking for it. —Kenneth Burke, “Why Satire?”

THE LOTTERY THE SCENE is a long table. The men of the community are seated along one side of the table, preparing to listen to an after-dinner address. Five male citizens of the Jewish ghetto under persecution by the Tomanian dictator, Hynkel, have been called to a midnight supper by Schultz, a former Hynkel adherent who now tries to recruit the support of these men for a surprise attack on “the Great Dictator.” Addressing those seated along the table, Schultz raises his wine glass and prepares them for the ultimate sacrifice: SCHULTZ: Gentlemen, may I claim your indulgence for a moment. We are here tonight to rid the country of a tyrant. In order to carry out this plan, one of us must die. In ancient times the Aryan tribe of Lango-Vadyans made human sacrifice to the god Thor. At a feast by lottery the victim was chosen. Tonight at this feast one of you will be chosen. Each man will receive a pudding. Concealed in one of these is a coin. Whoever gets that coin must give up his life for the liberation of his people. But, he will join the long line of history’s noble martyrs and will rid his country of a tyrant. I know that it is the wish of all of us to be chosen this night to die for Tomania. Much as I should like to participate in this ordeal, I cannot. MANN: Why? MR. JAECKEL: Don’t you understand, he’s too well known. It must be done by somebody like us. MANN: I can’t see it like that. SCHULTZ: Gentleman, if this is a question of my honor, it’s very embarrassing. MR. JAECKEL: Commander Schultz, I apologize for my friend. And let me say on behalf of myself and the others that we consider it a great privilege to die for our country.1

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Committed to the selection of a martyr to the cause by means of a lottery at the suggestion of Schultz, who now niftily departs the scene, the gentlemen gingerly proceed to eat their pudding. What ensues is a comic scene in which each man happens to find a coin in his pudding and attempts to pass it off to his neighbor without being noticed. The local barber ends up with all of the coins and tries to swallow them all in an attempt to avoid becoming the selected martyr. The group is brought to their senses by Hannah, who, in an effort to expose the foolishness and foreignness of the sacrificial plan that would scapegoat one of the group for the sake of the whole, had previously planted coins in everyone’s pudding. Charlie Chaplin’s lottery scene in The Great Dictator, his first “talkie,” juxtaposes the tragic ideal of sacrifice of a part for the sake of the whole and the comic interpretive frame. Chaplin, for one, can take a tragic intention like Schultz’s (or perhaps it was a pretension), and surround it in a comic interpretive frame that makes the comedy transcend the tragedy, through satire. Like Chaplin, Kenneth Burke also tries his hand at writing satire that turns purported “tragic” processes into high comedy, and offers an analysis as well. In “Toward Helhaven: Three Stages of a Vision,” he both practices and critiques the art of satire and sees in it something of an intermediary form between tragedy and comedy. Burke identifies two rhetorical tactics that typify satire: (1) perfecting and (2) the principle of division. Tragedy, Burke admits, is technically a more “perfected” or “finished” form than comedy. Yet he believes that comedy is the more “civilized” of the two.2 Satire, he claims, retains this drive to “perfection” found in tragedy. But to the extent that satire is comic rather than grotesque, satire aims to curb the worst tendencies of tragedy, as Burke’s analysis of satire will show. The drive to “perfect,” according to Burke, is part of human nature—its best part and simultaneously its worst part. Symbol-using animals maneuver their symbols in order to rid the world of the “imperfections” they see in it. This drive is part and parcel of the human need to be consistent—to be more consistent, in fact, than their own environment and more consistent than they themselves are. Satire is marked, claims Burke, by “an excess of consistency.”3 This drive to perfection is in itself a good, but goes awry because humans do not live in a perfectly consistent world nor do they have perfectly consistent needs, either socially or individually. The kind of trouble that suggests the need for satire begins when those inconsistencies raise their heads. Satire is the human drive for perfection run full speed ahead in the face of the recalcitrance of an imperfect world. “Is the world quite imperfect?” Burke asks. “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 more there opens up for you the most delightful of all promises, the opportunity to fare freely

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forth in pursuit of perfection.”4 If you can’t make it to Utopia, suggests the satirist, try Utopia-in-reverse.5 To that end, Burke constructs his own Utopiain-reverse, Helhaven. Characteristic of the drive for perfection is this “either-or” choice of Utopia or Utopia-in-reverse. Perfecting necessarily runs amok when human beings cannot turn around—when they must “fare ever forward” and deny that something was amiss or has since gone amiss dispite their first good intentions. The way Burke describes it, the human tendency to move only forward serves as the grist for satire. There can be no turning back—not even temporarily. For instance, Burke writes: 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 ourselves 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.6 Further, satire must show “that in principle the Helhaven situation is ‘morally’ here already.” Through satire, we “extend to ‘perfection’ the sort of conditions we already confront in principle,” he claims.7 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 spring-water, 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.8 Or, he continues, “insofar as you use an airport without having to live nearby . . . to that extent you are in principle already among The Chosen.”9 Burke’s selection of pollution as the imperfection he will perfect through satire is telling of his religious concerns. Pollution used as a metaphor connects its literal and its figural meaning. Burke writes: “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 byproducts,’ or ‘side effects,’ of advances in modern industry.”10

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When the process of building up a perfect world around an imperfection threatens to become absurd, Burke’s second identified strategy charateristic of satire comes into play: the principle of division. This principle too is aptly demonstrated using his pollution theme. Burke’s Helhaven satire on pollution sets aside (for a future time) the ideal of an ultimate separation in society. In “ultimate time” a saving remnant will depart from the sullied rest, leaving all pollution behind.11 In Helhaven, the “culture-bubble” figures as the means for this separation. When “the saving remnant” depart for the moon, made ideally habitable through human technology, the Lunar Paradisiacs, as he calls them, will finally gain their Utopia. Burke draws his Lunar Paradisiacs from the ranks of apparently opposing factions, which become transcendently united in this ultimate finish: “[T]here 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.”12 Helhaven, Burke proposes, will merge “in one enterprise, both Edenic Garden and Babylonic, Technologic Tower.” “[F]inal Flight will have been made possible,” he writes, “by the very conditions which made it necessary.”13 Together, perfecting and the principle of division make for a satiric heaven where imperfections can be safely disposed of and ignored. Through “the principle of ‘the worse the better’ ” and “the Apocalyptic Vision of Division,” Burke writes, “[t]he ills of technology could be left to soil the Earth, the virtues of technology could rise transcendently elsewhere.”14 Of course, loose ends crop up. Burke warns that “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.”15 Resources will still need to be drawn from the superpolluted terrain left behind. “In order that the Lunar Bubble be kept perfectly provisioned,” Burke explains with tongue in cheek, “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.”16 Though Burke writes his own satire, he does not do so uncritically; he expresses reservations about the form. These reservations tell quite a bit about his comic critique of tragedy. Burke recognizes an evasive tendency in satire.17 In his own writing, this evasive desire takes the form of both wanting to give expression to an obsession with pollution and wanting to separate himself from the most socially damaging tactics displayed by someone with such an obsession. He writes, “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 ide´e fixe” of pollution, both literal

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and figural.18 How much of the drive for perfection can he give expression to in good faith? Can he protect himself from contamination with the principle of division? All too aware that the principle of division is a version of the scapegoating process—that the “satirist attacks in others the weaknesses and temptations that are really within himself”19—Burke vows to include himself as a butt of his own joke. “If I am to write a satire,” he determines, “when all the returns are in it mustn’t turn out that I am holier than thou. I must be among my victims.” He finds less fault with the human tendency to perfect and thinks satire is a way to vent that drive while criticizing it. No matter how rotten Helhaven may turn out to be, heavenly hopes in part inspired its creation, he suggests. Hence, he finds no need to throw out the baby with the bath water. “[T]he satire would not depend upon the factual thesis that the development of ever more and more technology is inevitable,” he writes. “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.”20 Burke’s self-scrutiny suggests the comic modifications he would bring to naturalistic religious traditions of sacrifice and piety. If comedy victimizes, it must include the self in its victimization processes. And though comedy will, with the joy it provides, affirm pious loyalties to the sources of human wellbeing, it will not so overvalue consistency as to banish impious critiques of piety or pious critiques of impiety when those are turned into an alternative religion. By what method will Burke allow piety and impiety to infiltrate each other? How is he to prevent the development of the perfect Hell of pious excess or to guard against waters “that seem to lap at the piles on which the house itself is built” in impious excess?21

PERSPECTIVE BY INCONGRUITY Burke wants to roadblock the symbolic “perfecting” process; by gaining critical “perspective by incongruity,” Burke demonstrates a way to create an identification between things that have been previously dissociated. Burke’s chief tool for moving from piety to impiety is the grotesque style, or “perspective by incongruity,” a trick he takes from Nietzsche. Burke’s relationship to Nietzsche repays some examination. Obsessed with the Nietzschean “lightning flashes” of insight provided by this technique of juxtaposing dissimilars, Burke decides to become an “electrician” dedicated to focusing, managing, and controlling the awe and wonder Nietzsche inspires in him toward ends more useful to a democratic community.22 Burke wants, through his work, to make Nietzschean perspectives cheap and easy to obtain and to end the monopoly held on per-

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spectives by “a choice few of our most ‘royal’ thinkers.”23 He wants to democratize perspectives.24 Burke calls his process of using “perspective by incongruity” to critical ends “verbal mysticism” and he employs these “mystical” strategies in order to break apart the usual categorical alliances between words. He pairs the psychoanalytic noun with the Marxist adjective, the religious verb with the industrialist modifier. But after breaking apart these habitual alliances between words, he works to put a language back together again. To be a critic, for Burke, means engaging in “the anti-religious function (criticism), in the attempt to establish . . . ‘perspective by incongruity.’ ”25 But after he has been the critic, Burke wants to be the poet, in order to reconstruct meanings in a didactic mode. Through didacticism, Burke changes his emphasis from deconstructive ambivalence to reconstructive efficacy while comedy serves to keep this crucial ambivalence always in the background.

COMIC AMBIVALENCE Burke appreciates the comic genre because it implies a natural and incongruous mix of human motives. Freud, in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, notes that jokes juxtapose and help unify a mix of human motives and concerns both high and low; quoting G. C. von Lichtenberg, Freud writes, “The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds [= points of the compass] and might be given names in a similar way: for instance, ‘bread-bread-fame’ or ‘fame-fame-bread.’ ”26 Humans have both material and spiritual motives—they value both ideals and powers—claims Burke, as a look at of their uses of language as symbolic action discloses. Sometimes they euphemize; at other times they debunk. But “an act can ‘dialectically’ contain both transcendental and material ingredients, both imagination and bureaucratic embodiments, both ‘service’ and ‘spoils.’ But it [the comic frame of motives] also makes us sensitive to the point at which one of these ingredients becomes hypertrophied, with the corresponding atrophy of the other. A wellbalanced ecology requires the symbiosis of the two.”27 Human beings wind their way through the world, sometimes posturing as the rejecting critic, at other times playing the accepting religious poet, depending on their needs and on the environments they encounter. As Stanley Edgar Hyman, a major interpreter and friend of Burke, noted, “being an accepter-rejecter in a world of ravening accepters and ravening rejecters is a pretty funny thing to be.”28 A comic interpretive frame captures this human ambivalence: It denies human sainthood, while rejecting—on principle if necessary—human depravity. Neither sainthood nor depravity forms the human “essence,” Burke explains: “An act has either co-operative or competitive features. You select one or the other as the ‘essence.’ Thus the euphemistic may say, for instance,

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that the act is done ‘for the glory of God.’ The debunkers . . . may select the militaristic ingredient as its essence; or in the Bentham line, may say that the act is done for ‘gravy,’ self-interest, self-aggrandizement. A ‘comic’ term for the essence of motivation accepts neither—it expects an act to be moral, and it expects the actor to ‘cash in on’ his moral assets.”29 Maybe, Burke postulates, we can allow others to “cash in” on some of their moral constructions as we would have them allow us to “cash in” on ours, “cash” being of the material and psychological types necessary to life. Burke distinguishes between utilitarian cashing in and poetic cashing in. “To cash in” means to make use of a trust. Seen in dyslogistic utilitarian terms, the swindler makes use of a trust, but seen in eulogistic poetic terms, human cooperation relies upon and uses human trusts in the form of social beliefs held in common all the time. The premise of Burke’s comic frame: All strategies of acceptance involve some laxity, some idiosyncratic freedom that makes the particular strategy worthwhile and conducive to human thriving. But where that freedom requires and magnifies a symbolic mystification, comic social dynamics will, like it or not, provide the clarification, to which the wise person will attend. Other people not accurately located in the attitude of the frame will happily provide the corrective vision, given half a chance; material repressed that needs to be dealt with will be back on the doorstep tomorrow. Ignored, the mystification becomes menacing.30 The niche providing the vital liberty, stretched and crowded to its neo-Malthusian limits, because uncoordinated with the rest of the material and symbolic environment, will then cease to support the life it once nourished. Hence for Burke, the comic cannot be reduced to the pursuit of happiness; it might more accurately be described as the strategic pursuit of happiness in chastened awareness of the human tendency to ignore what we do not want to see. Comedy shows up the totalizing pretensions of any frame of interpretation as partialities.31 “While the thinker trains himself and his audience to balance on one tightrope,” Burke explains, “history is stretching a tightrope elsewhere.”32 A fundamental human inattentiveness makes for comedy. While we keep our balance by working out one kind of narrative construction, we ignore the crowd gathering around the different construction down the street. If we pay attention to human inattentiveness, thinks Burke, vices start to look more like stupidities. But comedy, resting on an assumption of fundamental human willingness to communicate and cooperate, can redescribe viciousness as being mistaken. It assumes, in Santayana’s terms, that people can abandon their errors without forgetting their ideals.33 Brought full circle, comedy reworks mistaken descriptions made apparent through the experience of social and natural recalcitrance in light of commonly held ideals. Social dysfunction, in Burke’s view, results from inaccurate description; the canons have not been criminal, he hopes to persuade us; they have been fools.34

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Burke maintains that there is a strategic continuity between tragedy and comedy. Aristotle’s advocacy of New Comedy in his Poetics, which was a reaction against Athenian Old Comedy and which provided a reform that targeted its critique toward stereotypes rather than actual people, influences Burke: “Comic characters,” he writes, “are ‘worse’ than ordinary people in the sense that caricatures of public figures look ‘worse’ than if simply ‘lifelike.’ ”35 This Aristotelian understanding of comedy soft-peddles its dramatic association with more gruesome rites of victimage. But the more effort Burke puts into his study of victimage rites and the more Freudian his understanding of comedy becomes, the more he must admit the strength of the continuities between tragic and comic victimage. “For years I had worked valiantly to uphold what I thought of as a ‘Comic Perspective,’ ” he writes. And I still won’t quite relinquish it. Then, on working with socio-psychological problems to do with the nature of human congregation, I became convinced that the establishing of an Order in human affairs involves a sacrificial principle. With such thoughts in mind, I studied the modes of victimage in tragedy, and in highly developed theological structures. I am not here being inconsistent. For though the principle of victimage is obviously central to tragedy, it itself is not exclusively tragic.36 Freud’s 1905 study of comedy, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, emphasized the victimizing actions and the role a scapegoat played in comedy. According to Freud, “Generally speaking, a tendentious joke calls for three people: in addition to the one who makes the joke, there must be a second who is taken as the object of the hostile or sexual aggressiveness, and a third in whom the joke’s aim of producing pleasure is fulfilled.”37 Like tragedy, comedy has a victim: the laughingstock—the butt of the joke. Alongside comic victims, Burke also finds comic (and Christian) analogies to the tragic flaw: “The tragic ‘flaw’ or ‘error of judgment’ (hamartia) is matched by what we might call the comic ‘blotch’ (hamartema, a word incidentally that in the New Testament came to mean ‘sin’).”38 But according to Burke, comedy victimizes differently than tragedy. What modern comedy lost in innocence after Freud’s account, it could make up for by incorporating the increased irony of the times. Freud’s hypercritical era may have taken away a measure of social naivete´ with one hand, but with the other it bestowed the possibility that the three roles Freud described in his analysis of the joke could be played by fewer than three people. On the rhetorical implications of the “ironic age” Burke writes, “it becomes clear why the nineteenth century, of all centuries, reapplied irony by transferring the spectator attitude from the audience to the writer. . . . Here was a century in which the men of intellect saw the people headed eagerly towards so many ambitions which these men despised. Feeling that the authority of this movement was

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irresistible, yet having always a strong desire to change the course of events if they could [emphasis added], they became spectators [emphasis in original], with the divided, ironic attitude that comes of seeing people headed with confidence towards desolate ends.”39 Unlike tragedy, modern comedy of the type embraced by Burke is ironic; the detached writer becomes the spectator and sometimes even the butt of the joke as well. The elements of identity shared between sacrificer, victim, and audience can emerge into consciousness when the clown or the fool of comedy can laugh along with everyone else— all laugh at, and thereby sacrifice, requisite bits of their selves.

THE RHETORIC OF JOKES On Freud’s view of comedy, Burke writes: The best evidence of a strongly rhetorical ingredient in Freud’s view of the psyche is in his analysis of Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious. In particular, we think of Freud’s concern with the role of an audience, or “third person,” with whom the speaker establishes rapport, in their common enterprise directed against the butt of tendentious witticisms. Here is the purest rhetorical pattern: speaker and hearer as partners in partisan jokes made at the expense of another. If you “internalize” such a variety of motives, so that the same person can participate somewhat in all three positions, you get a complex individual of many voices.40 Freud helps Burke see the rhetorical nature of comedy, but Burke internalizes the roles Freud puts forward—he works to make the unconscious conscious. He does this by doing away with the one voice–one person correspondence. One person may have several voices, according to Burke. Each voice makes sense on its own terms, but taken together the voices appear to be mutually exclusive. The saint’s voice may not logically mesh with the sinner’s voice, yet both voices may honestly express the same person, insofar as people have an unconscious at work. Freud writes in his treatise on wit that the “mutual canceling-out by several thoughts, each of which is in itself valid, is precisely what does not occur in the unconscious. In dreams, in which the modes of thought of the unconscious are actually manifest, there is accordingly no such thing as an ‘either-or,’ only a simultaneous juxtaposition.”41 The work of Freud further leads Burke to complicate the aesthetic category in which comedy is usually examined. Burke sees moral negotiations alongside aesthetic considerations at work in the comic. Comedy is not a thing-in-itself; it is human equipment for living. Freud himself happened upon this dilemma when he realized that in the case of some jokes and not in the case of others he was worried about his audience’s reaction. At first Freud theorizes that there might be a difference

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worth noticing between, on the one hand, jokes that are enjoyed for their own sake—the joke that is an end in itself and serves no particular aim—and, on the other hand, tendentious jokes, which have a purpose. It is precisely this purpose, he notes, which some members of an audience might find objectionable or offensive, that makes the joke into something other than a joke for joking’s sake. “Only jokes that have a purpose,” Freud writes, “run the risk of meeting with people who do not want to listen to them.”42 But as his treatise continues, Freud questions his own distinction. Freud describes the “jokes for jokes’ sake” tradition: “The philosophers, who count jokes a part of the comic and who treat of the comic itself under the heading of aesthetics, define an aesthetic idea by the condition that in it we are not trying to get anything from things or do anything with them, that we are not needing things in order to satisfy one of our major vital needs, but that we are content with contemplating them and with the enjoyment of the idea. ‘This enjoyment, this kind of ideation, is the purely aesthetic one, which lies only in itself and which fulfills none of the other aims of life (Fischer, 1889, 20).’ ”43 From the viewpoint of the proponents of comedy as pure aesthetics, “real” jokes should be pure of rhetorical intent. This viewpoint, one with a Kantian heritage, sees enjoyment as aimless and nonutilitarian and makes dispassionate enjoyment the hallmark of aesthetic material. But Freud questions the purity of aesthetics from its rhetorical content: “We shall scarcely be contradicting this statement of Fischer’s—we shall perhaps be doing no more than translating his thoughts into our mode of expression— if we insist that the joking activity should not, after all, be described as pointless or aimless, since it has the unmistakable aim of evoking pleasure in its hearers. I doubt if we are in a position to undertake anything without having an intention in view.”44 Enjoyment is humanly useful according to Freud. Jokes always have an evocative aim of some kind, even if they only aim to evoke joy in the hearer. Burke thinks a set of wrong categories contributes to the confusion over the comic. By considering the study of jokes purely a subset of the study of beauty, we hide the implicit rhetoric of a joke. Whereas philosophers of aesthetics had come over time to divide aesthetic phenomena up into categories of beauty on the one hand and sublimity on the other, Burke (Kenneth, not Edmund!) objects by proposing that the threat underlies all beauty, not merely the sublime: [T]he threat is the basis of beauty. Some vastness of magnitude, power, or distance, disproportionate to ourselves, is “sublime.” We recognize it with awe. We find it dangerous in its fascination. And we equip ourselves to confront it by piety, by stylistic medicine, and by structural assertion (form, a public matter that symbolically enrolls us with allies who will share the burdens with us). The ridiculous, on the contrary, equips us by impiety, as

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we refuse to allow the threat its authority: we rebel, and courageously play pranks when “acts of God” themselves are oppressing us (as with the many courageous jests that the farmers of the Dust Bowl invented, to cancel off the dread of earthen clouds sifting through the cracks of their windows, into their rooms, into their very lungs and flesh).45 There is no distinction to be made between beauty and sublimity this Burke proposes; both threaten. On the other hand, Burke suggests that the difference between the sublime and the ridiculous is one that makes a difference. “[B]y starting with ‘the sublime and the ridiculous,’ rather than with ‘beauty,’ ” he explains, “you place yourself forthwith into the realm of the act, whereas ‘beauty’ turns out to be too inert in its connotations, leading us rather to overstress the scene in which the act takes place.”46 The vocabulary of “sublime” and “ridiculous” highlights the ethical content of supposed “purely aesthetic” materials. Sublimity equips us for living by evoking our piety. Likewise, the ridiculous equips us for living by promoting impiety. We base the distinction between the sublime and the ridiculous upon our gut-level decisions about how best to equip ourselves for living and on our determinations of acceptable and unacceptable sources of authority. Hence, what we laugh at can tell us a lot about who we are, morally.

BODIES AND SOULS Burke suggests that the comic genre helps keep human spiritual goods connected to the goods of human bodies. For Burke, being able to complete the circle through comedy—the circle that runs from piety to impiety and back again to some sort of synthesis—requires looking back on “ ‘the original economic plant,’ the human body.”47 “[I]nsofar as poets ‘give body’ to their thoughts,” he maintains, “look for Aristophanes, Rabelais, Swift, and Company in the offing.”48 In a critical review of The Secret of Laughter by Anthony Ludovici, Burke examines Ludovici’s thesis that laughter has a biological, selfinterested, and antagonistic human origin—a suggestion Ludovici takes from Thomas Hobbes. Burke accepts the connection of the comic genre as symbolic action with aggressive animal origins and the negotiation of power relations. Burke shows how laughter retains traces of a “socialized snarl” as evidenced by the facial and gestural similarities between laughing humans and angry ones. “[W]hen you have listed the significant aspects of the act of laughing (elevation of the head, baring of the teeth, emission of harsh guttural sounds),” he writes, “you have given us the symptoms, not of laughter, but of an animal enraged.”49 Laughter is, on some level, he maintains, a symbolic response to a threat. “We laugh when tickled, for the most neurologically direct reason of all: because we must bare our teeth as the attacks upon our body produce

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inevitably in us the stimulation of our defense reflexes.”50 Burke acknowledges and examines a continuity between laughter and fighting. This stance is wholly in character with Burke’s penchant for pointing out the cooperative elements in human competition and the competitive elements in human cooperation. But Burke will not reduce laughter to a “snarl interpretation,” as does Ludovici. To do this, claims Burke, would be to fall prey to the fallacy of origins “to which nineteenth-century science erected all its altars.”51 An action’s origin does not equal its essence. The human symbolic action of laughter—which may well have had a snarl origin, he concedes—has over the centuries acquired additional meanings. An important one of these meanings comes closer to a rhetorical gesture that communicates “Love me.” The socialized snarl of laughter may often be due to what we might call “secondary” or “derived” meanings. That is: if we grant that verbal speech probably originated in the mimetic, in bodily posture, we might conversely find occasions in which the mimetic is still used exactly as verbal speech is used. Some laughter might then have to be explained “lexically.” To illustrate: Suppose that A had laughed just because he “felt good.” Such a phenomenon would be strictly accountable within Mr. Ludovici’s formula— since to “feel good” is to “feel superior adaptation” in a general way, and one in an expansive mood might properly show teeth at the entire universe. But if A, in his burst of smiling, had smiled upon B, note how a new kind of “meaning” for this smile might arise. For B might whisper to himself, “This is obviously the time to ask a favor of A. A’s mere sense of physical wellbeing will be superiority enough for him today. He will do me no damage with teeth, or with their social counterparts.” In other words, A’s laughter of good health may suggest to B nothing other than a promise of sufferance or service. . . . [F]rom a promise of service arises a judgment of value—the lovable. . . . [W]e may expect subsequently to find occasions wherein a man, employing this derived or “conditional” meaning, will show teeth purely as a sign that he would like to be deemed lovable. To explain the use of the smile-sign on such an occasion wholly by its snarl-origin would be exactly as though one were to discover a “socialized snarl” lurking in some actual verbal equivalent, such as “I want you to like me.”52 To reduce laughter to its Hobbesian meaning as Ludovici does, complains Burke, is to be too much the critic, to rely too much on dyslogistic language, and to ignore the potential spiritual utility of comedy. But interpretations can swing, just as unhelpfully, to the other extreme, Burke points out. Where language as symbolic action tends to become too euphemistic, comedy can highlight important elements that mystification leaps over. Burke aims for biological accountability. Complex social structures tend to avoid coping with their own indelicacies, unless reminded of them through comedy; “A cultural scheme that does not empty its own bizbod,” Burke warns, “is a house erected

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upon the sands.”53 Comedy keeps the less dignified aspects of human sociality on the scene. It relieves what Burke calls the “deathy” tendencies of language: The negative could in itself be “deathy” only in the sense that, while man cannot properly use language at all unless he has a feel for the principle of the negative, all symbolism can be a mockery. That is, although symbolism may help us get food, as sheer bodies we live or die not by the words for food, but by the food. As a person, we want another person, not just a symbol for that person. In this sense, all such “transcending” of the thing by its name is towards death. And in this sense, even the most “vital” language is intrinsically deathy. It is a realm of “essence” such that, without the warm blood of live bodies to feed it, it cannot truly “exist.” The “spirit of all symbol systems” could be said to “transcend the body” in this sense, thus taking on a dimension that can also be named by our “good” word for death: “immortality.” . . . [T]he great utility of language in helping men cooperate and prosper and praise and give thanks endows it with plenty of “vital” associations. By the same token, however, the negative becomes integrally woven with the motives of shame or guilt (“conscience” in general) because of its role in shaping and transmitting ideas of propriety and impropriety. Next, particularly in cultures that lay great stress upon toilet training and a corresponding set of proprieties associated with the pudenda, the genius of the negative (now strongly moralistic) comes to pervade the realm of the aesthetic, though often in disguise (except in comedy, satire, invective, and the like). In aesthetic forms where it is categorically excluded by the rules of the game, it must enter by subterfuge if it is to enter at all.54 Comedy keeps symbolic actions tied to their uses by living human animals and keeps language from “perfecting transcendence” of the human body to the point of killing it. Burke’s comedy is a humanism that searches out the ways that forms of human sociality bureaucratize material powers and preserve not-yet-existent human ideals while keeping the two from becoming confused.55 By interpreting interpretations of life—by the criticism of critics—Burke thinks that human beings can maximize cooperation in ways that may compensate for some of the natural dilemmas they come up against. While absorbed in naturalist disillusion and utilitarian pursuit of quantity, Burke suggests, humans forgot that quality “sings”;56 comedy, he thinks, corrects this by reminding people of the incongruities and moral inconsistencies when human swindlers pretend to be human poets. Through the best efforts of human cooperation, Burke hopes, some human wishes might yet take material form. Cultivating human cooperation through the study and practice of rhetoric differs from strict mechanical “technology” in that it defies the proportionality of cause and effect and allows for natural surprises in place of predictable causal

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regularities. Burke is skeptical about the degree to which humans can “sing” while resigning themselves to live in a world that takes their envisioned ideals to be hopeless illusions. But he offers a practical method for altering attitudes through reassessment of the words people use to describe their world, a “conversion” technique. By replacing evaluative either/ors with evaluative continuums, human beings trying to get along with each other can avoid the extremes of euphemism or debunking. “Discounting” one’s evaluations on a scale of eulogistic to dyslogistic terms provides a way for others to mark down one’s evaluative descriptions so that they can be worth less than one might wish without being worthless. By “conversion downward,” obstacles once taken to be overwhelming can be whittled down to manageable size, thus increasing one’s ability for social endurance through access to forms of temporary relief. But at this point, Burke makes a distinction between comedy and humor. Humor, as he describes it, involves purely verbal hand-waving. For lack of any better way to cope, humor misdescribes the situation in order to make it bearable. Burke finds humor “in the jokes whereby men, in the face of danger, dwarf the danger (‘trench humor’ that maintains ‘trench morale’).”57 Thus, humor has a quietistic quality. It aims at acceptance of a situation. Whether this is a human good or not depends on the nature of the threat the humor copes with, the other options available for dealing with the threat, and the acceptability of the moral consequences of meeting the threat head-on. Burke explains that the purpose of trench humor is “not so much a glorifying of the self as a minimizing of the distresses menacing the self.”58 At its best, humor can be looked at as a kind of misdescribing aimed at a greater good of survival when an increased capacity for endurance of temporary or irremediable troubles can further that aim. While comedy emphasizes the sociality and the rhetorical impact of language—its capacity for promoting communication and communion—humor emphasizes the capacity for language to rhetorically work on the self through self-expression.

THE LIMITS OF COMIC ACCEPTANCE Clearly, this kind of humor can be morally ambivalent. Burke himself got into hot water for seeming to make light of a situation that struck some of his readers as an endorsement of a threatening situation. Burke defends himself against this charge from his Marxist critics in a letter to the Windsor Quarterly editors: [H]owever much we may agree that capitalism should be abolished, it is still with us, hence we must adopt some kind of psychological device for making it tolerable while it lasts. I had in mind here the sort of phenomenon we noted during the war, when men who had to live in the trenches made

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their lot psychologically tolerable by developing the humor of “trench morale.” And I was suggesting that since art responds to psychological demands, we must expect to find in full contemporary art corresponding devices for enabling us to fit ourselves emotionally into the status quo even though we have already decided on rational grounds that this status quo should be fundamentally altered.59 So where are the limits of acceptance? As early as 1937, Burke identifies Walt Whitman, along with others, as an example of someone who accepted too much. For Burke, Whitman comes fairly close to the border of accepting the unacceptable and he thinks Friedrich Nietzsche and Filippo Marinetti cross that border. Referring first to Whitman, Burke writes: “Were some things repellent? He would make himself the universal maw nonetheless, the all-consuming appetite. (And there the limitations of acceptance suggest themselves. If a whole people perfected his ways, building his frame of acceptance into a collective poem as vast as that of the mediaeval church, we can imagine someone saying in effect: ‘You would digest everything? Very well, here is a diet of sawdust and nails. Try casting that into your belly.’)”60 Marinetti, Burke thought, looked like a “cruel caricature of Whitman”; Nietzsche, a “yea-sayer” who sometimes welcomed what he abhorred.61 When push comes to shove (and push does come to shove for Burke), one can be morally forced into an attitude of rejection. Acceptance carried to extremes by accepting what is in some fundamental way unacceptable becomes indistinguishable from irresponsibility. Burke points out both Nietzsche and Marinetti as examples of people who say Yes to whatever is. Their method, he claims, allows them to feel assertive while in fact being passive.62 Real deaths matter more than any symbolic manipulations. As Burke points out, it is hard to maintain an ironic stance and call art dangerous when people are really dying.63 In the end, the author has to choose her “here stand I” attitude and must become a propagandist.64 This “beneath-which-not” allows the author’s attitudes to show and throws the author into the arena of moral agency and moral responsibility. As late as 1974, Whitman is still Burke’s focal point on the dilemma of the limits of acceptance as evidenced by the Helhaven satire and the “Whitmanesque” satiric poem that accompanies it. Why was Whitman the focus of Burke’s questions about the limits of acceptance? What did Whitman do that seemed to Burke to cross a line of moral permissibility? Burke suggests that he was once a less than critical admirer of Whitman’s. He sardonically refers to himself as “The Master, who began as disciple of Whitman and got into dire trouble until he found a way out.”65 In this identification lies the key to Burke’s focus on Whitman. In criticizing Whitman’s enthusiastic level of acceptance, Burke criticizes his own tendencies, and specifically American ones at that, toward accepting the unacceptable while faring ever forward.

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Recurrently, Burke uses the image of the human digestive system as a metaphor for examining the morality of acceptance. Whitman tried to digest nails, he complains. He took in too much as food—even non-nutritive, damaging materials. In making fun of overaccepting tendencies, Burke speaks of folks who can “stomach” anything. In his satire, he suggests that the problems induced by trying to digest non-nutritive technological materials (i.e., nails) might perhaps be remedied by replacing the human stomach with a new, improved technology—by developing “an artificial stomach better able to digest such products.”66 What Whitman (and presumably Burke himself at some earlier point) failed to appreciate is that all construction requires destruction. Embracing one without acknowledging the other causes one to fall prey to essentialist thinking. In the technological world (and language is a modified technology for Burke) as well as in the naturally changing one, there are always negative side effects to positive growth, waste products from metabolism, impurities, pollution, and unintended consequences to be dealt with. Of Whitman’s poems, Burke writes, “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 ethos of care-free destruction now nearing its care-worn culmination in environmentalist problems due to technologically caused pollution.”67 Burke’s own satiric poem targets this tendency he shares with Whitman: 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?”68

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The comic ought to promote acceptance and charity, thinks Burke, but not to the point of gullibility. Some rhetorical entreaties to self-sacrifice ought to be met with laughter—are in fact laughable when translated into a blatantly rhetorical mode. Humans are at their spiritual best, Burke suggests, when they can celebrate the world they live in, but, he cautions, some aspects of their world simply may not be worth celebrating. Nor can comic acceptance thrive under conditions of war.69 Under conditions of dire threat, people cannot afford communion with their probable enemies. The risks of being “conned” by such a “confidence” are just too high. Aware of the human need and desire to experience awe and to express piety, Burke summarizes: “Where our resources permit, we may piously encourage the awesome, and in so encompassing it, make ourselves immune (by ‘tolerance,’ as the word is used of drugs, by Mithridatism). Where our resources do not permit, where we cannot meet such exacting obligations, we may rebel, developing the stylistic antidote that would cancel out an overburdensome awe.”70 One way to understand the ambivalent character of Burke’s “humor” is to see it as quietistic only to the extent that its rhetorical content is ignored by its audience or irrelevant to its author. Burke compares “pure” humor and tragedy: [B]y symbolic fusion in tragedy, an ability to “accept one’s fate” is established. This, in a general way, is the explanation of the “catharsis” of tragedy, which is the essence of “pure” art. It enables us to “resign” ourselves by resolving in aesthetic fusion trends or yearnings not resolvable in the practical sphere. And this same tendency to promote acceptance is to be seen likewise in “pure” humor. Pure humor is not protestant but acquiescent. It enables us to accept our dilemmas by belittlement, by “humanization.” A good humorist does not want to “make us go out and do something about it.” Rather, he makes us feel, “Well, things may not be so bad after all. It all depends on how you look at them.”71 Humor is pure to the extent that it is not rhetorical but “purely” expressive, defying the need for an audience for its completion. But Burke advocates “purity” in humor no more than he acknowledges language’s purity from rhetorical intent anywhere else. For him, it is more often the residual rhetorical content of humor that makes it salvific: “If two statements, for instance, one humorous and the other humorless, are found to contain the same animus against someone, we are not thereby justified in treating them as the same in their motivational core. For the humorless statement may foretell homicide, and the humorous one may be the very thing that forestalls homicide. Thus surrounded, or modified by the total motivational context, the animus in one case may be as different from the other as yes from no.”72

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Humor, even where it misdescribes a situation for personal psychological comfort, can have rhetorical content. Though as self-expression it can serve as a way of shrinking the threat of a potential opponent down to endurable, if false, size, it is rarely only expressive. While it steadies the nerves of its deliverer, it can just as easily warn another hearer and can be aimed at preserving right relationship. Its “surely you jest” attitude displays just how threatening another person’s acts may seem (or be), while preserving the social assumption that “if you knew how much your action scared me, you would not act in that way,” if only temporarily. If the receiver of the humor can show enough humility to laugh, that person can be both the butt of the joke and the cobeneficiary of the humor. There is, however, a fine line between humility and humiliation, and Burke is vigilant about trying to discern it. If humility is the eulogistic way of describing the sacrificial attitude people sometimes assume in order to preserve goods greater than their own dignity, humiliation is the dyslogistic way of describing a very similar phenomenon from the point of view of the one deprived of dignity. Humility is a self-assumed posture; humiliation is an externally enforced one, though the differences may be hard to discern when mystery stemming from a strong social hierarchical motive clouds the situation. According to Burke, “The important thing is to continue the search for a vocabulary that . . . could provide humility without humiliation.”73 Far from advocating quietism at any cost—Burke disdainfully names this attitude “resignation”—Burke acknowledges that there are social environments in which humor cannot thrive. Referring again to a threat of homicide offered in jest, Burke notes that such rhetorical action “could lead to intentional homicide only insofar as it were reduced, with the qualifications of humor dropped from it. . . . [S]uch abstracting can take place, of course, whenever conditions place too much of a strain upon the capacity for humor.”74 When conditions strain the capacity for humor, comic attitude gives way to grotesquery. He writes: “There is . . . a stage of planned incongruity that goes beyond humor; the grotesque, wherein the perception of disconcordancies is cultivated without smile or laughter. . . . Humor still manifests its respect for our earlier categories of judgement, even while outraging them. Like blasphemy in the sphere of dogmatic religion, it reaffirms the existence of the old gods once more in the very act of defying them. . . . Humor tends to be conservative, the grotesque tends to be revolutionary.”75 It is this conservative core that helps comedy complete the circle from piety to impiety, back to a reshaped piety. While the grotesque form can highlight a moral incongruity, it takes laughter to shape a comic synthesis. Burke uses comedy to humanize piety and sacrifice. The sacrificer cannot exempt herself from victimage without inviting laughter. Neither can she remain unconscious of the old identity she tries to kill off through victimage. And when expressing

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the religious human tendency to “perfect,” irony, consciousness, and incompleteness must characterize the process if it is to avoid becoming grotesque. What does Burke’s analysis of comedy teach us and bring to consciousness when we laugh at Chaplin’s comedy? What does it tell us about who we are morally? What’s wrong with the “tragic” picture? First of all, the person proposing the sacrifice is asking someone other than himself to make it. In the opening example of satirized tragedy, Schultz offers up the part as sacrifice for the whole; due piety is not being shown to the part. In addition, Schultz tries to scapegoat away his old self. He is not conscious of his old identification with Hynkel, which he attempts to eradicate, though those in his audience see this easily. But Chaplin’s comic interpretation transcends any tragedy. For we, the audience—the spectators—come away wiser and more conscious of our own unconscious motives, ready to reshape our pieties and refigure our sacrifices.

CHAPTER FIVE

RALPH ELLISON AND THE VERNACULAR PIETIES OF AMERICAN IDENTITY [H]umiliation was when you could never be simply yourself, when you were always a part of this old black ignorant man. Sure, he’s all right. Nice and kind and helpful. But he’s not you. . . . With all I’ve learned I’m dependent upon this “peasant’s” sense of time and space. —Ralph Ellison, Todd in “Flying Home” “You start Saul, and end up Paul,” my grandfather had often said. “When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul—though you still Sauls around on the side.” —Ralph Ellison, grandfather in Invisible Man

RALPH ELLISON WAS ONE of the most prolific beneficiaries of Kenneth Burke’s thought about the religious and ritual elements of identity construction, destruction, and transformation. The “both/and” antiessentialist thinking of Burke works itself out in Ellison’s writings as a tension between feeling both a part of and simultaneously apart from various identity groupings. Like Burke, Ellison rejects a conversion model of identity formation in favor of a confirmation model, which he takes to be more pious. Many of the same influences from Freud and Santayana found in Burke’s work show up in Ellison’s as well, as I will endeavor to show.

THE PIOUS NOVELIST: AN ATTITUDE TOWARD HISTORY Ellison cannot elaborate the meaning piety has for him without drawing out the connections between the parallel concepts of history and narrative. As is the case for Kenneth Burke, for Ralph Ellison piety is an attitude toward history—specifically, toward the history with which a person identifies. As he tells members of the Whiting Foundation in 1992, Ellison conceives the role of an American writer as a particular kind of pious activity for an American such as himself. He recounts a hunting incident from his childhood to explain what’s wrong with an overly forgetful kind of natural piety:

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Our national tendency to ignore or forget important details of our past reminds me of the philosophical stance of certain adults with whom I hunted during my boyhood in Oklahoma. After bringing down a rabbit or quail, men would proclaim in voices that throbbed with true American optimism, “A hit, my boy, is history!” But if they missed and the game got away, they’d stare at the sky or cover and say, “A miss, my boy, is a mystery.”1 “It is [the American writer’s] role,” he continues, “to transform the misses of history into hits of imaginative symbolic action that aid their readers in reclaiming details of the past that find meaning in the experience of individuals.”2 Instead of glamorizing mystery, Ellison exchanges mysteries for meaning. Ellison takes writing novels to be a pious act and a meaningful reclamation of the details of human experience. The pious person calls “good” what has been, to whatever small degree, good for him or her—whatever nourishes or has been a source of one’s being—and pays close attention to the complexities and especially the contradictions contained in that set of varying goods. For Ellison, to paraphrase the adage, God is in the complexities, and every attempt to purify away complexity compromises the gratitude owed to the multiple sources of one’s being. “[A]ll one can really ask of any individual,” he writes, is “that he not deny where he comes from, and that he plumb this background with all of the conscious thought that he possibly can.”3 As evidenced by Ellison’s account based on his honest examination of his own life, treasure comes mixed in with the trash, raw materials frequently emerge from the waste, high style cannot be purified of vernacular style nor can the sacred be easily separated from the profane without severe consequences for the culture that performs the purging. Consequently, Ellison accepts Kenneth Burke’s premise that maturity comes less as a conversion process of rebirth and more as a confirmation process, albeit one fraught with the threatening ambivalences of making an inheritance one’s own by “earning it,” to use Burke’s terminology.4 For Ellison, this means acknowledging the ways a childhood spent in the Oklahoma territory “frontier culture” and an education in the deep South at Tuskegee formed him into a particular person, similar but not quite identical to or reducible to any group identity. Though Ellison moves from the South to the North at the end of his college career, he never converts from being a “Southerner” to a “Northerner.” He is a Southerner gone North. There is an acknowledged continuity rather than a break for him in these consequent identities. Further, he is not simply a Southerner; he draws important distinctions between his Oklahoma and his Alabama experiences in the southern United States. Other studies of Ellison have noted the impact of Ellison’s “Oklahoma frontier” childhood on his later writing,5 but have not emphasized this experience as one that informs the form as well as the content of Ellison’s moral character.

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To notice that is to heed Burke’s influence on Ellison’s thought. Having lived and learned there, a pious Ellison must acknowledge, even though tempted not to, that “imagination exists even in the backwoods of Alabama,” no matter how far from Alabama he chooses finally to live, else he denies one of the sources of his own being.6 Mississippi, Ellison reminds us, has been capable of spawning both lynch mob members and authors such as Faulkner, who attempt to plumb the abyss of race relations in the U.S. South within their fiction as a proper component of their craft.7 The moral impact of Ellison’s use of a confirmation rather than a conversion model, stated in Christian theological terms that Ellison himself would not be likely to employ, implies that the converted “saint” may owe acknowledgement of samenesses with the “sinner.” The form discourages demonization of those whose identities are constructed to be different or other at any given point in time. The complexity of characterization that Ellison wants preserved mitigates against the temptation to demonize. Because even “the enemy” has this human complexity that Ellison so values, affirmative possibilities for relationship exist, even with one’s ostensible opponent, or so claims Ellison. Conversely, presumed “allies” cannot be allowed to dictate a bureaucratized identity not imaginatively earned for oneself. Much to the consternation of critics who would reduce Ellison’s writing to an essentialized black perspective, Ellison resists the role of racial victim offered to black Americans by the sociologists of his day. Ellison even resists the restrictions he feels imposed upon his identity by writers of the Harlem Renaissance. He takes these groups to be part of “that feverish industry dedicated to telling Negroes who and what they are, and which can usually be counted upon to deprive both humanity and culture of their complexity.”8 According to Ellison, writers fail when they refuse “to achieve a vision of life and a resourcefulness of craft commensurate with the complexity of their actual situation.” “Too often,” he claims, “they fear to leave the uneasy sanctuary of race.”9 It is in the complexities that Ellison finds the potential for fundamental kinship with the enemy. Examination of the complexities of the situations that history smoothes over when it tries to hide its misses reveals the affirmative possibilities of relationship, or so Ellison hopes. As his Whiting Foundation speech makes apparent, Ellison thinks that the novelist has a moral role to play in societies, subject as they are to change. By imaginative retrieval of the misses of history, the novelist provides the materials for meaning-making that the standard written histories leave unavailable to too many people in a democracy. He describes his task as a writer as “a conscious attempt to confront, to peer into, the shadow of my past and to remind myself of the complex resources for imaginative creation which are my heritage. Consciousness and conscience are burdens imposed upon us by the American experiment. They are the American’s agony, but when he tries to live up to their stern demands they become his justification.”10

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Ellison blurs the distinction between historical narrative and artistic narrative. Even historical narratives, Ellison would claim, require the rhetorical “explanatory power” provided by artistically emphasizing some factors over others, by leaving out “insignificant” details that shape the narrative to “truth” through the appeal of “beauty.” The American novelist at his best, he asserts, “has committed himself to the task of disentangling the pathologies of democracy from its failures, its attempts at melioration, and its assertions of a transcendent ideal. As fictionist he seeks to reduce the complexity of experience to eloquent form, but in doing so he risks the embarrassment of not only violating the self-protective pieties of other groups, but of exposing the selfserving maneuvering of his own.”11 Hence the laudable goals of eloquence and the equally praiseworthy goals of retrieval of usable culture work at cross purposes, he implies, especially for the marginal members of a democracy. In terms of piety, the marginal member needs to retrieve complexity from the historical narrative; as an artist, this same marginal member needs to leave out some other complexities for the sake of eloquence and persuasive power. Every “leaving out” is an exclusion, something akin to Burkean scapegoating, which in the short run makes meaning and establishes an identity for a part of society unconcerned with what is left out, but ultimately redounds to the poor moral health of the whole. No stranger himself to eloquence, Ellison uses the imagery of the American novel, specifically Huck Finn images, to describe the American novelist’s moral debt to a nurturing, if seriously flawed, democracy: “a novel,” he explains, “could be fashioned as a raft of hope, perception and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation’s vacillating course toward and away from the democratic ideal.”12 Of the standard historical narrative of a mainstream “American experience” that all too often grounds American identity by silently presuming white skin, Ellison writes: “[A] defenseless scapegoat was easily at hand, but . . . by pushing significant details of our experience into the underground of unwritten history, we not only overlook much which is positive, but we blur our conceptions of where and who we are. Not only do we confuse our moral identity, but by ignoring such matters as the sharing of bloodlines and cultural traditions by groups of widely different ethnic origins, and by overlooking the blending and metamorphosis of cultural forms which are so characteristic of our society, we misconceive our cultural identity.”13 Ellison, like Burke, sees this tendency to scapegoat as a human characteristic. Notoriously, whites have done it to blacks, and, as I will show particularly in chapter 6 on sacrificial rites, Ellison elaborates these occasions and the particularly American institutions that have perpetrated the scapegoating of black Americans in gruesome and unflinching detail. But Ellison’s own attempts to resist this scapegoating tendency in himself get him into trouble with some of his critics who would prefer that he render interpretations that scapegoat the former scapegoaters.

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Reducing a historical heritage down to meaningful and eloquent detail purifies it of elements of identity contamination, but it does so impiously—by ignoring inconvenient or messy sources of one’s being. To the extent that one is assisted or nourished by someone or something considered other, someone unassimilable for whatever reason with one’s own sense of identity, any account of pieties that totally merges one’s goods into an exclusive sense of identity is impious toward those “other” unassimilable sources of one’s being. Ellison praises those “who recognize their relatives across the chasm of historical denial and the artificial barriers of society, and who see themselves as bearers of many of the qualities which were admirable in the original sources of their common line.”14 For this reason, Ellison maintains that racially essentialized interpretations of history are reductive, even if personally tempting. He rejects sociological accounts that focus on race and that generalize the dehumanizing social forces to which African Americans have been heir, hence reifying their status as victims. The history of black and white Americans, he claims, is knotted together; each effects the other in both positive and negative ways. The story in Ellison’s novel Juneteenth of the relationship between the black preacher, Hickman, and the white boy he adopts, Bliss, is a tale about failed piety. Hickman hopes that once Bliss has grown up, he will remember where he came from and that his history will make a difference for both Bliss and his wider world. He hopes that with his upbringing in the black church and with his white skin, Bliss will be able to go places, understand things, and open doors shut to many with a less complex heritage. But sadly, Bliss rejects his upbringing and his father for the sake of a purified white sense of identity, thus shattering Hickman’s hopes. Bliss’s attitude toward his history is impious.

TREASURES FROM THE TRASH HEAP Ellisonian piety means responsible ownership of the entirety of one’s history, insofar as it can be elucidated and allowing that it is constantly being filled in. Where then does he look for his objects of piety? To refuse what Ellison called “the sanctuary of identity” means to accept the level of moral ambiguity about one’s pieties that a complicated and morally uncomfortable description of one’s inheritances requires. Threat and nourishment, trash and treasure come mixed, he maintains, and the pious person must get his or her hands dirty picking through them. Not only do vernacular forms “contaminate” the high style of American culture; the “sacred” traditions of African Americans are “profaned” by the wider American culture. Ellison is not offended by this profanity; he sees it as part of the vernacular process. The “contamination” is in fact a cross-fertilization, he maintains, healthy to the survival of American culture. Reflecting

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upon the performance of a choir of white children, very likely the grandchildren of slave holders, who were singing African-American spirituals, he writes, “I recognize that by appropriating the style—and profaning it, as it were— they are simply trying to attain some vague ideal of perfection. In this country it is in the nature of cultural styles to become detached from their places of origin.”15 Origin for Ellison is not essence; Ellison is too much entrenched in the traditions of American naturalist responses to Darwin to accept an Aristotelian notion of entelechy. Because Ellison takes the relationship between being “a part of” and being “apart from” as a spectrum rather than a dichotomy, he can never fully separate trash from treasure. Pieties cannot be determined from a point of view that categorizes goods as essentially trashy or essentially treasured. What was once a treasure may become trash; what was once someone else’s trash may become irreplaceable treasure (in the same way that being green can be an advantage or a hindrance to a lizard depending on its relationship to a changing environment). Ellison’s writings are filled with imagery of persons pilfering the dump in search of some needed part. Part of the cultural resources Ellison credits as his own intellectual treasures are the discarded magazines and opera records his mother brought home from the houses of the white Oklahomans for whom she cleaned. Whereas Kenneth Burke had advocated paying attention to proverbs and folk wisdom as literary “equipment for living” alongside more traditionally “tasteful” literary classics, Ellison adds in the vernacular resources of Jack the Rabbit and Jack the Bear tales, the music of Charlie Christian, Charlie Parker, and Louis Armstrong, children’s word games, and a host of other day-to-day rites. Ellison owes his naturalistic emphasis to Santayana, inherited via Kenneth Burke. Ellison’s account of pieties similarly refers to naturalized pieties demonstrated through vernacular rituals. Santayana had described piety in naturalistic terms in 1905 as “man’s reverent attachment to the sources of his being and the steadying of his life by that attachment.”16 In his Life of Reason account, he explained that we show piety to both the things we need (that is, we do our best to hold on to them) and also to the things we fear (in that we try to appease them or stave them off so that they will not harm us). This naturalistic blurring of the distinction between sacred and secular activities shows in Ellison’s search for ritual expressions of piety toward the things he learned from the African-American Oklahoma culture in which he grew up. “There are certain forms which have been repeated and proved valid,” Ellison writes, “if only through the fact that they have existed for so many years. That is a place to study.” He continues: Anywhere you get our people gathered together for ceremonial purposes has something to tell us about drama, about what we could use as drama. For example, I see certain of these fellows getting into the life of bars where

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people gather. I know that there is a sort of ritual pattern: certain things are discussed at certain times; certain people come at certain times; certain things are not discussed when one group of people is there. A certain atmosphere will prevail after football games or after someone has made a big numbers hit. You have many of these patterns which no one has done anything with.17 References both to the ritual life in barrooms and that found in sports activities show a direct reference to Burke’s naturalized vision of the piety of “impiety.”18 Ellison further suggests the “study the verbal play of Negro children, who can do a hell of a lot with words and sounds” as a source of vernacular rituals that express naturalized pieties.19 In “Remembering Jimmy” (1958), Ellison details the activities of Oklahoma City jazzmen in language that plays up the similarities between pious jazz players and pious churchgoers: “Now, that’s the Right Reverend Jimmy Rushing preaching now, man,” someone would say. And rising to the cue another would answer, “Yeah, and that’s old Elder ‘Hot Lips’ signifying along with him, urging him on, man.” And keeping it building, “Huh, but though you can’t hear him out this far, Ole Deacon Big-un . . . is up there patting his foot and slapping on his big belly . . . to keep those fools in line.” And we might go on to name all the members of the band as though they were the Biblical four-andtwenty elders, while laughing at the impious wit of applying church titles to a form of music which all the preachers assured us was the devil’s potent tool. Our wit was true, for Jimmy Rushing, along with the other jazz musicians whom we knew, had made a choice, had dedicated himself to a mode of expression and a way of life no less “righteously” than others dedicated themselves to the church. Jazz and the blues did not fit into the scheme of things as spelled out by our two main institutions, the church and the school, but they gave expression to attitudes which found no place in these and helped to give our lives some semblance of wholeness.20 The dominant aesthetic tradition may hold that jazz is dregs while the ecclesiastical is sacred, but Ellison finds in jazz the raw materials for his own church. Burke had commented that we tend to build churches over sewers for cosmetic reasons, and Richard Wright had elaborated the church/sewer metaphor with a despairing story that made a sham of a black church placed over a sewer,21 but Ellison finds a different kind of dirt underground. His underground man treads through coal dust, “a source of heat, light, power.”22 Ellison’s underground is not a sewer, but a cellar, loaded with a powder keg of potential. The basic meaning of dirt for the two men is different.

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ANTAGONISTIC COOPERATION WITH THE SOURCES OF OUR BEING If piety for Ellison is an affirmative attitude toward a complex history and the trash heap a proper place to look for potential pieties, what is the proper expression of piety toward the objects of piety found there? Like Santayana and Burke before him, Ellison accepts that pieties can at times be both selfprotective and self-serving—that they have everything to do with our own needs and fears. Ellison’s pious posture is not one of loyalty but of “antagonistic cooperation”; his metaphor that shows the posture not to be as absurd as it sounds on its face is the jazz band, “a group of sophisticated minds . . . working in a spirit of antagonistic cooperation to explore a tune’s hidden possibilities.”23 They take the tune they have inherited and see what they can make of it; the band affirms a traditional melody while resisting its untouched repetition. Their job is “to affirm while resisting.” The antagonistic cooperation that Ellison takes to be the proper expression of piety is a selective and creative appropriation of tradition.24 The past is to be for Ellison partly master and partly servant, as is the one who lives within it. The past is to master Ellison insofar as he must learn from it and learn it to a level of maturity that allows him to make evaluative judgments concerning the best it offers. Ellison holds that we do not live apart from the traditions of the past—we are made from them. But Ellison is also to be the master of his received tradition. When Ellison “plays it by eye and by ear,” he follows a cultural tradition that owes more to empiricist patterns of thought than to rationalist ones. Eyes and ears may be formed out of, or at least informed by, these traditions, but these eyes and ears still function according to the purposes of a living agent to whom they belong. This agent’s purposes may diverge from those of any of a multitude of received traditions; this historically formed agent is not simply receptive, but also creative—she modifies the world as she lives in it. Thus does Ellison propose an antagonistic cooperation, or a natural piety, if you will, toward Ralph Waldo Emerson, his namesake. And in so doing, Ellison articulates what Santayana implied—that all too often the sources of our being come mixed up with the things that threaten us. The overzealous quest for an unambiguous sense of purity—a sense of what goes with what— may well leave us with a deranged understanding of our pieties. On the subject of potentially threatening pieties, Ellison cites Andre´ Malraux and echoes his claim that it is more important to know what nourishes a person than it is to know what differentiates him from others.25 One would hope the choice between the obligations owed to sources of nourishment and differentiation might not be so forced. For Ellison as for virtually everyone else, the issue of piety automatically suggests a person’s identity within a primary family group. It matters to the

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grammar of piety, as to the grammar of identity, whether one is a mother or father, a son or a daughter. These are the primary terms in which questions of continuity and discontinuity with others first present themselves to a new person. The character Mary Rambo in Invisible Man is Ellison’s clearest mother figure. She nourishes the narrator when he is dependent, the Invisible Man loves her, separates himself from her, and hides—out of shame—from his relationship with her. She is, as Melvin Dixon points out, very different from most of Ellison’s female figures; unlike them, she is no cartoon character, but rather a full and admirable person.26 Burke picks up on Mary Rambo’s maternal role. He writes to Ellison: “She [Mary Rambo] is in principle what I think you might be willing to call a ”vernacular“ Virgin Mary, in her wholly feminine role as nurse and mother.”27 But while she is fully fleshed out in his novel, the conflicts the Invisible Man feels toward her are not resolved within the pages of the novel.28 Even as the Invisible Man knows that he should return to Mary Rambo’s house for the rest that he needs, and that in all fairness toward the aid she has given to him he ought to return, he cannot bring himself to do it.29 Perhaps it is not surprising that Ellison does not resolve his own gender identification problems within the novel (though his essays show that he surely loves his own mother), as stereotypically as he draws up those roles for his own identification. Most problematically for me, Ellison genders human potential as masculine, in line with the bulk of Western moral tradition with its Aristotelian notion of sacred male anima, without questioning those inheritances and their essentializing strategies, which he otherwise would reject. “Sociologists” are the chief gender villains in Ellison’s writing. They portray (he says) Negroes as “the lady of the races.”30 “[I]f a Negro writer is going to listen to sociologists—as too many of us do—who tell us that Negro life is thus and so in keeping with certain sociological theories, he is in trouble because he will have abandoned his task before he begins. If he accepts the cliche´s to the effect that the Negro family is usually a broken family, that it is matriarchal in form and that the mother dominates and castrates the males, if he believes that Negro males are having all of these alleged troubles with their sexuality . . . he’ll never see the people of whom he wishes to write.”31 Ellison is deeply offended in a gendered way by some sociological accounts of race that he has been taught. These sociologists castrate African Americans by removing all their human potential along with their complexity. And Ellison’s Tuskegee teachers are complicit with the sociologists in this castration; “One of the worst things for a teacher to do to a Negro child,” he writes, “is to treat him as though he were completely emasculated of potentiality.”32 The very complexity that those sociologists and teachers cut away contains the anima— the human soul. He writes: “[T]here is something else in Harlem [besides the offending sociologist’s picture of the African American], something subjec-

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tive, willful and complexly and compellingly human. It is that ‘something else’ that challenges the sociologists who ignore it, and the society which would deny its existence. It is that ‘something else’ which makes for our strength, endurance and promise. . . . If he [the African-American writer] does this [parrots sociologists and white intellectuals], he’ll not only go begging, but worse, he’ll lie to his people, discourage their interest in literature and emasculate his own talent.”33 As he says both figuratively in an essay and graphically in the castration scene from Invisible Man, “Let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant states.”34 Unfortunately, testicles, which only males possess, figure as the sign for human potential, rather than say heads or hearts, without which no human being of either sex could function. Though no human being should ever be forcibly castrated, people generally do survive both castrations and total hysterectomies as recognizably human in a way that they do not survive a beheading or the evisceration of a heart. Surely gender and reproductive capacity is not at the bottom of a human identity. In Ellison’s case, his family history may in part make his idealization of male potential more understandable and less offensive, even if it falls short of justification. Ellison’s father died when he was three; Ellison barely remembered the man. Because the father is all but an empty placeholder in Ellison’s life, it is reasonable to assume that he is, to Ellison, a sign for the good that might have been. The bulk of the goods Ellison holds dear exist largely as unrealized hopes. So many goods, for him, fall into the category of humanly possible but absent in history, like his own father.35 Ellison’s correspondence with Kenneth Burke presents an intriguing overlap between piety language and gender language. Ellison, in this letter, is thanking Burke for the difference Burke has made to Ellison’s life: I was about to thank you for a minor favor while leaving the major debt unmentioned. For I realized then that my real debt to you lies in the many things I’ve learned (and continue to learn) from your work and that perhaps the greatest debt lies in your courage in taking a counter-position and making your ‘counter-statement.’ But then the problem arose of whether one really has the right to thank a thinker for having courage, and would not that be a misunderstanding and an embarrassment? For when a man, in battling [emphasis added] for his life, has given birth [emphasis added] to works which enlighten and inspire, is it not a mistake to confuse the matter and attempt to thank him? It’s like thanking him for being a human being. I suppose the only adequate expression of gratitude in such an instance lies in work, real hard work [emphasis added], which comes of a similar struggle as that which has inspired or set off the chain reaction in one. So if in the little things I write from time to time you observe anything of value, then to that extent am I able to express concretely my appreciation for what you

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have done. That is a debt I shall never stop paying and it begins back in the thirties when you read the rhetoric of “Hitler’s Battle” before the League of American Writers, at the New School (I believe you were the only speaker out of the whole group who was concerned with writing and politics [emphasis in original], rather than writing as an excuse [emphasis added] for politics—and that in a superficial manner. . . . I am writing a novel now and perhaps if it is worthwhile it will be my most effective means of saying thanks.36 The gendered language of Ellison’s letter mingles “battling” with “giving birth” and “hard work” or labor. He construes the proper expression of his piety as directed toward a future “birth-giving” of his own, rather than directed back toward the one who gave birth through creative struggle. It pushes far, but perhaps not too far, to say that Burke serves as a father figure to Ellison— perhaps one that even occasionally blinds him to other sources of his own nourishment in the father’s perceived demand for exclusive loyalty. Though Ellison tends to dismiss most sociological accounts of race as demeaning, he praises the approach of Constance Rourke. Rourke, according to Ellison, differs from other sociologists in that she makes clear the positive contributions that African Americans have made from the start to a usable American cultural inheritance in general; she communicates in her work “how much of American cultural expression is Negro.”37 When Constance Rourke took up Van Wyck Brooks’s challenge to search to create a usable past as cultural heritage, she turned directly to the cultural traditions of American slaves as well as the cultural traditions of other groups of Americans.38 Like Rourke, Ellison believes that the United States is marked by the cultural legacy of slavery in both good and bad ways. He wants to mine even these disowned traditions for their positive contributions to the American cultural whole.39 As he told James Alan McPherson, “I recognize no American culture which is not the partial creation of black people. I recognize no American style in literature, in dance, in music, even in assemblyline processes, which does not bear the mark of the American Negro.”40 Also from Rourke, Ellison inherits an appreciation for a functional approach to cultural analysis. Ellison claims that because the primary functioning artisans and craftspeople of early American society were slaves, it was precisely those functional roles that made the traditions of those craftspeople integral to the production of a new American culture, different in important ways from the European cultures left behind by many colonists. “[W]hite Americans have been walking Negro walks, talking Negro-flavored talk . . . , dancing Negro dances and singing Negro melodies far too long to talk of a ‘mainstream’ of American culture to which they’re alien,” he writes.41 Not only were black hands the actual hands that made much of the early country work, but also black slaves brought with them, according to Ellison, an ap-

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proach to “art that was highly functional,” much to the benefit of the survival of the whole American cultural endeavor, even while the practice of slavery mortally threatened the nation’s soul.42 From the midst of the threat, there is cultural nourishment to be gleaned. For early American culture to be usable, it needed to function in an environment different from Europe, to come “to grips with the nature of the New World—the plants, the rivers, the climate”;43 it needed to speak to the hearts and minds of a jumble of people, not all of whom were Europeans. This functionally different environment and these differing requirements for communication gave rise to what Ellison terms “vernacular” culture.44 For Ellison, the vernacular does not name a socially stratified segment of culture, one opposed to “high-brow” culture, but rather names a process that determines identity. “[T]he vernacular process,” he explains, “is a way of establishing and discovering our national identity.”45 “[I]n the days when our leaders still looked to England and the Continent for their standards of taste, the vernacular stream of our culture was creating itself out of whatever elements it found useful, including the Americanized culture of the slaves.”46 Instead of pounding at the democratic door and arguing that blacks are a vital part of American culture, Ellison turns the tables. He assumes as much and argues instead that all Americans, even white Americans, are culturally part African-American.47 Ellison claimed that vernacular resources drawn from American slaves and ex-slaves were valuable not only to African Americans but also to Americans, period. White Americans were culturally part black, whether they chose to acknowledge their debts or not. “What,” he asked, “is one to make of a white youngster who, with a transistor radio screaming a Stevie Wonder tune glued to his ear, shouts racial epithets at black youngsters trying to swim at a public beach?”48 How many white men “wooed their wives and had the ceremonial moments of their high school and college days memorialized by Ellington’s tunes?” he asks rhetorically.49 “I tell white kids that instead of talking about black men in a white world or black men in a white society, they should ask themselves how black they are, because black men have been influencing the values of the society and the art forms of the society. How many of their parents fell in love listening to Nat King Cole?”50 Ellison disturbs the presumptuous equation of white and American identity in order to do moral work; instead of using race to essentialize American identity he upsets essentialist thinking by emphasizing “the white American’s inescapable Negro-ness.”51 Corresponding to his emphasis on positive artistic contributions of black Americans to American culture is Ellison’s emphasis upon the assets African Americans bring to its moral life. As a panel member in a conference poised to determine how to meet the educational needs of “underprivileged” (read African-American) youths, Ellison challenges his audience to realize the paternalistic blindness of the gathering—to realize that as Americans they

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needed the very qualities that only these youths could bring to the nation, qualities such as aggression, daring, patience, and a profound capacity for endurance.52 Elsewhere he adds that “it is the black American who puts pressure upon the nation to live up to its ideals. It is he who gives creative tension to our struggle for justice.”53 Ellison establishes a pattern of turning the assumptions of ingrained white racism upside down in order to point out the strengths of black Americans. He rejects every opportunity to talk about African Americans as victims and turns it into a chance to talk about their moral assets. “What do they have that is a strength?” he asks. “What do they have that you can approach and build a bridge upon?”54 Like Burke, he believes that the possibilities for communication lie in building bridges of transcendence that appeal to another and better interpretive world in which to live.55 Ellison’s engagement with Irving Howe provides an edifying example of antagonistic cooperation. In “Black Boys and Native Sons,” Howe had accused Ellison (and James Baldwin, as well) of a literary breach of faith. Specifically, Howe claimed that as African-American writers, both younger men had failed in “piety” toward their literary father, Richard Wright. Ellison reiterates Howe’s accusation against himself by suggesting that a tale about piety and impiety informs Howe’s mapping of the African-American literary scene—the biblical story of Noah and his sons, Ham, Shem, and Japheth. In Howe’s retelling, cast in the role of the (this time black-skinned) father is Richard Wright. Ellison and Baldwin are guilty of ingratitude when they criticize their own; they refuse to cover up their father’s nakedness. Howe, casting himself in the role of pious son, defends the cynicism and rage of Wright’s novels as the only authentic stance for an African-American writer. Howe clothes Wright in the insignia of the essentialized African-American author, one who piously “remembers” an essential and dehumanizing bleakness of African-American experience. Howe portrays Ellison as one who has succumbed to the disease of naive liberalism—one who can conclude in Invisible Man, according to Howe, that his world is one of infinite possibilities. In so doing, Howe mistakes the significance of the “infinite possibilities” Ellison describes; clearly Ellison intends this phrase not as a salvation, but as a bluesy, sick joke about the slipperiness between the surface and the heart of things, about an American rhetoric that, for better or worse, goes all the way down. Howe criticizes Ellison’s and Baldwin’s critique of Wright’s deterministic brand of naturalism—one in which novels such as Wright’s reinforce a Manichaean tradition that wholly separates vice and virtue and allows for no healing identification between the vicious and the virtuous person. Baldwin calls these protest novels “reports from the pit,” which serve primarily to reassure readers and writers outside the pit of their own salvation.56 Protest novels such as Wright’s, dedicated either to “merciless exhortations” or “shouting curses,” depending upon skin color and the consequent role into which the novelist

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is cast, detailed the existence of evils and railed against them without taking such evils seriously enough to get dirty in the examination, complained Ellison. The vehemence of their curses blocked the only open path to amelioration. Ellison refuses to be an exile from American identity; he retains the problematic identification while he wrestles with that identity in antagonistic cooperation. He blurs the distinction between communication and combat, or “between writing well and being ideologically militant.”57 Unlike Howe, he refuses to polarize the choice and fears the social order that does “more than . . . that of Mississippi,” referring to Stalinist varieties of ideologically purged Marxism.58 Along with his adherence to an American identity, Ellison also stays identified, by staying locked in communicative combat, with Irving Howe as fellow critic. He closes “The World and the Jug” with this admonition to Howe: “[M]y reply to your essay is in itself a small though necessary action in the Negro struggle for freedom. You should not feel unhappy about this or think that I regard you either as dishonorable or an enemy. I hope, rather, that you will come to view this exchange as an act of, shall we say, ‘antagonistic cooperation’? ”59 Ellison’s antagonistic cooperation is never a straightforward submission of son to a dominant father as suggested by the Noah story so historically hurtful to those who share Ellison’s skin color. Too many other factors alongside paternity go into his sense of who he is. Against the most common interpretation, Ellison suggests another: “Ham” is pious after his own fashion, convinced that some nakednesses needs to be uncovered for the sake of the family. Ellison thought that Burke’s family-oriented emphasis on emotion-fraught parental pieties led him to often overlook the resources that come from outside the family to the child who grows up in a democratic culture. The level of unexpectedness a person ought to expect in the cultural milieu of the United States provides opportunities as well as dangers. The sources of well-being for persons raised in a democratic climate are wider than what the family offers, but less predictable. Hence the uneasiness many people feel in acknowledging nonparental debts, which complicate a sense of personal and communal identity. The desire for certainty and security in our relational identities dies hard; threatened, we tend to panic. Ellison writes: “[W]e stress our affiliation with that segment . . . which has emerged out of our parents’ past—racial, cultural, religious—and which we assume, on the basis of such magical talismans as our mother’s milk or father’s beard, that we ‘know.’ Grounding our sense of identity in such primary and affect-charged symbols, we seek to avoid the mysteries and pathologies of the democratic process.”60 But from his own experience, Ellison argues that pieties include, but are not limited to, familial pieties in a democracy. As only one example, a commitment to pluralist education in the United States interferes with parental pieties. But Ellison, as a marginal member of his community, taught through

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experience to be less afraid of chaos than those in the mainstream, honors the value of accidents as one nurtured upon them as upon his mother’s milk. In part, Ellison likes accidents because he believes that the world that sustains him works by means of them. In other words, his worldview is at bottom accidental rather than cosmological. Ellison’s anticosmology shows in this quotation, in which he muses on the role of the novel in democratic culture: “Perhaps the novel evolved in order to deal with man’s growing awareness that behind the facade of social organization, manners, customs, myths, rituals and religions of the post-Christian era lies chaos. Man knows, despite the certainties which it is the psychological function of his social institutions to give him, that he did not create the universe, and that the universe is not at all concerned with human values.”61 This post-Christian statement of Ellison’s is no single misleading fluke. He writes elsewhere, “We cannot live, as someone has said, in the contemplation of chaos, but neither can we live without an awareness of chaos.”62 Ellison holds that we live in a chaotic universe, or at least one that is chaotic in its relationship to human needs and goods. Sometimes this universe can sustain those goods and sometimes it destroys them, but in neither case is the correlation providential. This nonprovidential worldview has philosophical implications for pieties; what is owed to accident cannot be owed to essence, if tradition insists that the two must be pitted against each other. But also, in part, Ellison likes accidents because a glance at his history shows that they have more often than not helped out the people with whom he identifies. In theory, the unexpected can as easily turn out to be beneficial as hurtful; “one of the functions of our vernacular culture,” he writes, “is that of preparing for the emergence of the unexpected, whether it takes the form of the disastrous or the marvelous.”63 When a person cannot find himself in the “essential” historical narrative, he may also discover that the “accidents” in those stories can serve as sources of well-being which lay claim to his piety.

“WHEN WE JAM, SIR, WE’RE JAMOCRATS!” A democratic culture, according to Ellison, maximizes the occurrence of social accidents.64 In them, individuals are subject to “a random effect generated by a society in which certain assertions of personality, formerly the prerogative of high social rank, have become the privilege of the anonymous and the lowly.”65 They allow for “a much broader ‘random accessibility’ than class and economic restrictions would appear to allow.”66 I have elaborated Ellison’s understandings concerning what piety is, where the objects of piety are to be found, and how, in his view, piety is properly expressed. I now turn to the particular sources of being to which Ellison consciously devotes his own pious energies. Though Ellison owes a formal

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debt to Santayana for the shape of his understanding of piety, the objects— the contents—of Ellison’s piety differ greatly from Santayana’s. Certainly Santayana was no democrat, whereas Ellison’s deepest hopes were pinned upon the future of American democracy. Santayana tends to have classicist tastes; Ellison wishes to add the vernacular to the traditional. In a passage that sounds penned with Santayana looking over his shoulder, Ellison writes about the novel, which he takes to be a democratic literary form par excellence, saying that “although the perfection toward which [the novel] moves is democratic rather than aristocratic, there is no necessary contradiction between our vernacular style and the pursuit of excellence.” Excellence can be functional as well as formal; democracy, Ellison claims, “seeks perfection in the form of functional felicity.”67 He does not criticize the formal pursuit of perfection per se, but rather he takes the social content of this pursuit to task; he questions the terms in which perfection is proposed. Just as excellence in an aristocracy tends to increasingly polarize its social hierarchies as it moves closer and closer to its idealized standards of taste, excellence democratic-style tends toward a different vision of social equality that it holds ideal. These conflicting forms of perfection differ in spiritual kind, but blend in historical “kind.” Those who hold Ellison’s vision of democratic excellence have historical continuity with others who idealize aristocratic excellence; Ellison does not purify his democratic vision of perfection by banishing the various forms that nobility of taste takes. How much chaos a person is willing to tolerate to some extent depends upon how many treasures he or she tends to find in the trash; what gets thrown out is a political decision. Because Ellison usually finds himself in the role of political underdog, he owes much of his well-being to accidents. When he moved to Harlem from Alabama, Ellison accidentally ran into Langston Hughes, Leadbelly, Andre´ Malraux, and Richard Wright within days, and these meetings shaped his future life in dramatic ways. “It is such accidents, such fortuitous meetings,” Ellison observes, “which count for so much in our lives.”68 Political accidents, the slip-ups of the narrative-keepers, provide him with the entry into the mainstream of history he needs; Ellison writes, “it’s the breaks in the pattern of segregation which count, the accidents.”69 Among the democratic objects of piety Ellison treasures are the “American compulsion to improvise,” the United States’ stated but unrealized determination toward social equality, and its naively optimistic embrace of pluralism, and these traits he rescues, Emersonian-style, from the European trash heap. Along with a piety toward accidents, Ellison also specifically credits jazz, democratic ideals, and public education as sources of his being. Ellison elaborates the connections that these sources of well-being have with one another. Public education in a democratic social climate shapes the culture, both its performers and its audience, with its random reach. This random reach of public education, along with other cultural treasures from the trash, train

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the little man from Chehaw station, Ellison’s name for the unexpected culture critic always likely to be in the American audience. “[H]aving been randomly exposed to diverse artistic conventions,” he writes, “the little man has learned to detect the true transcendent ambiance created by successful art from chic shinola.”70 Ellison’s own public education grounded him in both classical and vernacular traditions. He learned classical music and European folk dance; he saw no harm and much good springing from this training as an “exercise in democratic education.” “[I]n learning such dances, we were gaining an appreciation of the backgrounds and cultures of our fellow Americans whose backgrounds lay in Europe. Not only did it narrow the psychological distance between them and ourselves, but we saw learning their dances as an artistic challenge.”71 No artistic training could detract from Ellison’s sense of identity; “dancing such dances,” he maintains, “would no more alter our racial identity or social status than would our singing of Bach chorales.”72 Of the mixed classical and vernacular education he received both at Douglass High School and on the streets of Oklahoma City and of the mixed loyalties it engendered, Ellison writes, “Often we [students] wanted to share both: the classics and jazz, the Charleston and the Irish reel, spirituals and the blues, the sacred and the profane.”73 Jazz is one of Ellison’s profane counterparts to “sacred” classics. The standards of taste the practice of jazz teaches serve to tell him much about democratic excellence. Jazz serves Ellison as a metaphor for democracy, but one that cannot be reduced to its metaphoric implications. In a democracy, as in a jazz band, identity is an artistic projection. Particularly for African Americans, jazz ritualizes and hence preserves an unattained ideal; it is an “artistic projection of the only real individuality possible for [the African-American] in the South, that embodiment of a superior democracy in which each individual cultivated his uniqueness and yet did not clash with his neighbors.”74 For the jazz performer, identity achieved through the creation of a good variation is never complete, but rather is continually repeated and tries to alter itself toward perfection with every repetition and is held to and responsible for the artistic standards of the group. Further, the jazz ethos is one in which challenge is a good. Ellison describes the ethic of the jazz artist (and the American democrat): “There is in this a cruel contradiction implicit in the art form itself, for true jazz is an art of individual assertion within and against the group. Each true jazz moment . . . springs from a contest in which each artist challenges all the rest; each solo flight, or improvisation, represents (like the successive canvases of a painter) a definition of his identity as individual, as member of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition. Thus, because jazz finds its very life in an endless improvisation upon traditional materials, the jazzman must lose his identity even as he finds it.”75 The social practice of jazz also presents the individual and group in agonistic relationship to their mutual

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advantage; it successfully merges communion and competition. Ellison claims that the “delicate balance struck between strong individual personality and the group during . . . jam sessions” is “a marvel of social organization.”76 The social model presented by the jazz band serves as Ellison’s paradigmatic case of antagonistic cooperation.

RICHARD WRIGHT AND THE SOURCES OF RALPH ELLISON’S BEING One way to examine the problematic elements in Ellison’s understanding of piety is to see them played out in the particular example of his relationship to Richard Wright. The choice of affirmative or negative emphasis is at the heart of Ralph Ellison’s ambivalence toward Richard Wright, his personal mentor, friend, and later, stylistic opponent. Ellison, having written essays both in praise of and in castigation of Wright, both appreciates (and mimics) elements of Wright’s style and vehemently disagrees with parts of it. Close examination of this relationship will reveal something of Ellison’s position on piety, or loyalty to the sources of one’s being. At his most critical, Ellison charges Wright with bad faith. Ellison believes that Wright dehumanizes fellow African Americans when Wright speaks of, for example, “the strange absence of real kindness in Negroes.” “[H]ow unstable was our tenderness,” Wright laments in Black Boy, “how lacking in genuine passion we were, how void of great hope, how timid our joy,” and, most damning of all as far as Ellison is concerned, “how bare our traditions, how hollow our memories.”77 To be sure, Wright believes that these lacks are the results of victimization by white supremacist society, but Wright’s fiction does indeed carry with it a tone of despair that resonates with Ellison’s deepest spiritual fears—his personal sickness unto death. I believe that Ellison most fears what he describes in a letter to Burke as an oppression that can no longer be confronted with hope.78 He fears that he may be “hoped to death.” And because loss of hope is his worst fear, Ellison sometimes whistles in the dark to the end of maintaining the possibilities for communication, even when that communication must necessarily be a rhetorical challenge. Wright imitates his writing mentor Henry James in his belief in the inadequacy of American culture, claims Ellison.79 To Ellison’s eyes, by spelling out such a belief Wright commits high impiety of a kind that touches the deepest levels of the human spirit. Referring to the list of lacks in Black Boy, Ellison chastises, “This . . . was Wright’s list of those items of high humanity which he found missing among Negroes. Thank God, I have never been quite that literary.”80 To be clear, Ellison’s dissatisfaction with Wright’s work does not condemn its aim at social protest. Ellison vigorously defends protest as pious participation. The portrayal of protest as pious participation is most keenly seen when

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Ellison quite affirmatively details Wright’s troubled relationship to the American Communist party in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Ellison points out that Wright had fought “with the Communists especially because he had thought that they offered a viable solution. Instead,” and, not at all coincidentally, like Ellison’s protagonist in Invisible Man, “he discovered that they were blind.”81 Ellison can personally identify with Wright’s social complaints. Wright, he continues, sparred with American Communists precisely because he was in agreement with parts of their project and thought the project worth the energy to reform; Wright offered the morally charged descriptions in his novels as a prod to correct overgeneralized theories of party ideology when those theories missed important particulars. “[P]rotest,” Ellison claims, “is not an end in itself, but an effort in the direction of responsible and creative participation.”82 Ellison’s riff on Santayana’s and Burke’s themes—what I’ll call his obligation to “antagonistic cooperation with the sources of our being”—imposes an imperative to speak up, and ultimately to reject, if necessary, parts of those sources when they injure. When Ellison watched Kenneth Burke raise the wrath of a largely communist audience at the American Writers Congress by suggesting to them that they owed more priority to the communication of their ideals through contextualization than they did to ideological purity—that they owed more to communicating across identity lines than they did to drawing them up and reinforcing them—Burke’s message struck home. In a 1945 letter to Burke, Ellison writes: I believe, for my part, that if one truly believes in communism one has the obligation to reject the course it has taken in this country since 1937, and that had more of those intellectuals who left it stated their reasons publicly, they might have saved the Left from becoming the farce it has now become. When it comes to breaking worn-out allegiances we Americans have a gangster psychology. For even when an organization goes bad, or when it persecutes us or maims us spiritually, we feel a strange need to keep silent about it. . . . [T]he rejection of an organization is as much a function of belonging and belief as that of accepting and carrying out its program.83 But of course gangsters typically have a gangster psychology because not having one is not safe in the company of gangsters. Wright, according to Ellison, had “no interest in keeping silent as the price of his freedom of expression. Nor was he so dazzled by his freedom to participate in the councils of newspapers and magazines as to keep his mouth shut. Instead he felt that his experience, insight and talent were important to the party’s correct assessment of American reality. Thus he fought to make his comrades understand that they didn’t know a damn thing about the complexities of the South.”84 True to his belief in the value of complex descriptions of cultures, Ellison claims that the American Communist party rejected Wright’s complexity in favor of an ideological reduction; the party was “always trying to tell Wright that he wasn’t following

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the line. This was so because they thought they had the complexity of his experience down on paper.”85 Rather than his protesting stance, Ellison condemns Wright’s despair—his underestimation of the possibilities for positive social change and his consequent abandonment of a meliorist stance. Wright concentrated on negative possibilities for action and in so doing was impious to parts of the sources of his own identity—those parts that had made Wright quite a political “actor” in his own right. It is not, as is so often claimed, Wright’s naturalistic attention to depressing detail to which Ellison objected.86 Ellison does not buy his own meliorism through a refusal to see discouraging details. His readers can find his own fiction chock-full of such dismal pictures of the somber complexities and the ironic abuses inherent to black life in America. It is rather through a finer and finer focus upon complexity that Ellison finds overlooked possibilities—finds treasures in the garbage. Ellison thinks that if the United States is as utterly devoid of human possibilities for African Americans as Wright paints it, Wright cannot then account for his own successes. He accuses Wright of being impious toward the sources of Richard Wright’s being in order to justify his own despair and in order to urge his personal stance of rejection upon his readers. But Ellison balks at the justification of anyone’s despair or the socialization of so heavy a loss to any human soul. Says Ellison, “whenever I hear a Negro intellectual describing Negro life and personality with a catalogue of negative definitions, my first question is: how did you escape? Is it that you were both exceptional and superior?”87 Brutalization by white society cannot be both the beginning and the end of the story for Ellison, though brutalization may be (and in fact is) a large portion of the tale. Ellison sets up his own test for personal failures of piety and his test involves the potential for identification: He must be able to remain identified with the most brutalized of African Americans. “I must still say within myself, ‘Well, that’s you too, Ellison.’ I’m not talking about guilt,” he continues, “but of an identification which goes beyond race.”88 The factor of identification “beyond race” that Ellison points to is a universal human potentiality to make life better through reasoning, communication, and action—the possibility of making life together more divine than it currently is. Ironically, a man as personally successful at reasoning, acting, and communicating as Wright was “could so dissociate himself from the complexity of his background while trying so hard to improve the condition of black men everywhere . . . could be so wonderful an example of human possibility but could not for ideological reasons depict a Negro as intelligent, as creative or as dedicated as himself.”89 One wonders if Ellison’s critique of Wright is fair to him. Could not a person consider himself socially lucky without abandoning a just stance of moral outrage toward the conditions and agents that keep so many others like himself profoundly oppressed? There is, too, a question of audience brought for-

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ward by a consideration of these critiques.90 Racially speaking, for whom does Ellison write? For whom does Wright write? If one reads Wright as writing for a politically stronger white audience, his writing looks less like despair and more like rhetorical invective. Ellison, at these moments in particular, would seem to be writing to a black audience and encouraging them to find and focus their own strengths toward hopeful action. Above all, Ellison fears that Wright may help (perhaps unwittingly) to perpetuate “an image of the Negro condition that is apt to destroy our human conception of ourselves.”91 Humanity, for Ellison, lies in affirmative possibilities, and he will not dwell upon those aspects of American society that he rejects, though there are plenty of those. He does not deny the experience of slavery and racism or its negative effects. But he builds bridges upon other factors than a history of abuse. “[Slaves] were abused,” he admits. “And the Negro writer is tempted to agree. ‘Yes! God damn it, wasn’t that a horrible thing!’ But he sometimes agrees to the next step, which holds that slaves had very little humanity because slavery destroyed it for them and their descendants.”92 But at that point Ellison digs in his heels. No, he insists. “Any people who could . . . endure until it could take the initiative in achieving its own freedom is obviously more than the sum of its brutalization.”93 Ellison owes piety toward the sacrifices of others from which he has benefited. But we must be careful to notice the oddities of Ellison’s descriptions of sacrifice and the peculiarities of the memorial he raises: “I must affirm those unknown people who sacrificed for me. I’m speaking of those Negro Americans who never knew that a Ralph Ellison might exist, but who by living their own lives and refusing to be destroyed by social injustice and white supremacy . . . made it possible for me to live my own life with meaning. I am forced to look at these people and upon the history of life in the United States and conclude that there is another reality behind the appearance of reality which they would force upon us as truth.”94 Ellison draws a relationship between piety and sacrifice, but the sacrifices he most memorializes—those worthy of being called sacrifice rather than waste—are those made by human beings who refused to be destroyed. The ultimate sacrifice that secures Ellison’s identity is a harder master than death. Enduring in the hope of passing along a tradition that sustains the soul, when giving up might be easier, commands his deepest respect.

CHAPTER SIX

ELLISON'S TRAGIC VISION OF SACRIFICE [T]ragedy teaches man to become divine, but before man can aspire to divinity, he must first accept completely the responsibilities and limitations of being human. —Earl Rovit, “Ralph Ellison and the American Comic Tradition”

AS I SHOWED IN CHAPTER 3, Kenneth Burke, in his analysis of human symbolic activity, worries about whether those actions do more harm or more good for the people who perform them. A brief review of Burke’s thinking on the related subjects of sacrifice and tragedy will help show the extent to which Ellison adopts Burke’s language and his ambivalence about tragedy.

MEDICINES AND POISONS: A REVIEW Symbol-using animals, claims Burke, are simultaneously both a part of and apart from the societies in which they live. Taking the “a part of/apart from” ambivalence to be a spectrum rather than a dichotomy means that some residual level of impiety, or betrayal of the sources of our being, always accompanies the human condition—hence the human need for a remedy for the unease inherent in natural piety seekers. It follows, too, for Burke that the aesthetic quest to make artful tragedy out of painful experience and the scapegoating that results are to some degree inevitable. In thinking through the rhetoric of sacrifice, the poison-to-medicine spectrum serves as the relevant scale for measurment. When people try to fix what ails them, they need to take actions driven by sacrificial motives and to manipulate the symbolic worlds in which they live. In chapter 3 I also pointed out that when Burke organized his ideas about tragedy and sacrifice, he used two varieties of hero at either pole of a sacrificial spectrum. At one end, the poisonous end of the spectrum, he talks about the scapegoat, the figure who bears the burden of uneasiness and who is either killed off or driven out of the community. Burke takes scapegoating rites to be bound up with identity-making; they are, in his view, initiation rites. These rites de passage change the presumed continuity of the natural history of the human animal into the discontinuity of an identity change sought by symbol

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users through symbolically created breaks in historical continuity—a conversion. This conversion is ritually paid for and politically enforced by sacrificial bloodshed, reinforced through repetition of the sacrifice. Killing off a scapegoat involves ending one kind of troublesome identity and beginning a new, cleaned-up life separated from the old life. At the medicine end of the spectrum, Burke describes the tragic hero, the one high enough above us to shape our aspirations, yet enough like us, flawed enough, to retain our identification. By punishing and praising the tragic hero, we vicariously punish and praise ourselves. Differing from the scapegoat figure who would be used by sacrificers to essentialize evil or good, Manichaeanstyle, in the person of the victim, the tragic hero is less perfect, and always comes embued with some level of moral ambivalence. In terms of a poison-to-medicine spectrum, I have claimed in chapter 3 that Burke practices homeopathy; a tiny, controlled dose of the scapegoat poison is required to alleviate the disease of repressed residual impiety. The tragic hero, with his moral ambivalence, provides this tiny, controlled dose under the restricted social framework of the tragic performance, according to Burke. From Burke’s—and, I will argue, Ellison’s—homeopathic point of view, there is no essential difference between a poison and a medicine, yet the two can be very different in their effects, depending on matters of dose, disease treated, particular characteristics of the person suffering sickness, and circumstances surrounding the act of medication. Wisdom consists in knowing how to work with potential poisons for human benefit.

ELLISON’S SACRIFICIAL HEROES As colleagues at Bennington, Kenneth Burke, Stanley Edgar Hyman, and Ralph Ellison were engrossed in discussions of the social role of hero myths and sacrificial rituals. Burke and Ellison along with Hyman, his wife Shirley Jackson, and others in this Bennington circle were particularly influenced by Lord Raglan’s The Hero, Jane Harrison’s Ancient Art and Ritual, and the writings of Gilbert Murray. They were particularly concerned with the premise, drawn from The Golden Bough, that the myth of the hero serves as the narratization of a sacrificial rite; storytelling is a form of repeating the rite’s performance.1 Ellison, too, grounds his thought in this intellectual milieu but places a heightened emphasis on the role of “vernacular process” in sacrificial rites. He not only looks at classical heroes but also shows how homespun vernacular heroes function in the same ways classical ones do. According to Ellison, the classical heritage of tragic and comic literature has no monopoly on ritual processes. Hercules is a classical hero, concedes Ellison, but he goes on to show how John Henry, as a folk hero, has great formal similarities to Hercules.

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Ellison reveals how both figures serve as “sacrificial heroes because they die to affirm something about human life.”2 Ellison, in his 1980 preface to Invisible Man, claimed that when he turned to the examination of sacrificial heroes, vernacular and classical sources came out blurred: “[C]reatures from AfroAmerican fables—Jack-the-Rabbit and Jack-the-Bear—blended in my mind with figures of myth and history about whom I’d been reading: those tracings of the sinister ties which bind the generations in that basic parade of human vision whereby the sighted are often blind and the sightless most perceptive, the son his own father-in-law, and the dedicated and self-righteous detective his own elusive criminal. Images of incest and murder, dissolution and rebirth whirled into my head.”3 Ellison’s heroes, both the mythical and the historical ones, were at once vernacular and classic in the issues of identity transformations they raised, since “classic” here refers not to the social stratification of taste, but rather to the depth and breadth of the hero’s participation in the human condition. Ellison further examines the process and motivation by which marginalized social groups raise up their own vernacular heroes. African Americans, he claims, have long nurtured a habit—a ritual tradition—of elevating their own heroes by telling and retelling stories of the hero’s real-life deeds when they assemble as a group. These “verbal jam sessions” are in fact improvisational rites that allow the group to identify with the persons that they admire— that aid them in remembering people who pushed past the accepted norms of habitual practices as exemplars of excellence or provocateurs of delight. In the process of raising a vernacular hero, “a transparent overlay of archetypal myth is being placed over the life of an individual,” claims Ellison, “and through him we see ourselves.”4 Ellison takes to heart Burke’s messages about the role that identification and the refusal of it plays in establishing scapegoats and tragic heroes. But in keeping with his vernacular variation on Burke’s theme, Ellison finds vernacular heroes from the world of jazz to use as examples of scapegoating and tragic processes. One such person, who as a sacrificial figure lands somewhere on the spectrum between the roles of scapegoat and tragic hero, is Charlie Parker.5 Parker, according to Ellison, served as a tragic hero to those who could identify with his struggles. Ellison writes, “For the postwar jazznik, Parker was Bird, a suffering, psychically wounded, law-breaking, life-affirming hero.” Bird’s “tortured and in many ways criminal striving for personal and moral integration invokes a sense of tragic fellowship in those who saw in his agony a ritualization of their own fears, rebellions and hunger for creativity.”6 The phrases lawbreaking and life-affirming echo Burke’s discussions of tragedy and its heroes in Attitudes toward History, which I discussed in chapter 3. Furthering the analogy to Burke’s work, Ellison claims that for those listeners who insisted upon keeping Parker in either a subhuman or a superhuman position, that is, for those who refuse to identify with him, Parker serves as a scapegoat. “Our defeats

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and failures, even our final defeat by death, were loaded upon his back and given ironic significance and thus made more bearable,” he writes. “Perhaps Charlie was poor robin come to New York and here to be sacrificed to the need for entertainment.”7 Of Parker’s public suffering Ellison writes, “In attempting to escape the role, at once sub- and super-human, in which he found himself, he sought to outrage his public into an awareness of his most human pain.”8 In the framework shared by Burke and Ellison, while the tragic hero is ambivalently above and below, inferior and superior to the person who makes use of him, tragedy (as opposed to scapegoating) ultimately exacts a human identification with its hero—one that hurts—in payment for the catharsis it provides. It is this self-sacrificial payment that scapegoaters aim to avoid paying by seeing only the discontinuities between themselves and their sacrificial figure. Ellison draws upon Constance Rourke’s studies of the American tradition of minstrel shows in American Humor and The Roots of American Culture, and in doing so shows how minstrelsy and the performer role associated with it victimized and continues to victimize African Americans. Relying upon Rourke’s work, Ellison shows how earlier American minstrel shows of the 1840s and 1850s served as a scapegoating ritual of exclusion. He writes, “As Constance Rourke has made us aware, the action of the early minstrel show . . . constituted a ritual of exorcism.”9 The minstrel performer, excluded from white society, served as the vehicle for this exorcism of white demons. The role of performer as scapegoat developed in minstrel shows. In historical continuity with the minstrel performer, the jazz musician resembles the minstrel entertainer because both serve as “the traditional delight-maker (inferior because performing at the audience’s command, superior because he can perform effectively through the magic of his art).”10 Those telling designations of “inferior” and “superior” point to the sites of human disconnection with the minstrel identity—disconnections that through audience reception turn him into a scapegoat rather than a tragic hero. Audience members see themselves making no command performances, nor can they envision themselves approaching the excellence of the minstrel’s talent. As long as the performer is seen variously as subhuman and superhuman, but never merely and commonly human, identification can be refused. The performer maims him- or herself, relieving the audience of the guilt of victimization and allowing them psychological distance from the role of active aggressor. Because the minstrel-performer ostensibly humiliates himself, the audience can reassure themselves that their role in the sacrifice being performed is a passive one, alleviating their guilt. Ellison points out that “a psychological dissociation from this symbolic selfmaiming is one of the powerful motives at work in the audience.”11 Ellison also examines Louis Armstrong’s role as a sacrificial figure. Both Parker and Armstrong served in rites of victimage, according to Ellison. But how these men were received by their audience determines whether they were

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scapegoats, tragic heroes, or even comic clowns. Armstrong, according to Ellison, saw himself as a clown, but many in his audience refused to see him as he saw himself and instead used him as a scapegoat. Ellison claimed that Armstrong was “not only a great performing artist but a clown in the Elizabethan sense of the word,” though one made into a scapegoat by his audience against his will.12 Ironically, in this case, Armstrong’s victimization was primarily the undertaking of black Americans, claims Ellison. The traditional “victims” become the “victimizers”; Ellison will not allow the American racial distinction to essentialize the human capacity for both being a victim and victimizing. By labeling Louis Armstrong an “Uncle Tom” because he was too much the “performer,” hence too closely tied to the minstrelsy traditions other black musicians would disown, other black performers victimized Armstrong. They did not see him as a clown, as he saw himself, but rather they used him as a scapegoat. Ellison explains: “[W]hen they [black jazz performers] fastened the epithet ‘Uncle Tom’ upon Armstrong’s music they confused artistic quality with questions of personal conduct, a confusion which would ultimately reduce their own music to the mere matter of race. By rejecting Armstrong they thought to rid themselves of the entertainer’s role. And by way of getting rid of the role, they demanded, in the name of their racial identity, a purity of status which by definition is impossible for the performing artist.”13

KEEP AMERICA PURE WITH LIBERTY PAINTS! Ellison stays wary of the drive for purity of identity, which requires establishing a discontinuity between various identities, because he demands recognition of the historical continuities of relationship. Because he knows from experience that white America has long tried to purify itself of its uncomfortable relationship to black Americans to devastating effect, he criticizes the symbolic move when he sees it, even when it comes from black musicians trying to purify themselves of a history of subservience and a prior dependence upon a white American audience that they would rather deny. “What I am suggesting,” he explains, “is that when you go back you do not find a pure stream. . . . Usually when you find some assertion of purity, you are dealing with historical, if not cultural ignorance.”14 For the sake of psychological comfort, that potential for continuity must be replaced by an insider/outsider distinction, created symbolically and thereafter reinforced through the sacrificial rite. In Ellison’s words, the scapegoat serves as “a marker, a symbol of limits, a metaphor for the ‘outsider.’ ”15 The insider-outsider distinction that marks identity group heresy and orthodoxy creates the discontinuity necessary for feeling pure of dissenting members and obliterates any claims those outsiders make on communal responsibility.

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Ellison thinks that this tendency to create scapegoats has invaded American fiction to its moral detriment. According to him, when characters lose the moral ambiguity that humans share as potential victims/victimizers, fiction loses its ability to provide the reader with tragic awareness. “It is not accidental,” he writes of the American novel since Hemingway, “that the disappearance of the human Negro from our fiction coincides with the disappearance of deep-probing doubt and a sense of evil.” The only kind of moral doubt that comes through in contemporary fiction he complains, “is a shallow doubt, which seldom turns inward upon the writer’s own values; almost always it focuses outward, upon some scapegoat with which [the reader] is seldom able to identify himself as Huck Finn identified himself with the scoundrels who stole Jim, and with Jim himself.”16 The sort of tragic consciousness Ellison favors provides readers with the ability to make multiple identifications with both victims and victimizers. The Huck Finn who gave moral instruction to Twain’s readers was able to identify both with slavemaster and with slave; Ellison argues that this was Huck’s strength as a literary figure. He speaks of twin myths in American culture, “one of which holds that there is a pure mainstream of American culture which is ‘unpolluted’ by any trace of Negro American style or idiom, and the other (propagated currently by the exponents of Negritude) which holds that Western art is basically racist.”17 If Ellison could read Houston Baker’s interpretation of Invisible Man, especially Baker’s account of the sharecropper Trueblood, I suspect that he might point out that Baker misses the irony Ellison intended on the subject of “washing up.” Baker, in full moral seriousness unattenuated by any sense of irony, writes about the two pregnant black women in Trueblood’s family: “The two bearers of new black life are engaged in a rite of purification, a workaday ritual of washing clothes . . . where the ‘earth . . . was hard and white from where wash water had long been thrown.’ ”18 Baker is still purifying; only the color of the dirt has changed in order to convict the guilty. While the guilty deserve conviction, and dirt certainly can be and frequently turns out to be white, Baker’s hard-nosed pressure for a racialized moral purity leads him to justify the injustices Trueblood inflicts upon his own kin. Predictably, Baker solves this inconsistency through another purification rite: “the sharecropper,” he explains, “confessionally purges himself—as he, in vernacular terms, again ‘washes his dirty linen’ before a white audience.”19 Never does Baker realize that “washing” for purity’s sake is part of what Ellison is trying to make fun of—to complicate for the sake of revealing something true about purification processes. Incest, whether committed imaginatively by a white Norton or by a black Trueblood, is condemned by Ellison as the genealogical, patriarchal, and potentially racist purification strategy that it is. Some of Ellison’s other commentators can condemn incest when they see it in the personage of Norton. Notice Kun Jong Lee’s account in “Ellison’s Invisible Man: Emersonianism Revised”: “The northern aristocrat’s incest may be compared with royal or aristocratic incest

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in other societies, which was largely dictated, anthropological studies have shown, by extrasexual reasons, such as ‘maintenance of rank and conservation of property’ ” (Firth 340). The strategy of committing incest to consolidate power and possessions was not unique to non-Western or ancient societies. Frank Whigham notes that aristocrats in Jacobean England tended to “ ‘limit exogamy’ when their vested interests in the traditional social hierarchy were being threatened by the rise of the middle class (168).”20 Baker himself condemns Norton’s incest on similar grounds: “What more exacting control could this millionaire New Englander have exercised than the incestuous domination of his own human family as a productive unit, eternally giving birth to new profits? Only terror of dreadful heavenly retribution, of punishment for ‘impropriety,’ had prevented him from attempting such a construction of life with his pathetically idealized only child, now deceased.”21 But Baker’s protection of Trueblood’s moral purity wipes away his act of incest and reduces its value and import to a pornographic story to be sold as a commodity to Norton—a commodity with presumably no concrete consequences for Trueblood’s family. Baker’s Marxist lens makes Norton the only villain and renders Trueblood’s wife and daughter invisible, along with the damage these two women sustain. This interpretation, I am arguing, is foreign to Ellison’s intentions. Burke had pointed out that medicinal relief, if not purification, can be achieved without the full-blown force of poisonous scapegoating. When identification with the victim becomes a possibility, the scapegoat can become a tragic hero. Ellison claims that the “effectiveness of any sacrifice depends upon our identification with the agony of the hero-victim.”22 It is as if we are never really convinced that we are clean after scapegoating and we have to wash again and again; as long as the identification between the sacrificer and the sacrificed is denied and repressed, the ritual cleaning keeps requiring repetition. Ellison condemns this strategy for relieving moral unease through purification processes. In the finale of Invisible Man the narrator reflects: “The fact is that you carry part of your sickness within you, at least I do as an invisible man. I carried my sickness and though for a long time I tried to place it in the outside world, the attempt to write it down shows me that at least half of it lay within me.”23 But when a tragic hero replaces the scapegoat, the sacrificer can be both a part of and apart from the victim. Through the psychological dissociation provided by the dramatic framework, the audience can maim itself as it becomes engrossed in the tragic performance, then get up and go home unharmed. In saying this, I have, however, hinted at a potential weakness in Burke’s view of tragic catharsis. Here, too, there is a repetitive element. As with obsessive handwashing, even the stories of tragic heroes tend to be told and retold; we admire them as we watch their social elevation and weep over their ensuing downfall; we are fascinated as we allow them to be maimed for us; we learn more about ourselves from the experience. Tragic heroes are noble enough to attract our aspirations through self-flattery but flawed enough for our identifi-

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cation. Yet Ellison seems to be a bit more cautious even than Burke is in the neighborhood of tragic catharsis. Something too close to scapegoating seems still to be going on in tragic catharsis—something that leaves Ellison, if not Burke, uncomfortable. Ellison writes of a particular view of the tragic hero with which he can rest easy—specifically, “the hero as witness.” “At his best he [the reader or the audience of tragic drama] does not ask for scapegoats, but for the hero as witness,” he writes.24 What is this “hero as witness”? Ellison, I would suggest, is concerned that in tragedy, even with all the moral ambivalence embodied in it as opposed to the moral purity pretended to in scapegoating, something proffered in the tragic performance is only partially recognized in the reader or hearer. Any tragedy from which a person may go home “unharmed” is a tragedy wherein the freight is not fully being paid by the recipient of catharsis. The “hero as witness” offers the would-be recipient of catharsis the opportunity for tragic self-knowledge. He or she presents the possibility, not just for a sentimental identification that leaves a person relatively unscathed, but for the recognition of relationship that brings home the full meaning of consubstantiality as Burke described it and the complicity it implies. This full self-knowledge shows that all “vicarage” is hubris. For a catharsis that endures, a person pays full price and can allow no one to stand in his or her stead. Perhaps this is the insight about gradations of identification that a person all too used to being cast as the “whipping boy” brings to a Burkean account of symbolic action that sometimes, by Burke’s own admission, grants symbols too much magical power. This Ellisonian tragic hero offers the opportunity for a person living in a hierarchy of social power to recognize just who he or she is. This “hero as witness” is not Oedipus, but Tiresias—the unclassifiable one. The social division into essential kinds masks what needs to be recognized. Without the division into kinds that provides for a comforting purity that separates essence from accident, innocence is impossible. Of innocence Ellison writes, “innocence” refers to our tendency to ignore the evil which can spring from our good intentions, as well as to the consternation with which Americans react upon discovering the negative, often appalling, results that can erupt from actions conceived as totally positive. In the terminology of tragic drama such “innocence” is viewed as an aspect of human character, and when operative in the psychology of the Hero it is termed a tragic flaw. The Greeks termed this flaw in character and perception hubris, and to the force which springs up from the enactment of such tragic flaws, and which clings to tragic action like the clicks of erasure to magnetic recording tape, the Greeks gave the name of nemesis.25 These words, written by Ellison in 1974 as a U.S. president struggled with his own hubris, show how social power facilitates an emphasis upon intentions as

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essential while dismissing unintended consequences as accidental. But this essentialized ethic allows for a false independence from accident that tragedy mitigates. Tragic drama makes the inessential, the accident, the unintentional count in our fate. It is the little unintended details that undo us, no matter how mighty a structure we build to preserve our innocence. We never are alone in the world with our good intentions. We segregate bodies, we segregate society into kinds, we segregate literature into genres—we namers—and we segregate the essential meaning of words from the accidental traces that cling to them. Segregation accomplished, we proceed to apply different rules to different kinds. Ellison suggests that “the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word.” Following Burke in his later esteem for vernacular literature, Ellison explains, “by this I mean the word in all its complex formulations, from the proverb to the novel and stage play.”26 Of essentializing understood through the metaphor of segregation, Ellison makes a claim that if taken seriously might unravel skeins of logocentric moral philosophy and theology: “The essence of the word is its ambivalence.”27 If Burke points out the need to identify with our would-be essentialized scapegoats in order to see that they are really our antiessentialist tragic heroes, Ellison in turn points out that some Americans can more readily afford the refusal to recognize themselves as players in a tragedy than others. Reflecting on his own ambivalence about the name he inherited, Ellison writes, “when we are reminded so constantly that we bear, as Negroes, names originally possessed by those who owned our enslaved grandparents, we are apt, especially if we are potential writers, to be more than ordinarily concerned with the veiled and mysterious events, the fusions of blood, the furtive couplings, the business transactions, the violations of faith and loyalty, the assaults; yes, and the unrecognized and unrecognizable loves through which our names were handed down unto us.”28 The name is the symbol that grants recognition of some identities and denies recognition where name is denied. Ralph Waldo’s very name demands that he recognize connections and obligations that he might more comfortably deny. And he would be the first to point out that these connections are ones he did not choose—often involuntary, sometimes the connections names imply are coerced. Names speak of families whose existence is founded on rape and exploitation, but families whose historical reality, even if morally repugnant to the memory, cannot be denied with impunity. Ellison did not give himself his name; he was assigned it and had to do agonizing work to make it his own. He inherited this responsibility without ever consenting to it. Ellison undertakes this work of reconciling himself to his name and recognizing his problematic historical relationship to it in order to prevent himself from scapegoating, for the difference between scapegoating and having a tragic hero turns on whether we can identify with our victim—whether we are con-

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scious of our own role as victimizer. Without this kind of fundamental kinship with the enemy, scapegoating can aim at catharsis through purification; an initiation into a new identity can be achieved by killing off an old kind of self and being reborn as a new kind with no historical relation to the old self. This need for recognition of relationship matters in the choice of names Ellison assigns in his fiction. Ellison resists the equation of the Brotherhood in Invisible Man with the Communist Party USA. He explains his choice: “I did not want to describe an existing Socialist or Communist or Marxist political group, primarily because it would have allowed the reader to escape confronting certain political patterns which still exist and of which our two major political parties are guilty in their relationships to Negro Americans.”29 In this case, assigning a particular historical name would have facilitated an escape from recognition Ellison wished to press upon his readers. Notice that he chooses to do this not to protect particular groups—not to hate the sin but love the sinner—but rather to give breadth to his attempt to convict the guilty. The conviction he aims at, however, is not a juridical one, but a confrontation that can be avoided—one that leaves the guilty party free to refuse the recognition. In his short story “Flying Home,” Ellison explores the need for recognition of relationship. Todd, a black Army pilot, seeks to reject a recognition of cultural relationship to an elderly black southern farmer, Jefferson, and to rebuild his identity instead upon a relationship to the predominantly white military hierarchy. Todd meditates grimly on his commanding officers as enemies/heroes: “[T]he enemy would appreciate his skill . . . he would assume his deepest meaning, he thought sadly, neither from those who condescended nor from those who praised without understanding, but from the enemy who would recognize his manhood and skill in terms of hate.”30 Jefferson asks Todd, “Son, how come you want to fly way up there in the air?” Todd answers inaudibly, “Because it’s the most meaningful act in the world . . . because it makes me less like you, he thought.”31 The identity change Todd desires, but ultimately does not get in the form he first desires it, requires an initiation rite that sacrifices folks like Jefferson to appease the more powerful folks from whom he would demand recognition. In this initiation rite, as in any such dramatic rite of passage relying upon a sense of purity, there can be no acknowledged spectrum of continuity between the sacrificed and the sacrificers.

INITIATION RITES AND TRAGIC HEROES IN INVISIBLE MAN The unnamed narrator of Invisible Man serves as an ambivalent tragic hero. As Ellison’s readers—and this includes white readers—we become caught up in his quests while the flaw that allows us to identify with him is his “unques-

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tioning willingness to do what is required of him by others as a way to success.”32 Ellison is intent upon this reader identification with the hero and just as intent that the identification cross racial lines.33 But within the narrative itself, a more purity-oriented rite takes place recurrently. The white establishment that provides the novel’s unnamed narrator with his scholarship to college early in the story scapegoats the young man in an initiation rite—the Battle Royal scene near the opening of the novel. The Battle Royal, claims Ellison, “is a ritual in preservation of caste lines, a keeping of taboo to appease the gods and ward off bad luck. It is also the initiation ritual to which all greenhorns are subjected.”34 Ellison looks at both tragic heroes and scapegoats and his work examines how they participate in ritual processes. The difference between the rites that reinforce caste that Ellison examines in the novel and the rites that Ellison invokes upon his reader in this novel involve the denial of identification in the former rites and the emphasis upon identification in the latter. “[N]o one had ever told me that the ‘battle royal’ was a rite,” explains Ellison, “but I came to see that it was. It was a rite which could be used to project certain racial divisions into the society and reinforce the idea of white racial superiority.”35 The Battle Royal ritual is repeated in variant forms throughout the novel. With each repetition Ellison emphasizes that a certain kind of blindness is necessary to the success of the rite. When the narrator questions the sacrifices he is called upon to make for the Brotherhood later in the story, Brother Hambro, the Brotherhood’s chief indoctrination specialist, accuses him of ignorance of the meaning of sacrifice and its connections to discipline. “I was ordered to carry through an objective and I carried it through,” chastises Hambro [brother of Ham]. “Understand? Even though I had to lose my eye to do it.”36 A kind of blind faith is required to perform these ritual sacrifices. Certain kinds of historical relationships that muddy the waters that would otherwise purify an identity cannot afford to be seen. “So that is the meaning of discipline,” thinks Ellison’s invisible man, “sacrifice . . . yes, and blindness; he [Hambro] doesn’t see me.”37 The scapegoating rituals that Ellison reiterates and explores in Invisible Man are all about establishing certain pure identities. They contain elements of rites of passage from an old identity to a new and unconnected one. The narrator’s first public speech for the Brotherhood, for instance, repeats many of the elements of the Battle Royal read as an initiation rite. The “boy” who was once initiated into a caste role of racial subservience is now to be initiated into the ranks of the Brotherhood. Visibility is clouded. The narrator reports entering the boxing arena where his first official speech as member of the Brotherhood is to be given: “We went in a bunch,” he reports, as did the boy who first fought the Battle Royal; the atmosphere is clouded by a “smoky haze” as in the earlier smoker.38 Those involved in the ritual are to be bonded into one identity and the focusing of that identity is served by the haziness of

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environment, the heightened sensory experience, and an emphasis upon disorientation and discontinuity with the past. Ellison describes his narrator’s experience of initiation into the Brotherhood: The audience seemed to have become one, its breathing and articulation synchronized. I looked at Brother Jack. He stood up front beside a microphone, his feet planted solidly on the dirty canvas-covered platform [a boxing arena], looking from side to side; his posture dignified and benign, like a bemused father listening to the performance of his adoring children. . . . And I seemed to move in close, like the lens of a camera, focusing into the scene and feeling the heat and excitement and the pounding of voice and applause against my diaphragm, my eyes flying from face to face, swiftly, fleetingly, searching for someone I could recognize, for someone from the old life.39 This selective focusing activity makes the present part of the scene seem like the whole of the scene and reflects the synecdochic relationship of scapegoating rituals to tragic narratives, just as Burke had explained them in Rhetoric of Motives.40 Once the episodic and initiatory part of the story is made to seem the whole of the story, past identifications become unrecognizable. It is important to the success of the rite that continuity with problematic (hence impure) past identifications not be allowed to the participants. The new identity must be purified of the connections to any past sources of well-being (such as the narrator’s ties to Mary Rambo in this instance) that detract from the sufficiency of the new identity as Brother. In his first speech for the Brotherhood the narrator experiences the catharsis brought about through this change of identity: “I feel that here tonight, in this old arena,” he weeps, “the new is being born and the vital old revived.”41 The essential old part, the vital old part is being transformed into the whole. And we can deduce that the “nonvital” old connections, in this case the connections to Mary Rambo, the mother figure, are being washed away. These old connections to the feminine are replaced by a new, redefined relationship to femininity—one that echoes the narrator’s relationship to the stripper at the previous Battle Royal smoker. The Invisible Man feels disoriented, confused, and off-balance; he feels “pressed against warm feminine softness”; he stumbles “as in a game of blindman’s buff” as he picks his way through the audience to exit the boxing arena.42 Later in the streets of Harlem after the narrator’s initiation into the Brotherhood, Ellison reiterates the Battle Royal again. When the narrator leads Harlem’s Brotherhood supporters into a clash with Harlem’s separatist members led by Ras the Exhorter, Ellison plays up the similarities of the fight to the blindfolded fighting of the young men at the Battle Royal smoker: “The fight was moving back into the dark where the street lights had been knocked out clear to the corner, and it was quiet except for the grunting and straining and the sound of footfalls and of blows. It was confusing in the dark and I

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couldn’t tell ours from theirs and moved cautiously, trying to see.”43 Eventually Ras corners the narrator and raises his knife against him. Just before the kill that would have solidified and rendered triumphant the validity of a purified and Africanized identity for Harlem with Ras as its head, this leader of the separatist forces in Harlem has a sudden “lapse” in his blindness—one that stops him from completing the sacrifice. Ras talks about his “failure” to sacrifice: “You call me crazy? Look at you two and look at me—is this sanity? Standing here in three shades of blackness! Three black men fighting in the street because of the white enslaver? Is that sanity?”44 To what God was Ras’s nearsacrifice about to be offered? Ras continues, “Dead! I’d have killed you, mahn. Ras the Exhorter raised up his knife and tried to do it, but he could not do it.”45 “Ras would not sahcrifice his black brother to the white enslaver. Instead he cry. Ras is a mahn—no white mahn have to tell him that—and Ras cry.”46 Ellison plays up the similarities of the near-sacrifice to the biblical tale of Abraham and Isaac. And as in that story, the sacrifice is called off even as the knife is raised to commit it. But Ellison describes another sacrifice situation that alludes to the same Genesis story—this one is not stopped in time. As the Invisible Man debates the requirements of sacrifice with Brother Hambro, he describes hearing a child crying in the distance. But as Hambro “kills off” Harlem for the “greater good” of the Brotherhood—“tragedy” though it is, concedes Hambro—something living dies. “The distant child had stopped singing now,” observes the narrator at the sacrificial point of no return, “and it was dead quiet.”47 With these reiterations Ellison explores the meaning of sacrifices that secure identity. How do we discern their moral limits, he asks? The narrator complains, “Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only they were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop? Is this the new true definition, is Brotherhood a matter of sacrificing the weak? If so, at what point do we stop? Hambro looked as though I were not there. ‘At the proper moment science will stop us.’ ”48 Just as Burke had configured it, Ellison too portrays a “science”—in this case Marxist historical materialism—as an alternative piety (the lion) that in many ways substitutes for the traditional religious view (the camel) it displaces. He satirizes the gullibility and moral blindness of this “pious” self-sacrifice in the voice of its black adherent, Brother Tarp, who seeks to banish the Invisible Man’s suspicions about sacrifice: “Religion?” He blinked his eyes. “Folks like me and you is full of distrust,” he said. “We been corrupted ’til it’s hard for some of us to believe in Brotherhood. And some even want revenge! That’s waht I’m talking about. We have to root it out! We have to learn to trust our other [white] brothers. After all, didn’t they start the Brotherhood? Didn’t they [emphasis in the original] come and stretch out their hand to us black men and say, ‘We

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want y’all for our brothers?’ Didn’t they do it? Didn’t they, now? Didn’t they set out to organize us, and help fight our battle and all like that? Sho they did, and we have to remember it twenty-four hours a day. Brotherhood [emphasis in the original]. That’s the word we got to keep right in front of our eyes every second [emphasis added].”49 Like a veil, Brotherhood must be kept in front of one’s eyes so that any accidental and contingent connections and continuities with one’s community, one’s personal history, and one’s own moral dependence upon physical wellbeing will not be seen, facilitating the blindness necessary for an abrupt change of identity secured by sacrificing a scapegoat and, in this case, by the victimization of one’s own self. As Ellison’s narrator in Invisible Man contemplates it, “For them it was simple. But hell, I was both. Both sacrificer and victim.”50 Where is the line, Ellison asks, between noble self-sacrifice and “eating out one’s own guts”?

AMERICAN RITES OF IDENTITY The most horrifying example of scapegoating as catharsis presented by Ellison is the rite of lynching. He describes in detail “the anthropological meaning of lynching, a blood rite that ended in the death of a scapegoat whose obliteration was seen as necessary to the restoration of social order.”51 Lynching was the ritual that played out the national myth of white supremacy, according to Ellison. The United States had developed “a national mythology in which Negroes were the chief scapegoats,” claimed Ellison, who goes on to say that “the function of this mythology was to allow whites a more secure place . . . in American society.”52 Maintenance of this social hierarchy inspired a “rage for human sacrifice” that established the myth as a sacred one. “[T]he awe-inspiring enactment of the myth,” writes Ellison, “took the form of a rite in which a human victim was sacrificed.” This rite required “a preselected scene,” and was “led by a masked celebrant . . . who manipulated the numinous objects (lynch ropes, the American flag, shotgun, gasoline and whiskey jugs).”53 The inclusion of the American flag as a numinous object is crucial to Ellison. Its presence indicates that this ritual upholds one of two competing myths that secure American identity, one of which Ellison repudiates and one on which he places his hopes. The myth he rejects, the myth of sacred white supremacy, struggles alongside the myth he embraces, the myth of American democratic identity, both vying for American souls. The democratic myth appeals to Ellison’s favorite American founding ideals of freedom and equality, as well as the values Americans place upon change and openness; the white supremacist myth appeals to and appeases the social pride of white Americans.

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The differences of kind substantiated in its social hierarchy are upheld by the scapegoating of a black victim in its recurrent rite of lynching. Of the religious nature of lynching Ellison writes, “For the lynch mob, blackness is a sign of satanic evil given human form. It is the dark consubstantial shadow which symbolizes all that its opponents reject in social change and in democracy. Thus it does not matter if its sacrificial victim is guilty or innocent, because the lynch mob’s object is to propitiate its insatiable god of whiteness.”54 Elsewhere he adds “[N]ot only were the stability of social order and the health of business seen as depending upon white dominance, but the sanctity of the moral order as well. Whether denied or admitted, in this area religion was in the service of politics.”55 According to Ellison, Americans have never quite succeeded in banishing hierarchical worship: “even as the English support of the old hierarchical psychoses collapsed,” he writes, “it quickly reasserted itself in the immature and unfinished psyche of the new political order. That absentee authority and privilege once vested in kingship now reappeared as the all-too-present authoritarian privilege of those possessing property and high social position.”56 As Huck tells Jim on the raft trip down the Mississippi, through the heart of the United States, “Sometimes I wish we could hear of a country that’s out of kings.”57 But despite Twain’s joke, lacking kings, Americans made do with what they had to hand. Thus did race become “a major cause, form and symbol of the American hierarchical psychosis,” explains Ellison. The democratic journey is a turbulent one, according to Ellison, and Americans become democracy-weary all too quickly. When they tire, they turn to the hierarchical psychosis for some semblance of safety. Alluding again to Huck and Jim’s journey down the river, Ellison writes, “Beset by feelings of isolation because of the fluid, pluralistic turbulence of the democratic process, we cling desperately to our own familiar fragment of the democratic rock, and from such fragments we confront our fellow Americans in that combat of civility, piety and tradition which is the drama of American social hierarchy.”58 Hierarchical worship, of which the religion of white supremacy is one competing form, resorts to the familiarity of combat when communication becomes too threatening. In the religion of white supremacy, a racial hierarchy trumps a hierarchy based upon economic class, making for a peculiarly American form of combat. Racial stereotypes, claims Ellison, “prepared Negroes for the role of sacrificial scapegoat in the ritual drama of Southern society, and helped bind the poor whites to the middle and upper classes with whom they shared ethnic identity. Being uncomfortably close to Negroes in economic status, the poor whites clung to the stereotypes as to a life raft in turbulent waters.”59 As worshippers at the altar of social hierarchy, poor southern whites found it easier to sanctify white skin than to struggle through the turbulence of the democratic process, which was “far less inviting than clinging to the conviction that they, by the mere fact of race, color, and tradition alone, were supe-

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rior to the black masses below them. Yet in their own way they were proud idealists to whom the South’s racial arrangement was sacred.”60 Ellison rejects this American civil religion of whiteness, but he embraces the civil religion of democracy—sacred documents, literary traditions, ritual retellings of heroic deeds, tragic revolutionary sacrifices, and all. He sees the U.S. Constitution as a covenant that binds Americans to each other.61 He speaks of sacred myths held by American democrats, and their human-made initiation rites, like the one he celebrates and self-consciously describes as guest speaker at the 1972 William and Mary graduation, invoking language of sacred place, sacred founding documents, national severing of ritual ties with England, the conferral of new identities, bought with the blood of patriots.62 Again employing the metaphor of the rock of American identity in the middle of the turbulent river of democratic process, he writes, “The rock, the terrain upon which we struggle, is itself abstract, a terrain of ideas that, although man-made, exerts the compelling force of the ideal, of the sublime: ideas that draw their power from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. We stand, as we say, united in the name of these sacred principles. But indeed it is in the name of these same principles that we ceaselessly contend, affirming our ideals even as we do them violence.”63 Echoing the opening of the gospel according to John, Ellison declaims: In our national beginnings was the word democratic, and since we vowed in a war rite of blood and sacrifice to keep its commandments, we act in the name of a word made sacred. Yes, but since we are, as Burke holds, languageusing, language-misusing animals—beings who are by nature vulnerable to both the negative and the positive promptings of language as symbolic action—we Americans are given to eating, regurgitating, and alas, re-eating even our most sacred words. It is as though they contain a substance that is crucial to our national existence but that, except in minute and infrequently ingested doses, we find extremely indigestible.64 Remember, homeopathic medicines are poisons. Ellison’s logocentric embrace of “the word democratic,” however, should be understood alongside his claim that “the essence of the word is its ambivalence.” Democracy American-style, manmade, made sacred by the same, is riddled with the tensions Burke highlighted between communication and combat. Where the communicative elements of democracy are highlighted, the combative elements in the background need to be brought forward as remedy. Emphasizing combat, Ellison writes, American democracy is a most dramatic form of social organization, and in that drama each of us enacts his role by asserting his own and his group’s values and traditions against those of his fellow citizens. Indeed, a battle-

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royal conflict of interests appears to be basic to our conception of freedom, and the drama of democracy proceeds through a warfare of words and symbolic actions by which we seek to advance our private interests while resolving our political differences. Since the Civil War this form of symbolic action has served as a moral substitute for armed warfare, and we have managed to restrain ourselves to a debate which we carry on in the interests of democracy.65 Americans are engaged in warfare; in its most benign form it is a warfare of words and symbols. To be sure, words can be used as weapons. Ellison reminds his readers that the democratic “contest (our improvised moral equivalent for armed warfare) proceeds . . . as rites of symbolic sacrifice in which cabalistic code words are used to designate victims consumed with an Aztec voracity for scapegoats.”66 But words and symbols are more often thought of as means for communication than as weapons. If words can be used to mystify, they can also be used to dispel mystifications. Ellison writes of “that mystery which arises from strangeness and from the differences in experience between individuals and groups occupying different regions, neighborhoods, and levels of the social pyramid. Such mysteries arise out of the difficulty of communicating across the hierarchical divisions of American society, and a great deal of our misunderstanding springs from our failures of communication. Such mystery is a product of psychological distance and our ignorance of one another.”67 Another metaphor employed by Ellison to explore the tensions and ambivalences implied in the democratic process is the metaphor of ritual eating. Do we gain our identity by differentiating ourselves from what we ingest? Perhaps we only eat what we may use for our personal nourishment; that is, after all, what it means to consume something. Or do we ritually eat to elide difference in identity—to resolve distinctions in some way. Are we, to paraphrase Ludwig Feuerbach, what we eat or are we not? When do we cease to medicate ourselves and begin to “eat out our own guts”? Ellison suggests that we consume our most sacred words—and that when we do so, they do not sustain us but rather make us nauseated. Perhaps this is but another way to describe Burke’s paradox of the combat/communion mix. Ellison finds the mixture of combat and communion implicit in democracy most easy to understand through metaphors that embrace agonistic effort as a communicative good. The development of the hierarchical psychosis in the United States, he claims, “contained a lot of mystification, for if there was hope for a cure to our condition, it lay in the direction of both white and black men undergoing that agonistic effort necessary to the fulfillment of the nation’s commitment to those ethical principles compromised by the Founding Fathers.”68 American democratic hopes depend upon whether Americans can learn to cooperatively compete, thinks Ellison. Just like members of a jazz band, straining to shine individually while struggling to remain a group, members of the American

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democracy will have to play out and play with the contradictions involved in embracing both a creative freedom that values personal excellence and an equality of status that assures justice as an ideal. If, however, Burke and Ellison are right in claiming that the relationship between poison and medicine is defined by a spectrum rather than a dichotomy, the scapegoat of a “poisonous” lynching dedicated to white supremacy can be redescribed as the “medicinal” tragic hero of a national tragedy; this Ellison does. This Ellisonian hero is not, however, a vicar—a substitute—but rather a “hero as witness.” Referring to the ritual of lynching, he revisions its victim as a hero: “[T]his initial act of pride [the scapegoating of AfricanAmericans by whites] was to give the Afro-American an inadvertent and unrecognized but crucial role in the nation’s drama of conscience. Racism took on the symbolic force of an American form of original sin, and as a man chosen to suffer to advance the nation’s spiritual and material well-being, the black American was endowed linguistically with an ambivalent power, like that vested in Elizabethan clowns, Christian martyrs and tragic heroes.”69 Even as he transforms the scapegoat into a “hero as witness,” Ellison leaves open the question of whether this revisioned hero is comic or tragic. “Word magic” robbed black Americans when the words designated black Americans as victims, but fortunately word magic works in two directions. Ellison can undertake this transformation by locating the positive and affirmative content contained within an attempted negation. The creation of an identity difference motivated largely by pride or hubris is still an attempt to affirm something taken to be good and takes part in an otherwise humane process of affirming the good. The good remains a good despite the illegitimacy of the sacrifices made to secure it. Even negative acts have a positive rhetorical content. “[S]uch disavowals,” Ellison writes, “despite their negative posture, have their positive content. And to the extent that they are negatives uttered in an attempt to create . . . these disavowals are affirmations.”70 Tragedy is, after all, as Burke had argued, an affirmative genre. “[T]he great tragedies not only treat of negative matters . . . but treat them within a context of man’s will to act, to challenge reality and to snatch triumph from the teeth of destruction.”71 The misguided sacrifices made to secure varying understandings of American identity need scrutiny, so that good can be plucked out of error. It was good for Americans to act to change social reality through symbolic rites—all the better to move toward American democratic ideals. It was good to highlight the plenitude of excellences brought to American democracy by its many participants. But Americans were erroneous when they retrenched behind an allegiance to social hierarchy, an allegiance the nation once struggled and sacrificed to throw off in the name of the equality. They made blood sacrifice to ally themselves to a democratic ideal; the struggle to give material existence to this ideal wearied the young nation into hierarchy worship within days of being espoused.

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If Ellison does indeed embrace a civil religion of democracy, how are the democratic rites Ellison treasures formally different from the rites dedicated to the god of white supremacy? Sadly, they are not that different, he reminds us. They differ in content, but not in form. The democratic myth too was made sacred with the blood of human sacrifice spilled in a war that rejected colonial status. This myth too repudiates some of the sources of American well-being, particularly the remains of its British colonial infancy, in the name of creating a new nation purified of its childhood connections and dependencies. Aside from being a myth, the “purifying” of American identity engages us in acts of impiety toward parts of our traditions. What is properly tragic to Ellison is the “realization that the treasure of possibility is always to be found in the cave of chaos, guarded by the demons of destruction.”72 Rock or raft, in waters this turbulent, no one stays dry without abandoning the river. This is not only the United States’ national tragedy, but the antiessentialist one as well, endemic to trading dichotomies for spectrums, inherent in homeopathy. This tragedy makes the quest for identity both a potential salvation device and a political hellhole of hopelessness for American pluralists.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE BLUES OF AMERICAN IDENTITY: COMIC TRANSCENDENCE IN ELLISON Fair masks, like flowers, like sunsets, like melodies wrung out of troubled brains and strung wire, cover for us appropriately the anatomical face of nature; and words and dogmas are other masks, behind which we, too, can venture upon the stage. . . . —George Santayana, “The World’s a Stage,” in Soliloquies Masks afford us the pleasing excitement of revising our so accidental birth-certificate and of changing places in spirit with some other changeling. . . . —George Santayana, “Masks,” in Soliloquies We compose and play our chosen character, we wear the buskin of deliberation, we defend and idealize our passions, we encourage ourselves eloquently to be what we are, devoted or scornful or careless or austere; we soliloquize (before an imaginary audience) and we wrap ourselves gracefully in the mantle of our inalienable part. So draped, we solicit applause and expect to die amid a universal hush. . . . Everyone who is sure of his mind, or proud of his office, or anxious about his duty assumes a tragic mask. —George Santayana, “The Tragic Mask,” in Soliloquies

GEORGE SANTAYANA, like many participants in American letters, thought that Americans, whether tragic actors or comic ones, were constantly onstage. They were often most comic when they were unself-consciously playing the tragedian. Santayana’s view is consonant with Burke’s dramatic analysis of symbolic action and with Ellison’s account of American character. This dramatistic account of American culture is continuous with the views of Melville, who depicted the cast of American characters making and betraying confidences on the stage of a Mississippi riverboat, and with the vision of Twain, portraying the promise and perils of American “confidence men” strutting the boards of the more vernacular stage of a Mississippi river raft. Whether the character concerned is Ellison’s Rinehart, conning his way through the streets

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of Harlem, or Trueblood performing for his paying audience,1 in his novel Invisible Man, Ellison adheres to the belief that “[w]hen American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.”2 As we saw in the case of Burke, the dramatistic assessment of American character tends to allow the comic genre to embrace and encompass the tragic genre. Tragedians, more than comedians, are loath to admit the masklike nature of their dignified masks. But when viewed self-consciously as a performance, even a tragic performance has its comic side—comic in its pretensions not to be a performance—that is, a symbolic act aimed to move an audience or to socialize a loss. The tragic actor so identifies with his role that allowing the dramatic mask to come unglued from the human face threatens the meaning-world of the tragic actor. Ellison called the kind of self-knowledge evaded by this performer tragic knowledge. We evade tragic knowledge to avoid the unsettling risk of seeing our own “impurities”—the places where we owe outside our own identity boundaries, whatever those may be, wherever we may have placed them. And yet, claims Ellison, human beings contain ambiguous cotendencies; we evade the knowledge “perhaps out of an effort to postpone completing that identity which we are compelled nonetheless to seek.”3 Completing that identity through tragic knowledge provides a person with a transcendence “which, despite his tendency to evade the tragic aspects of reality, he seeks.”4 Ellison, like Santayana, knows that dramatic performance is all about identifying with a role—or refusing to. When Ellison writes about the possibilities for transcending racial roles through the reader’s engrossment in a novel, he complains that all too often, the white reader wears his whiteness pulled up around himself like a mantle: “[P]erhaps the white reader draws his whiteness around himself when he sits down to read. He doesn’t want to identify himself with Negro characters in terms of our immediate racial and social situation, though on the deeper human level, identification can become compelling when the situation is revealed artistically.”5 Ellison writes determined to loosen the cloak of whiteness from his white readers all too enmeshed in their tragic roles of high social office, because the dramatic performance, and consequently the dramatic novel, is all about making or withholding an identification. Ellison, as artist, wants to move his audience—his readers—to an identification that crosses “sacralized” racial boundaries. White Americans, claims Ellison, both know and refuse to know that they wear masks as performers in an American drama: “[T]hat which cannot gain authority from tradition may borrow it with a mask,” he explains.6 Thus, Americans refuse the knowledge of their masks because their authority, they believe, inheres in their masks. However, their irrepressible knowledge of their masks makes for a troubling uncertainty in the American actor’s psyche: “[O]ut of the counterfeiting of the black American’s identity there arises a profound doubt in the white man’s mind as to the authenticity of his own

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image of himself. He, after all, went into the business when he refused the king’s shilling and revolted. He had put on a mask of his own, as it were.”7 The sense of incongruity between the recorded and the unrecorded stories of American history and the reversals inherent to living within that history are typical of what Ellison calls the American joke. “[O]ur unknown history,” he writes, “doesn’t stop having consequences even though we ignore them.”8 According to Ellison, Americans know in their bones what it is to pretend, because the origins of their identity are tied up in pretensions to a discontinuity from their colonial past. “For the ex-colonials,” he writes, “the declaration of an American identity meant the assumption of a mask, and it imposed not only the discipline of national self-consciousness, it gave Americans an ironic awareness of the joke that always lies between appearance and reality, between the discontinuity of social tradition and that sense of the past which clings to the mind. And perhaps even an awareness of the joke that society is man’s creation, not God’s.”9 Part of what goes into the American joke is the distinction drawn by Burke between human comedy and divine comedy. The gut feeling that provokes laughter is based upon an observed incongruity when social interactions turn out to be anything but divine. Ellison, however, shows that not all the participants in the American drama are on the stage; some of them are in the audience. The framework for the drama extends past the proscenium, and this extension of the dramatic frame makes for plenty of comic situations. Later I will show how Ellison draws from the later work of Burke in order to criticize Burke’s earlier work on this point. Ellison especially delights in American theatrics that involve a particular character mask—a trickster figure. He calls him “the little man behind the stove at Chehaw station.” You never expect this person to be in your audience, but inevitably, when you least expect it, this little man shows up. He is the antidote for hubris—the one who knows what you thought no one in your audience would know. He can be your nemesis or your source of unhoped for success. Democracies are full of these little men. Of the little man, Ellison writes: “Connoisseur, critic, trickster, the little man is also a day-coach, cabinclass traveler, but the timing of his arrivals and departures is uncertain. Sometimes he’s there, sometimes he’s here. Being quintessentially American, he enjoys the joke, the confounding of hierarchal expectations fostered by his mask . . . through which he, like brer Rabbit, is able to convert even the most decorous of audiences into his own brier patch and temper the chilliest of classics to his own vernacular taste.”10 Because of this little man’s probable presence in any American audience, American performers can never afford to let down their standards of craft and standards of excellence. If they do condescend to their audience, the trickster is apt to call them on it. “[T]he little man is a cautionary figure,” explains Ellison. “If we ignore his possible presence, violence might well be done to that ideal of cultivated democratic sensibility which was the goal of the likes of Emerson and Whitman.”11

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The little man serves as a cultural connoisseur and a vernacular social critic. “Drawn to the brightness of bright lights, he cloaks himself in invisibility— perhaps because in the shadow of his anonymity he can be both the vernacular cat who looks at (and listens to) the tradition-bound or fad-struck king and the little boy who sees clearly the artist-emperor’s pretentious nakedness.”12 Therefore, Ellison argues, this trickster guards something of value in the theatrics of democratic culture—its fluidity of movement and its randomness. Americans live by this gamble as much as they die by it. “We take chances,” he writes, “and are taken by the random working of the democratic impulse.”13 Thanks to this randomness characteristic of audiences in democratic cultures, the probability of encountering this trickster in the audience of any performance is high. The little man is anathema to the proponents of high culture and classical taste; no vernacular-drenched critic could ever carry the right credentials for authorized response and judgment. But Ellison has a caution to those who would banish this vernacular critic: “Reject the little man in the name of purity or as one who aspires beyond his social station or cultural capacity—fine! But it is worth remembering that one of the implicitly creative functions of art in the U.S.A. . . . is the defining and correlating of diverse American experiences by bringing previously unknown patterns, details and emotions into view along with those that are generally recognized.”14 Those who see this comic trickster as a blot on class-purified or culturally purified standards of taste fail to recognize the vital role that mixes of various sorts play in the movements of a democracy. Ellison borrows from Constance Rourke the idea of American humor as a tradition with practical value in its own right toward the end of a vital democratic social life. American humor bridges the gap between genteel traditional culture and the practical, unscrupulous business of survival. American humor, Ellison claims, has “the function of defining and consolidating the diverse elements—racial, cultural and otherwise—which go into the American character.”15 Just as it exposes diversity in American character, humor exposes sameness when the social differences that support hierarchy are being “essentialized” and hence hypertrophied. Ellison, not as wounded as Rourke is by the charge that Americans lack a cultural tradition because he does not take such a charge seriously, emphasizes the disintegrating function of comedy as well as its integrating one. The question is, as Ellison puts it in a different essay, “How can we keep the discord flowing into the mainstream of the language without destroying it?”16 “The everpresent conflict of American linguistic styles was a source of comedy which sharpened our eye for the incongruous,” he writes. “Verbal comedy was a way of confronting social ambiguity.”17 Ellison maintains that comedy emphasizes the incongruities inherent in intracultural diversity. Thus, Ellison also works from Burke’s understanding of comedy as a balancing act for a community committed to the principle of the many and the one.18

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Rather than constructing or deconstructing, comedy corrects the imbalance when one mode grows hypertrophied at the expense of the other. As the narrator in Invisible Man warned, the democratic plan of living as a humanmade symbolic construction does not conform perfectly to nature; “the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived.”19 Sticking to the plan or the blueprint, even when it flies in the face of recalcitrant experience, betrays a cultural naivete´. Democratic culture American-style is a mix, according to Ellison—an impure mix and one all the better for being so. He emphasizes the mix of motives that moves American society: “To an extent, and for an endless variety of motives—benign or malignant, competitive or cooperative, creative and/or destructive—the ‘American’ is a self-confident man or woman who is engaged in projecting a second self and dealing with the second selves of others.”20 Further evidence of Ellison’s Burkean conviction that human motives come mixed shows in Ellison’s assessments of his own motives for moving to Harlem and his narration of the comedy that his mix of motives engendered; “irony,” he explains, “arose precisely from the mixture of motives—practical, educational, and romantic—that had brought me to the North in the first place.”21 The mixtures inherent in American identity are of value to Ellison; the myth of “pure” identity is a hoax and one that historically has proven dangerous to African Americans. To African Americans, according to Ellison, “the white man seems a hypocrite who boasts of a pure identity while standing with his humanity exposed to the world.”22 Ellison’s appreciation of the impurities comedy makes visible is portrayed eloquently in a passage from Invisible Man. In it, the narrator examines a statue, ostensibly one of Booker T. Washington: in my mind’s eye I see the bronze statue of the college Founder, the cold Father symbol, his hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters in hard, metallic folds above the face of a kneeling slave; and I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding. And as I gaze, there is a rustle of wings and I see a flock of starlings flighting before me and, when I look again, the bronze face, whose empty eyes look upon a world I have never seen, runs with liquid chalk—creating another ambiguity to puzzle my groping mind: Why is a bird-soiled statue more commanding than one that is clean?23 Why? Because a comic view has transcended the tragic vision proffered by the statue. The passage is particularly rich in the symbolism it uses. Wings are consistently used by Ellison as a symbol throughout his fiction and essays to indicate transcendence. In this case, the transcendence is provided to black(bird) agents by means of the comic incongruity of white dirt shed upon a statue

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aiming to portray black dignity. The laughter provoked by the impure mix is more effective at providing transcendence than a dignified and cleaned-up Washingtonian vision. Ellison, like Burke, finds a kinship between tragedy and comedy. Both, thinks Ellison, tap into a sacrificial motive characteristic of the symbolic lives of social human beings. For Ellison, it is possible that comedy could be somehow “beyond” tragedy. Ellison’s insight is that of a person frequently cast against his will into the “victim” role: Speaking of the recurrent murder of African Americans by lynching, Ellison writes that “for the group thus victimized, such sacrifices are the source of emotions that move far beyond the tragic conception of pity and terror and down into the abysmal levels of conflict and folly from which arises our famous American humor.”24 The space beyond tragedy is absurdity. It is not clear, however, that comedy transcends tragedy in Ellison’s view, if by “transcendence” one implies a redemptive character. Ellison claims that comedy is a necessary adjunct to tragedy; it provides balance to the sacrificial motive. It must exist alongside tragedy “for the same ends that Shakespeare juxtaposed the Fool with Lear, which was to maintain a measure of common sense before the extreme assertions of Lear’s kingly pride.”25 Ellison juxtaposes comedy with tragedy in order to abrogate tragic excesses. Especially in its characteristic American forms, Ellison credits the comic mode as a source of sustenance for peculiarly American values. Through parody and satire, he explains, Americans constantly recreate their culture from what they inherit. Through comedy, vernacular traditions infiltrate classical ones, adapting them to changed circumstances, making them speak effectively to new audiences. Ellison writes of the changes American slaves wrought on the dances of their masters: “The whites, looking out at the activity in the yard, thought that they were being flattered by imitation, and were amused by the incongruity of tattered blacks dancing courtly steps, while missing completely the fact that before their eyes a European cultural form was becoming Americanized, undergoing a metamorphosis through the mocking activity of a people partially sprung from Africa.”26 Ellison further emphasizes the relationship between tragedy and comedy in his discussions of the hero. Ellison’s heroes tend to be vernacular rather than classical and are often comic rather than tragic. Where Burke had pointed to Aesop as a source for comic heroes, Ellison places Uncle Remus alongside Aesop and turns to Brer Rabbit and Brer Bear for instruction in comic catharsis. Along with fictional folk characters, Ellison describes actual people in American jazz culture as comic heroes; he points to Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington as self-conscious clowns working in the comic mode.27 Ellison also elaborates a process familiar to African-American folk culture, namely that of turning threatening events and would-be tragic heroes into comic ones for the sake of catharsis. In Invisible Man, the after-the-fact descrip-

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tion of a street riot involving Ras the Destroyer by the Harlem community serves as a case in point. While hidden, the narrator listens to a group of men recapitulating the evening’s crisis: “[Y]ou ought to been over on Lenox about two hours ago. You know that stud Ras the Destroyer? Well, man, he was spitting blood.” “That crazy guy?” “Hell, yes, man, he had him a big black hoss and a fur cap and some kind of old lion skin or something over his shoulders and he was raising hell, Goddam if he wasn’t a sight, riding up and down on this ole hoss, you know, one of the kind that pulls vegetable wagons, and he got him a cowboy saddle and some big spurs.” “Aw naw, man!” “Hell, yes! Riding up and down the block yelling, ‘Destroy ’em! Drive ’em out! I, Ras, commands you. You get that, Man,’ he said, ‘I, Ras, commands you—to destroy them to the last piece of rotten fish!’ And ’bout that time some joker with a big ole Georgia voice sticks his head out the window and yells, ‘Ride, ’em, cowboy. Give ’em hell and bananas.’ And man that crazy sonofabitch up there on that hoss looking like death eating a sandwich, he reaches down and comes up with a forty-five and starts blazing up at that window—And man, talk about cutting out! In a second wasn’t nobody left but ole Ras up there on that hoss with that lion skin stretched straight out behind him. Crazy, man. Everybody else trying to git some loot and him and his boys out for blood!” I lay like a man rescued from drowning, listening, still not sure I was alive.28 Ellison also adopts Burke’s division of the self within the joke. Ellison, too, shows that the teller of the joke can also be its butt or its audience or can play all of the roles at once. Basically, both Burke and Ellison seek to break down the distinction between reflection and action. In Ellison’s account of his own experience of cathartic laughter in “An Extravagance of Laughter,” he describes the dividedness of being both butt and audience of a joke. “I had been taken over by embattled Siamese twins,” he writes; he experiences “the detachment of one and the mirth-wracked state of the other.”29 In another instance Ellison examines the experience of dividedness in his fictional protagonist, Todd, in his short story “Flying Home.” In the midst of his cathartic experience, Todd reports seeing the comic figure of the story, Jefferson, as a doubled vision—one “little black Jefferson that shook with fits of belly-laughter while the other Jefferson looked on with detachment.”30 “According to Kenneth Burke,” acknowledges Ellison, “ ‘Comedy should enable us to be observers of ourselves while acting.’ ”31 We need to observe ourselves while acting, he thinks, because we do not always act reasonably. Like Freud, Ellison holds that jokes help us negotiate

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the gaps between our reasoned life and the motives less available to our own scrutiny. These less than reasonable motives cannot be ignored because they have real effects that do not go away just because we wish them to. According to Ellison, comedy provides “a rationale for locating the irrational and the nonrational.”32 But unlike Freud, Ellison holds that repression occurs not only on the personal psychic level, but also on the level of the collective social conscience conveyed to the community through its effective history. “[I]n the underground of our unwritten history, much of that which is ignored defies our inattention by continuing to grow and have consequences.”33 The collectively repressed returns; “the basic themes of our history may be repressed in the public mind, but like corpses in mystery dramas, they always turn up again— and are frequently more troublesome.”34 Ellison aims for comedy structured less on blatant victimage as Freud described it and more like the ritual identifications that audience members make with classical tragic heroes. Where the audience of the tragedy obtains catharsis through the shedding of its tears, the audience of comedy gains catharsis through laughter and identification with the comic hero. Again in “Flying Home,” Todd comes over the course of the narrative to experience cathartic identification with Jefferson, an identification that he has resisted. The narrator reports Todd’s experience of catharsis; at the moment of identification with Jefferson, “[b]lasts of hot, hysterical laughter tore from his chest, causing his eyes to pop and he felt that the veins in his neck would surely burst. And then a part of him stood behind it all, watching the surprise in Graves’s [a local bigot] red face and his own hysteria. . . . He heard Jefferson’s voice with gratitude.”35 Whether the catharsis provided by identification comes through tears or through laughter depends to some extent upon the experiences of the audiences and the sorts of ritual sacrifices that the particular audience can find either acceptable or absurd. Ellison explains how the reactions of African American audiences can significantly differ from those of white American audiences: “[O]ne of the most interesting experiences connected with viewing [films exploiting African Americans as scapegoats in order to provide catharsis to white Americans] in predominantly white audiences is the profuse flow of tears and sighs of profound emotional catharsis heard on all sides. . . . As an antidote to the sentimentality of these films, I suggest that they be seen in predominantly Negro audiences, for here, when the action goes phony, one will hear derisive laughter, not sobs. (Perhaps this is what Faulkner means about Negroes keeping the white man’s conscience.)”36 In Kenneth Burke’s defense of the psychology of form over the psychology of information in Counter-Statement, he had spoken of playing upon the desires of the audience—desires that could be aroused, exacerbated, or latched onto and fulfilled or not at will by the good rhetorical writer. Burke, especially in his earlier essays, occasionally tends to write about the audience as if it could

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be played like an inanimate instrument; its tendencies, he implies, can be manipulated and known by the artist. News comes and news goes, Burke had claimed in his “Psychology of Form” essay, and it is desired in the same way that gossip is desired as novelty, but the natural and perennial desire of the audience could be counted upon as an unchanging basis for appeal available to the rhetorical writer, unlike the audience’s easily satisfied desire for information. One senses, however, that on this occasion in Burke’s writing, Ellison is affronted by Burke’s dehumanizing “instrumentalization” of the audience. For Ellison, the democratic audience is a source of near-sacred mystery, one far from knowable, thanks to the little man from Chehaw Station hidden within it. “[I]f he [the little man] didn’t exist, he would have to be invented,”37 quips Ellison. Ellison emphasizes instead the metamorphic character of the general American audience, and . . . the unrecognized and unassimilated elements of its taste. For me he [the little man] represents that unknown quality which renders the American audience far more than a receptive instrument that may be dominated through a skillful exercise of the sheerly “rhetorical” elements. . . . While that audience is eager to be transported, astounded, thrilled, it counters the artist’s manipulation of forms with an attitude of antagonistic cooperation, acting, for better or worse, as both collaborator and judge. . . . It must be appealed to on the basis of what it assumes to be truth as a means of inducting it into new dimensions of artistic truth. By playing artfully upon the audience’s sense of experience and form, the artist seeks to shape its emotions and perceptions to his vision, while it, in turn, simultaneously cooperates and resists, says yes and says no in an it-takes-two-to-tango binary response to his effort.38 Ellison’s criticism of Burke on this score echoes Burke’s own language and uses Burke’s own allusions to Hamlet by turning them back against him. Ellison plays upon a passage drawn directly from “Psychology of Form,” in which Burke quotes from Shakespeare. Ellison turns Burke’s Shakespearean allusion against the thesis of Burke’s own essay as a warning against too smugly “playing the audience.” In “Psychology of Form,” Burke quotes Hamlet’s railing against Guildenstern as an example of a climactic form. But Ellison drives straight into the content of the climactic passage, rather than the form. The Shakespearean passage in Burke reads: “Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me. You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. ’Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.”39 Burke plays upon the audience instrumentally. But the audience harbors the little man behind the stove at

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Chehaw Station, according to Ellison and this fellow is “given to a democratic touchiness, and is suspicious of all easy assumptions of superiority based upon appearances. When fretted by an obtuse artistic hand, he can be quite irritable, and what frets him utterly is any attitude that offends his quite human pieties by ignorance or disregard for his existence.”40 Unlike Burke, at least in this particular essay, Ellison is as able to identify with the audience as he is to identify with the writer. Ellison uses Burke’s own citation of Hamlet in order to criticize Burke’s abuse and dehumanization of the audience through reductive rhetorical strategy in “Psychology and Form.” If the audience is an instrument to be played, criticizes Ellison, unlike Guildenstern’s pipe, it is a most peculiar kind of “instrument.” The American audience especially, Ellison claims, is a difficult instrument to play well: “the American artist must . . . know the special qualities of that second instrument: his native audience.” While the artist is indeed in the business of “arousing, frustrating, and fulfilling its [the audience’s] expectations,” the little man behind the stove at Chehaw station, who sits in the audience as part of its content, complicates the artist’s task.41 “Thanks to the presence of the little man, this second instrument can be most unstable in its tuning, and downright ornery in its responses. . . . [O]nly at his peril does he [the artist] treat an American audience as though it were as easily manipulated as a jukebox.”42 “[T]he chances are,” Ellison writes, “that any American audience will conceal at least one individual whose knowledge and taste will complement or surpass his [the performer’s] own. This . . . is because even the most homogeneous audiences are culturally mixed and embody, in their relative anonymity, the mystery of American cultural identity.”43 Whereas Burke is most often in the business of showing how comedy dispels the mystery that social hierarchies would thrive upon, Ellison adds that democratic audiences have a mystery of their own that is highly comic, at least from the audience’s perspective. Because of it, the artist must respect the mutuality that obtains between the artist and audience, or else disregard it at his peril. But, he continues, this mystery is not the product of rhetorical mystification: “I say ‘mystery,’ but perhaps the phenomenon is simply a product of our neglect of serious cultural introspection, our failure to conceive of our fractured, vernacular-weighted culture as an intricate whole.”44 Ellison, over and against Burke, emphasizes the contingency contained within that human “instrument,” the audience, which makes its expectations and tendencies unpredictable and mysterious. Yet Ellison also champions the Burkean deflation of mystery through comedy. Through impiety, comedy can dispel the rhetoric of mystery and flatten hierarchy. Like Burke, Ellison shows how ridicule dissolves fear in cases of hypertrophied awe and allows an impious critique of threatening pieties. This tendency of Ellison’s shows most clearly when he advocates critical engagement and involvement in something very close to American civil religion. He writes, “At some point people, especially American people, are pushed to recognize

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that behind the Constitution, which we say rests in principles that lie beyond the limits of death and dying, are really man-made legal fictions. This doesn’t stop them from being precious or sacred, but we can only stand so much of the sacred or of piety. We must be able to express our dissent.”45 Now we get some more detailed hint of how Ellison’s American civil religion might differ from what usually passes for civil religion. His is modified by a sense of comedy. Ellison argues that Americans have been making lawyer jokes for a long time— at least as far back as Mark Twain, and for good reasons: “[P]erhaps Twain was being far more than irreverent when he presented men of the legal profession in a comic light, because by so presenting them he allowed people who were very upset by some of the legal goings-on in the society to reveal their feeling, to laugh at themselves, and most impious of all, to laugh at the courts and perhaps at the Constitution itself.”46 If the national documents Ellison so treasures are made sacred through sacrificial bloodshed of war, they are also made by humans and subject to criticism by connoisseurs of human social comedy. The American comedy is a human one, not a divine one. Like Burke, Ellison suggests that sublimity and the threat that the sublime suggests bolsters piety. And also like Burke, Ellison maintains that such threat is present not only in the sublime, but also in the beautiful. Ellison values the confusion of the categories of beautiful and sublime, and suggests that the confusion is telling. In Invisible Man, Ellison tells of the narrator’s sexual encounter with a white woman who, in her drunkenness, keeps referring to the narrator by a slurred pet name of “Boo’ful.” The Invisible Man mulls the ambiguity: “Hear the true affection, I thought, the adoration of the Boogie Bear, moving away. Was she calling me beautiful or boogieful, beautiful or sublime. . . ?”47 Or most likely, suggests Ellison, a bit of both—the attraction relies as much upon the blurred threat as upon the seductions of a very manly beauty. However, in Ellison’s variant of Kenneth Burke’s meditation on the beautiful and the sublime, laughter doesn’t always dispel fear and doesn’t always deflate sublimity. In Ellison’s vision, laughter sometimes reveals a sublimity of its own. Where Burke had dwelt critically on “fear and trembling,” Ellison writes of laughter and trembling and the “incongruous juxtaposition of mirth and quaking.”48 Ellison sometimes examines comedy that inspires awe, if not fear. In “An Extravagance of Laughter,” Ellison tells of a personal experience of uncontrollable laughter that came to be revelatory for him. Despite his discomfort and embarrassment over his inability to stop laughing in a dignified public situation, Ellison claims, “I laughed and I trembled, and gained thereby a certain wisdom.”49 “Aesop and Uncle Remus have taught us that comedy is a disguised form of philosophical instruction,” claims Ellison, “and especially . . . when it allows us to laugh at that which is normally unlaughable, comedy provides an otherwise unavailable clarification of vision that calms the clammy trembling which ensues whenever we pierce the veil of conventions that guard us from the basic absurdity of the human condition.”50 According

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to Ellison, comedy may well be the only way we can speak of those things most fearful of all. This point of view owes something to Burke’s analysis of humor as a specialized subset of the comic. In this view that they share, the laughter of humor helps to shrink the fearful down to manageable size, even when the fearful resists human management. Ellison’s account of humor, like Burke’s, paints it as a coping mechanism, one that may even falsify the situation when necessary for the sake of a greater good on those occasions when coping is a greater good than fighting. Of his Alabama experiences as a student at Tuskegee, Ellison writes that “laughter made the difficulties of our condition a bit more bearable.”51 Like Burke, Ellison claims that the rhetorical nature of symbolic action means that threats may forestall violence as easily as they foretell it. Ellison writes that “the rhetoric of anger, itself cathartic, is not necessarily a prelude to physical violence. Rather, it is frequently a form of symbolic action, a verbal equivalent of fisticuffs.”52 This moral substitute for war forestalls rather than foretells the demise of the project of American democracy that Ellison holds dear. He sees it as consistent with Emerson’s advocacy of “the development of consciousness, consciousness, consciousness. And with consciousness, a more refined conscientiousness, and most of all, that tolerance which takes the form of humor, for when Americans can no longer laugh at each other, they have to fight one another.”53 Expressing anger through humor provides catharsis and sometimes alleviates the need to fight, it serves as a symbolic and theatricalized substitute for violence, and in minimizing genuine threat, it maximizes the tolerance that sustains a democratic and pluralist project. Still, not all threats can be effectively minimized, even for a greater good. Ellison argues that the setting of comedy matters; in an environment loaded with present threat, few people can spare the energy to laugh when that energy is needed for survival. Jeeter Lester, the incestuous, racist head of the poor, white household in Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, would not be funny in real life. Ellison states that any real-life Lesters he met around Tuskegee were frightening; “in that setting their capacity for racial violence would have been far more overwhelming than their comical wrong-headedness.”54 Ellison and his friends back at Tuskegee could make a joke of their encounters with the Alabama police only after the fact. “Once safe at Tuskegee,” he writes, “we would become almost hysterical as we recounted our adventures and laughed as much at ourselves as at the cops.”55 Ellison’s friends could turn themselves into comic heroes, imbued with the ambivalence of both the pain of their experiences and their triumphant perseverance in the face of them. They could tell their tales of escape as a rite that artfully made joy out of the materials of miserable experience. “Thus was violence transcended with cruel but homeopathic laughter,” Ellison explains, “and racial cruelty transformed by a traditional form of folk art.” But he adds, “It did nothing to change the Phenix City police.”56

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The Phenix City police may not have been changed by being treated humorously, but Ellison and his friends were changed in subtle ways. Ellison reads the experience of after-the-fact humor as an initiation rite—one that is accompanied both by catharsis and by a change in the way that the laugher identifies himself. Ellison personally experienced such a change in identification during the laughing fit he had while viewing Tobacco Road in New York. “I could not have put it into words at the time,” he explains, “but by forcing me to see the comedy in Jeeter Lester’s condition and allowing me to react to it in an interracial situation without the threat of physical violence, Caldwell told me something important about who I was. . . . [H]e helped initiate me into becoming, if not a ‘New Yorker,’ at least a more tolerant American.”57 Ellison explains this change in identity from fresh-off-the-train Alabaman to more hopeful Harlemite in near-religious language: “[M]y divided selves were made one again by a sense of catharsis. Yes, but at the expense of undergoing a humiliating, body-wracking conflict of emotions! Embarrassment, self-anger, ethnic scorn, and at last a feeling of comic relief—all because Erskine Caldwell compelled me to laugh at his symbolic and therefore nonthreatening whites. Thus he shocked me into recognizing certain absurd aspects of our common humanity. Kenneth Burke would probably have said that I had been hit with a ‘perspective by incongruity.’ ”58 Ellison’s laughing experience provided him with a change of perspective and a view around the corner. What Ellison does not say is that his experience in any way changed the level of threat presented to him by flesh and blood Jeeter Lesters, or that, given the need to prevent violent confrontation, it was morally right that Ellison change instead of Lester. Ellison is merely acting in the only way that he can, given the recalcitrance of racism and the limitations in the scope of his agency and his sphere of influence—he is acting upon himself to attain temporary relief until such time as he can effect more permanent change. Comedy does not always hold the moral high ground in Ellison’s view. All too often, he claims, the American tendency toward the comic management of its affairs has hurt African Americans. He complains that “in this country there is a tradition of forgetfulness, of moving on, of denying the past, of converting the tragic realities of ourselves but most often of others—even if those others are of our own group—into comedy.”59 Hence, the American joke as he describes it is a morally ambivalent one. At times, Ellison renders a hopeful reading of the American joke; at times his reading emphasizes its moral absurdity. The joke looks different depending upon the point of view from which a person sees it and the role or roles a person plays within it. The overall tendency of Ellison’s comedy is to hope for, if not to assume, a blending of the roles of joke teller, joke hearer, and butt of the joke, for unless the butt of the joke can simultaneously benefit from the telling or the hearing of it, there can be no laughter from that position.

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In the more hopeful view, the joke is certainly funny. Ellison recounts his own experience of the American joke on an occasion in which he was going door to door collecting signatures on a petition for the Federal Writers’ Project. Standing outside one door, he heard what he described as loud, profane voices of black men arguing about the relative vocal merits of two sopranos at the Metropolitan Opera. Catching Ellison by surprise, it turns out that the men regularly served as extras at the Met. In this incident, Ellison—a classical musician himself—felt that his own worst preconceptions were under attack. He had overlooked the complexities of a democratic culture—had forgotten to expect the little man from Chehaw Station to be in the audience—and thus became the butt (as well as the audience, and later the teller) of the American joke of his own racial prejudices. He had allowed himself to think in either-or ways instead of both-and. “The men,” he writes, “were products of both past and present; were both coal heavers and Met extras; were both workingmen and opera buffs. . . . [D]uring a moment when I least expected to encounter the little man behind the stove . . . I had stumbled upon four such men.”60 But at times, Ellison’s reading of what is fundamentally the same joke lacks laughter and turns grotesque. His less hopeful reading explicates “the joke at the center of the American identity.” American identity seems to be predicated on a ritual projection of American fears onto a scapegoat. Like all episodes of scapegoating, the rite comforts efficaciously because the agents of the sacrifice are successfully able to pretend to a discontinuity with the scapegoat, when in fact, as Burke elaborately showed in the principle of vicarage, the rite can only work because of a continuity between sacrificer and victim that makes the sacrifice effective at relieving dis-ease. Ellison explains: “The white American has charged the Negro American with being without past or tradition (something which strikes the white man with a nameless horror), just as he himself has been so charged by European and American critics with a nostalgia for the stability once typical of European cultures.”61 By projecting fears of inferiority onto marginal members of American society, Ellison suggests, Americans relieve the anxieties of the hierarchical psychosis that they experience when they feel bested in the “hierarchy of cultures” contest. Ellison claims that “[t]he greater the stress within society the stronger the comic antidote required.” In his least hopeful view of the American joke, comedy turns grotesque.62 The racial elements that complicate American identity so vex the nation that the American joke crosses stress limits on laughter. Ellison writes, “In this instance the stress imposed by the extreme dislocations of American society was so strong and chaotic that it called for a comedy of the grotesque.”63 The grotesquery takes us to Ellison’s bleakest view of the American joke— the one presented at the end of Invisible Man. Having been castrated in his epilogue nightmare by the series of men who kept him running after hope,

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the nameless narrator of the novel begins to laugh. But the joke he tells is hard to stomach. He laughs because not only his generations are “wasted upon the waters” but also, he finally sees, the nation’s future. Norton’s prediction had been right after all—the Invisible Man’s and Norton’s fate were one after all. If the joke didn’t hurt so much, it would be funny. Ellison tells the ultimate American joke—that “what happens to blacks will accrue eventually . . . to the nation as a whole.”64 Ellison uses the blues to express this pathetic American joke. In Invisible Man, Ellison refers to a blues song by Walter Page and the Blue Devils Orchestra, “They Picked Poor Robin.”65 This song provides space for the simultaneous presence of the creative expression of the singer, the pain of victimage for the victim, and provokes a cathartic laughter that palliates the situation. Of this blues song Ellison writes, “Poor robin was picked again and again, and his pluckers were ever unnamed and mysterious. Yet the tune was inevitably productive of laughter even when we ourselves were its object. For each of us recognized that his fate [poor robin’s] was somehow our own.”66 Ellison further points out that this moment of recognition of a shared identity between one’s self and poor robin, the butt of the joke, is an initiation rite. “[T]here is a mystery in the whiteness of blackness, the innocence of evil and the evil of innocence,” Ellison explains, “though, being initiates, Negroes express the joke of it in the blues.”67 An identity changes with the laughter provoked by the blues; a continuity between two identities, which pretended for the sake of moral comfort to be separate, is realized in the catharsis. But though this initiation rite requires a change in identity from its participants, it does not banish the old identity. Paul keeps Saulin’ around on the side. The blues recognizes the impurity of identity changes. It initiates a person into the American joke, including the self in its indictment. Through the blues, African Americans (and, in due time, perhaps all Americans willing or forced to undergo painful initiation into the American joke) can both express their agony and shore up their sense of possibility. “The blues,” Ellison writes, “is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstance, whether created by others or by one’s own human failings. They are the only consistent art in the United States which constantly remind us of our limitations while encouraging us to see how far we can actually go.”68 This encouragement and quest for human dignity might seem part of the tragic genre, but the relief offered by the blues is not so neatly packaged as is tragic catharsis. “[T]he blues,” explains Ellison, “. . . at once express both the agony of life and the possibility of conquering it through sheer toughness of spirit. They fall short of tragedy only in that they provide no solution, offer no scapegoat but the self.”69 The blues allows the artist to play all three human roles in the joke. By singing—by telling the joke—a person plays the expressive role and thereby participates in the role of victimization; by experiencing pain, the person plays the butt of the joke and the victim of the sacrifice

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who undergoes loss; by laughing, the person receives the catharsis needed to keep going. The blues always come, according to Ellison, as a gift wrapped in a disaster,70 but significantly, Ellison never claims they are a redemptive gift, but merely a palliative one. Religiously, they owe more to humanist origins than to Christian ones that emphasize the redemptive nature of suffering. They are what is left to a people who cannot celebrate their experience. With a little luck, they just may be enough to allow those people to “keep on keeping on.” A few examples will help show the nonredemptive nature of the disaster that wraps the gift of the blues. The Kansas City jazz scene that nurtured so much of Ellison’s early Oklahoma life was a help—a grace, if you will—to Ellison and one rich source drawn on by the writer he later became; jazz, he reports, gave him the means to express parts of himself that had no other language for expression. Yet that same jazz culture could only have happened in a country nearly strangled by an economic depression and under the auspices of criminal control of local government.71 Later, that same depression incited the development of the Works Progress Administration. The WPA was a training ground for Ellison as a writer and a source of personal economic sustenance to him. “[T]he economic disaster which produced the WPA gave it an accelerated release,” he reminds us, “and allowed many Negroes to achieve their identities as artists.”72 Yet few people, and certainly not Ellison, would want to claim that the personal losses sustained during the Depression or the viciousness of the Pendergast political machine were justified by the subsequent successes that emerged from them. Ellison writes: “The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.”73 It would seem that both remembrance and transcendence play a role in the blues for Ellison. Yet remembrance and transcendence are usually approaches that are at odds with each other. What then does Ellison mean by “transcendence” in this situation? Does he affirm everything that is and has been for the sake of a higher good? I have argued that Ellison’s blues can’t be read as purely affirmative or as some version of a justifying faith. Ellison simply does not affirm it all. The transcendence he speaks of preserves a very particular sort of hope rather than faith. The blues leave Ellison with possibilities for a this-worldy hope that Americans might someday come closer to fulfilling their democratic promise, but they offer no certainties or affirmations. The blues singer certainly doesn’t sing as if he or she has any assurance that the situation will get better. The blues make the best of a bad situation; they are a salvage operation. Ellison feels the pull of a religious need to affirm it all, which he cannot embrace. “Identification with” does not equal “affirmation of.” He writes: “Sometimes I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the

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things loved and unlovable in it, for all of it is part of me. Till now, however, this is as far as I’ve ever gotten, for all life seen from the hole of invisibility is absurd.”74 Ellison cannot embrace the pain of American identity as tragic selfsacrifice; the pain resists being contained in a fully redemptive moral framework. Comedy therefore tinges his tragedy. The only catharsis he can find resists being reduced to moral seriousness, drawing as it does upon absurdity. There is a gap between the delight provided by the blues and the moral earnestness of full-fledged tragedy. Where Burke had mapped the terrains of both tragedy and comedy as modes of affirmation and, hence, naturalistic religious responses, Ellison holds back: So it is that now I denounce and defend, or feel prepared to defend. I condemn and affirm, say no and say yes, say yes and say no. I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of all I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I have to love. I sell you no phony forgiveness, I’m a desperate man—but too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division. So I denounce and defend and I hate and I love.75 To have some meaning in his life, Ellison must find some way to cope with the parts of his life that resist being made meaningful. When Ellison rejects, as an African American, the role of national scapegoat he leaves a residue of absurdity in its place. Better absurdity than the sort of meaning provided by that sacrificial tragedy, he suggests. Rejecting the redemptive interpretation of this potentially tragic story, he offers an alternative. As palliative for that absurdity left in the wake of his refusal of the redemptive role of the scapegoat, he offers the tragicomedy of the blues. In the end, Ellison leaves us with yet another spectrum—one that runs from tragedy to comedy. Burke had solved identity problems by making continuous spectrums out of discontinuous dichotomies. But he had offered tragedy and comedy as alternative modes of affirmation, even while one made him more nervous than the other. Ellison emphasizes the continuities between tragedy and comedy that Burke recognized but found disquieting; Ellison advocates the blend—the tragicomedy—of the blues. The spectrum Ellison offers in place of a dichotomy leaves us on a high-tension line to walk between a life of utter absurdity and one full of meaning. In a letter to Burke, Ellison writes of Invisible Man, “In my novel I’ve deliberately . . . proceeded across a tight rope stretched between the comic and the tragic. . . .”76 The novel’s unnamed narrator exemplifies the tragicomic hero: “one who had been forged in the underground of American experience and yet managed to emerge less angry than ironic. . . . [H]e would be a blues-toned laugher-at-wounds who included himself in his indictment of the human condition.”77

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What is at stake in Ellison’s preference for the blues over tragedy? I believe Ellison chooses the blues in part for piety’s sake, because he knows where he comes from and the sources of his being, but also because he believes that the blues, with its comic component, has more resources for coping with the absurdities left over after making as much meaning as possible, than does tragedy. Blues can turn contradictions into delight when no other avenue to transcendence is open. But given Ellison’s predilection for the blues over tragedy, what then is at stake in his preference for the blues over comedy? I believe that Ellison chooses tragicomedy over comedy because he has empathy for the reasons people have for trying to make suffering meaningful. He also has his suspicions, given the past abuses of comedy and his experiences of it as an unfriendly form of warfare. These suspicions lead him to see some point in “keeping pain alive” through memory in order to memorialize the losses of those he owes debts to and to rescue the people who suffered those losses from the wastebin of history. Ellison takes his dramatic emphasis from Burke. Like Santayana, who influenced them both, he reads the comic mode of human symbolic action as ritual activity performed by mask wearers aiming for human salvation through subtle alterations in identity. Ellison, like Constance Rourke and like the later Burke, emphasizes the comic possibilities and advantages of an American democratic environment. Comedy, he claims, is part of America’s usable past and part of its historical tradition containing possibilities for enhancing its future when understood and rightly used. Like Burke, Ellison holds that comedy humanizes the tragic by making it self-conscious. Ellison uses comedy to ridicule scapegoating, indicting himself in the process. He also appropriates comedy to further the end of valuing the unexpected, to help toward conscious identification with the sacrificed, and as a partial refusal of the unself-conscious substitutions of tragic catharsis. Given the moderate measure of absurdity he had to swallow in order to acquire and hold on to a contemporary American—even an Emersonian—identity, he hangs on to hope with the blues.

CHAPTER EIGHT

BOTH A PART OF AND APART FROM: THE SPIRIT AND ETHICS OF A RELIGIOUS PRAGMATISM If the soil is carried off by flood, May we help the soil to say so. If our ways of living Violate the needs of nerve and muscle, May we find speech for nerve and muscle, To frame objections Whereat we, listening, Can remake our habits —Kenneth Burke, “Dialectician’s Hymn” in Philosophy of Literary Form When finding that people held the same views as I, I persuaded myself that I held them differently. —Kenneth Burke, John Neal in Towards a Better Life

HE WAKES UP AND TRIES to orient himself. He seems to be in a glass box with his head placed between two electrodes. The narrator in Invisible Man seems to be undergoing an attempted lobotomy by his employers in their company hospital. He is repeatedly asked by his doctors, “WHAT IS YOUR NAME?” Try as he might, the narrator can make no reply to this question, though he is asked it more than once. In irritation, his doctors rephrase the question: “WHO . . . ARE . . . YOU?” The invisible man notes: “This phrasing of the question seemed to set off a series of weak and distant lights where the other had thrown a spark that failed.” Again the doctors urge the Invisible Man, “Try to think of your name.” The narrator responds, “I tried, thinking vainly of many names, but none seemed to fit, and yet it was as though I was somehow a part of all of them, had become submerged within them and lost.”1 “What is your name?” and “Who are you?” are not equivalent questions. The Invisible Man’s identity takes part in many names, yet the answer to his “who are you?” question remains separated and apart from the totality of any one of them. He is both “a part of” and “apart from.” A tradition of skepticism about the sufficiency of names has a point of reference in the writings of

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William James; the concept has connections to some feminist interpretations of pragmatism.2 As the above episode illustrates, Ellison complements this goal, showing the practical necessity but, still, the insufficiency of naming practices. A name may be a part of a person, but a person is always in some ways more than and apart from the name that would try to capture his essence. In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, when Sethe contemplates the killing of her child, Beloved, she thinks: “The best thing [Beloved] was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, . . . her beautiful, magical best thing—the part of her that was clean.”3 Beloved is both “a part of” and “apart from” Sethe. They are consubstantial in Burke’s sense of the word, as the man who was tempted to drop his son from a high building is in relation to his son. When Beloved dies, Sethe protects some “thing she was” from contamination; but at the same time, when Beloved dies, Sethe does not, since they are also “apart from” each other. Burke and Ellison teach nothing if not that we are all beings prone to manipulation of our world through symbolic acts. When Burke writes about symbol-using animals, he portrays human beings as both “a part of” nature, like other animals, but also as “apart from” nature in their capacity to use symbols. He undertands divinity as partially embodied in nature—from which it gains power—and also to some extent apart from nature when it finds no place in nature and exists only as a powerless ideal. Wayne Booth has helpfully pointed out that religious traditions of pragmatist thought see religion as “grounded in prayer and supplication.” An emphasis upon prayer and supplication highlights the rhetorical nature of religious language. This emphasis has roots in James’s claim that the heart of religious language is “help! help!” and proceeds historically through Burke’s interpretation of the prayers of the industrialist, the dialectition, and so on, which he accepts as worth something, but not beyond the reach of discounting through comic criticism. This understanding of religion has elements of the sublime and the absurd mixed together in it and requires “poet/critics” for sane practice. On the other hand, Booth’s reading of Burke’s work, in my view, overemphasizes the metalanguage of Burke’s pentad formulation. Booth desperately wants to find a closeted theologian in Burke.4 There is, however, no theologian in Burke’s closet. There may well be a religious man, but this is a man concerned with the second-order human rhetoric about God rather than knowledge of God. This makes him neither a friend nor an enemy of religious language, but rather a pious critic. This trope—being both a part of and apart from—runs through both Burke’s and Ellison’s work. It defies traditional philosophical logic and works against categorization and knowledge through naming. Burke well knows this; he writes, “Let us found a mathematics—or an ethic!—by outraging the law of the excluded middle whereby, instead of saying ‘A is A; A is not non-A,’ we may say, ‘A is either A or non-A.’ ”5

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Not only philosophical identity but social identity needs radical rethinking if we take Ellison’s and Burke’s views to heart. At the outset, I made three claims about the work of Burke and Ellison. The first two were, in the main but not entirely, descriptive claims. I have offered many texts and interpretations to support those claims in the bodies of chapters 2 through 7. The third claim, to which I now turn, was, in the main but not entirely, normative. What would an ethic that outrages the excluded middle look like?6 One particular moral contribution that Burke and Ellison make to the study of American religious and pragmatic thought is to highlight the ways in which theories of sacrifice and scapegoating can be cast and understood in a pragmatic language. Burke and Ellison show that in order to minimize our own resorting to scapegoating, we need to recognize the entirety of our debts. Either/or thinking lends itself to scapegoating tendencies, both men claim. If either/or thinking is a product of essentialism, as I have tried to argue, then it follows that the longing for purity supplied by the “natural kinds” typical of essentialist language might be ameliorated through criticisms of essentialism—the sort practiced by pragmatic thinkers. This approach offers not just a functional interpretation of sacrificial acts, but a moralized program for managing human sacrificial motives through a disciplined avoidance of the seductive but illusory securities essentialism seems to provide. Burke and Ellison not only suggest a method to manage human sacrificial motives, they also lend nuance to a conversation model of moral philosophy. They show that toward the end of “antagonistic cooperation,” we should have enough courage to disagree with those members of our community who have social power over us. Giles Gunn points to the aim of “rendering differences conversable” as desirable for a democratic culture.7 The point of his antifoundationalism is not to propound the incommensurable nature of languages, religions, and cultures, but rather to make the differences between them tell. In this model, one might aim not to limit public religious conversation in a democracy, but to increase it and fortify it through thicker description and more widespread knowledge about various inherited traditions. Gunn appreciates Burke’s and Ellison’s advocacy of “antagonistic cooperation” as a glue that holds together conversations, even when they get difficult. Together, this group of thinkers would tend to see “divided loyalties” not as disastrous but as productive.8 Burke’s and Ellison’s work further suggests that we need to restrain the bigotry police in ourselves when we act as social critics. Police have their function in protecting us from harm. But a police force too strong can get out of hand. Burke calls for habits of reading and listening that maximize the potential for communication. We need to hone our interpretive skills and translation abilities. Often enough, this translating activity will go against the grain of the conscious self-identities we hold. It is, I admit, a discipline I find incredibly difficult to practice when my own self-identity is threatened. Burke

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cites Irving Babbitt as an example of someone unable to listen actively enough: “I do not doubt that if one extolled something which Babbitt had forever admired, but if one happened to extol it by the use of a term which Babbitt reserved for one of his dislikes, the good man would be completely unable to ‘translate’ it.”9 This discipline of active listening is a social coordinate to the successful practice of moral bricolage of the sort proposed by Jeffrey Stout. To offer a personal example, I wince every time I hear or read the word virtue, knowing the word’s place in a misogynist history. But following my own advice would mean detaching the sexist overtones virtue has from the older language of which it was a part—from which I would have been excluded—and translating the word differently as a part of a more recent language in which I can have agency. It means restraining that gut reaction of mine. When I listen or read this way, I will actively project the possibility of trust. Sometimes my “gut” will be feeding me the right information and implicit warning. But sometimes not. I owe it to my ideals to acclimate myself to the climate of risk. Burke claimed that by selecting symbols—by my choosing to use a word like virtue, for instance—an “artist” could appeal in two ways to a reader: either through identification with the symbol or through the appeal of craftsmanship and technique. Burke thinks the appeal of technical form outlasts the appeal of symbolic identification, because formal qualities depend less upon the existence of circumstances that change over time.10 To listen as described here calls for me to hear or read the term virtue, not as a code word or group insignia for a certain sort of inimical identity—one I do not share— but as a technique or craft that tries to take bits of something old and to turn them to new purposes. I should ask myself, Where do they fit into the story this bricolage “artist” is putting together? This level of openness to the language of another probably calls for more courage than Burke realizes, because it renders the listener vulnerable to being conned. It calls for “leaving the sanctuary,” whether it be a safe house for racial, ethnic, national, or gender communities. If, in fact, I am wrong in my trust that the term is not being used as insignia but as part of a craft, I will end up identifying myself with a social grouping that has no commitment to my well-being. I may then find myself a member of a Brotherhood quite willing to sacrifice me for their own good. On the other hand, maybe Burke recognized the risks; he writes, “The dispossessed struggle hard and long to remain loyal— but by the nature of the case, the bureaucratic order tends simply to move in on such patience and obedience.”11 Vulnerability has its profitable uses as well as its liabilities, however. It will help along the process of communication if we allow others the intimacy with us that will make our pieties more understandable. At times others just can’t share our pieties because their experiences and the debts they owe are genuinely different from our own. But they can understand them. To be offered a

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glimpse of why potentially offending pieties are important in some nonoffending way, even a way not shared, makes differences tell and furthers, rather than hinders, the possibilities for ultimate identification. We do have religious obligations to authority, Burke and Ellison remind us. We do have obligations to some things not ourselves; that is, we have obligations to the objects of our natural pieties. As democrats, we have obligations to pursue and live within the constraints of democratic authority of the communities we belong to. This authority is not guaranteed to correspond with the Good and the True, but for all practical purposes, these authorities need to remain good enough and true enough for us to get by with them. If they do not, we have an obligation to communicate with the other members of our community toward the aims of changing those constraints. We must know our history, pleasant and unpleasant, hits and misses, what we are made of, for better or worse, and all of those upon whom we have depended along the way to now. But isn’t this asking a bit much? “Even the victims are responsible. All dreamers and sleepwalkers must pay the price, and even the invisible victim is responsible for the fate of all.”12 These words of Ellison’s are bad news for almost everybody. Compensations, Ellison’s narrator claims, will be exacted in totally natural ways when they are least expected. They are hard words to swallow— victims responsible for their victimizers? Ellison claims that even the person consistently elected scapegoat for the community remains nonetheless responsible for its character. The trick is to resist becoming the “quick fix” antidote. Contra most advocates for the community, refusing the scapegoat role is the social choice most responsible to the well-being of the community. Burke and Ellison further imply that we need to be aware of the disingenuities that relative degrees of privacy make possible. Every time someone “cashes in” on those ambiguities of language that slip so easily into being disingenuities, they damage the fragile trust that makes it possible for people to restrain their own bigotry police; they lessen the chances for survival of a democratic culture. Richard Rorty, for one, has tried to distinguish hopes, desires, and beliefs with merely private inferences from other such hopes, desires, and beliefs with more public implications.13 Rorty explains that religion has, at different times and places, served two types of human needs which get knotted together. Rorty states that there is no way to gratify both the need to hope simultaneously with gratification of the need to predict and control.14 Although I admire the goals of Rorty’s project, I have two reservations about it. Burke and Ellison lead me to expect that the separation between public and private that Rorty wants is not easily accomplished. Human religious practices can hardly be seen as unproblematically private in most cases of their occurrence in a democratic culture. Introducing questions of identity into Rorty’s picture makes it more difficult to privatize, and hence make unproblematic, the romantic aspects of religious matters.15

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It would not be morally acceptable for me to engage in some action that flies in the face of your needs simply because I was not actually in your presence when I did so. If it were okay to do that, then there would be no problem with most Ku Klux Klan meetings, for instance, since (1) actions undertaken at those meetings serve the need-induced wishes of some particular white men, and (2) only white men who share such need-induced wishes in common tend to be present at the private gathering. But clearly that sort of social tending to wishes goes beyond harmlessly projecting possibilities that serve desires and hopes and crosses over into mutilation of the moral language most of us think that we share. The test for priority of some kinds of desires over other kinds, for Rorty, seems to be a measure of how widespread those desires are. The desires of some sort of loosely defined “us” are more widespread than the desires of the Klansmen in my example. But suppose, as a thought experiment, we were to make the Klan meeting public. All are invited to attend, though the white supremacist agenda, for the sake of the example I’m proposing, remains the same. The things that Klansmen hope for, whether that be understood as what Klansmen believe to be true or what Klansmen desire, now steps on the toes (at the very least) of others in attendance. Now if my identity is bound up with some sort of identity that Klansmen anathematize, then as the meeting continues I’m going to wonder whether this is a community of which I am a member or not, despite the public nature of the event. I’ll be worried about whether my antagonistically expressed hopes and desires make any effective claim on this community, or if, on the other hand, the community is all too willing to scapegoat me by turning me into a heretic, were I to voice my worries. The issue then becomes less one of either truth or justification; it becomes more one of identity, which necessarily will shape my sense of both the true and the just. If I discover that I am to be the sacrifice that this community offers up for the sake of its solidarity, then I have discovered that when push comes to shove, the community will slough me in preference to enduring the conflict my presence in the community imposes. Justification becomes irrelevant because who I am places me outside the reach of the community whose language determines justice. My second objection concerns another categorical division that Rorty implies which seems too pat. The need of some people to hope runs up against the need of a different set of people to predict and control their environment. The former group finds that they are what needs to be predicted and controlled by the latter group. But to be controlled is to be barred from participation in any form of hope-filled human agency. Indeed, Susan Jarratt points out that Rorty’s approach tends to generalize about “cruelty” and discourages “discovering the operating principles of specific kinds of cruelty based on group differences.” He offers, she complains, “no reason to give thought to who is cruel to whom and why.”16 Burke and Ellison would suggest that the “wider

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self through which saving experiences come” that James posited was a sense of social identity that is necessarily dependent on the acceptance and cooperation of other elements of society and environment. Or as Giles Gunn has put it, the real concern for critics of religious poetry is “that no human being is an island unto itself.”17 The good and the beautiful spill over the arbitrary boundary lines that divide them; the ethical and the true do the same. The beautiful lie always enchants; the sublime beckons. Therefore, Rorty rightly points out, Christianity never was merely ethical, though he and his grandfather might have wished it so. Religions are always not only a blueprint for the way to live, they are also a map of the supposedly “beautiful” terrain upon which we live. Emphasis can so easily and quickly slip from one on dramatic action in the world to an emphasis upon the details of the world in which we act—the scene of action. The habit of understanding human religious life through the metaphor of poetry is at least as old as the Romantics, European and American. Rorty helps us to understand the implicit criticism of Platonism embedded in the use of this metaphor by the Romantics, a criticism those Romantics may not have totally understood themselves. Such an understanding does more than help us talk about human religiosity along with an acceptance of human pluralism, Rorty’s concern, thus turning us into some form of polytheists. It does that, but it also critiques the Platonic notion of the unity of the good, the true, and the beautiful. These categories don’t always come together in nonconflicting ways. Nor are they entirely distinguishable from each other. In the case of matters we call sublime, they overlap and may be internally inconsistent. What Burke and Ellison have to say about religion as a poem differs from what Rorty wants to say. Burke and Ellison do not believe that there is any realm of artistic endeavor that is purely private. Art is incorrigibly rhetorical. It aims to communicate. Often it aims to put forward a counterstatement to what is being taken as the good or the true for the bulk of society. But because any art worthy of the name aims to communicate, reception of the art matters. The audience matters, Ellison reminds us. The artist who fails to communicate and shows no responsibility for trying to, at best wastes our time and at worst becomes a social problem through her insistence on living in a world all her own. Religion is poetry, claims Burke, but poetry needs its critics in order to be a safe social practice. In this way Burke and Ellison are critics of any interpretation of Emersonian perfectionism understood as a private project. Art always has a social aim emphasized to some greater or lesser degree. There is, these two claim, a mild obligation to communicate. Sure, we sometimes write poems or draw pictures entirely for our own amusement—poems and pictures that we never intend to show to anyone else. But past the scope of the occasional daydream, we begin to worry when people spend their lives writing poems that no one at all

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understands, however privately meaningful those poems may be. We begin to think, past a certain point of tolerance, that the artist who fills his walls with paintings that he never shows anyone else has a problem. At a certain point, we find that problem not just amusing or annoying but maybe dangerous to society, and we seek outside help for that person. Moral and intellectual responsibility call for coordination of our fear- and need-induced wishes with the fear- and need-induced wishes of others through dialogue undertaken in community with them. What Burke’s and Ellison’s focus on identity adds to Rorty’s formulation is the insight that the recalcitrance of the environment (Emerson’s “nature” or the “not-me” portions of the universe) includes other human beings as part of that environment or as parts of the scene in which the agent acts. Therefore, I will need to relinquish practices, religious or secular, that fill me with hope by symbolically demeaning or taking resentments out upon another different identity group, even if those others never know about my actions because they are purely private, and even if I think that the symbolic bashing is just. Privacy ought not be used to evade social responsibility for civility in the face of differences of identity. Those “private” actions have public consequences for the building up of a moral language that we could hope to share. Rorty helpfully discloses the residual Platonism present in dualistic thinking that would rely upon dichotomies to organize understanding of the way things really are. The relevant false dichotomies in this case include: soul/body, piety/ criticism, presence/absence. Many pragmatists such as Siegfried, Fraser, Davaney, and Bernstein would include self/society or private/public in that list. Burke’s and Ellison’s emphasis upon continuums in place of dichotomies grants resources for finding what is concealed by dichotomizing tendencies of thought, reasons for looking there, and hints about what use those hidden resources might have. We would benefit from the conscious use of rhetoric, according to Burke and Ellison. Is rhetoric the art of persuasion? Or is it trickery? Burke and Ellison describe symbolic action as full of potential for both the most valuable persuasive practices needed by a democracy that does not wish to resort to force and full of the potential for trickery, hence an instrument in the toolbox of the demagogue. Aside from the issue of its desirability, pragmatists along with rhetoricians would agree that the use of rhetoric is, in any case, unavoidable and hence should be conscious. Human beings as social animals inevitably communicate with each other in inherited languages or some form of symbolic action very much like a language in that it is not innate, but taught by forebears and authorities, with more or less efficacy in its use. Through rhetoric human agents communicate with each other—they use languages and other forms of symbolic action to “mean” things. But the wider conversation of cultural

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pragmatism that Burke and Ellison add to is sometimes divided.18 Steven Mailloux puts these issues forward: “How do the pragmatist and rhetorical turns in academic disciplines relate to recent issues in a wider cultural politics outside the university? Is neo-pragmatism an anti-theory irrelevant to any specific political program; is it a reactionary defense of traditional institutions; or is it a justification for radical democratic reforms? Is pragmatism, like sophistry, open to the Platonic charge of relativism? Does rhetorical pragmatism thus lead to political quietism, because it provides no objective basis for ethical choice; or to social anarchy, because it provides justification for any political choice?”19 Pragmatist and rhetoricians both argue over interpretive emphases in their work in parallel ways. Is the anti-foundationalism at work in both rhetoric and pragmatism best used to skeptical purposes or to humanist purposes? Is symbolic action primarily about what human actions can be done with it or about what human actions can be undone with it? Is the political outcome of this antitheory theory quietism or agency? Do we play with the fire of relativism when we assert that there are no foundational certainties in the use of symbolic action? Or is there a distinctive stance of “fallibilism” that provides social grounding for such action that falls short of foundational certainty? Does playful symbolic action provide leverage against pretentious authority, on the one hand, or are we, on the other hand, subject to a regulatory function inherent in words? Which is primary: our right to strong readings or our obligation to communicate? On these either-or issues, Burke and Ellison as both/ and thinkers par excellence have much to contribute to the ongoing conversations. They would recast each of these formulations by trading in the dichotomized arguments for a spectrum that includes both extremes while discounting the most egoist extremities. They would render the differences voiced by rhetorical critics and neopragmatists such as Rorty, Poirier, Gunn, Bernstein, Fish, Stout, Levinson, Seigfried, and Booth conversable. Booth points out that although Burke was a cultural-linguistic interpreter of religion and life in general, he avoided the more language-reductive interpretations of these spheres.20 Richard Poirier, for instance, has adopted a “strong reading” stance, but he adopts it not for the antihumanist purposes one might expect, but rather for humanist ones. He speaks the language of “strong readings” not for nihilistic reasons, but for the purpose of maintaining the possibility of human agency. He plays up an emphasis upon the heteroglossic possibilities contained within language as forces against premature closure, rather than an emphasis upon the constraints of language that impose an ethnocentric restraint upon interpretation and privilege the bolstered social order of the status quo. He banks his call for criticism without foundations on “the many possible and competing voices to be heard” within any inherited language.21 For him language neither has the stability of a prisonhouse nor is it a stable means of adjudicating conflict. He emphasizes language’s instabilities in order to point

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out the possibilities of the vagueness that lie at language’s margins.22 Future hopeful possibilities outweigh the call for conversation closure, though both aspects of language inhere in the same set of words. But if both Burke and Ellison help show that the best possibilities for human symbolic action and rhetoric cannot be separated from the worst possibilities, they also demand a socialized understanding of rhetoric. From this view, we must not only be conscious that we inevitably use rhetoric, we must subject our own rhetoric to the scrutiny of others. This view also implies a responsibility to analyze the rhetoric of others closely. In the field of religious studies, this will mean thinking through how we use our words about God on each other. It will also mean locating the secular substitutes for God-talk on which identities are ultimately pinned—words about God, or History, or Nature, or ultimate reality. Rorty shows how the word bourgeois currently functions as an insignia of identity.23 By scapegoating that identity, some (generally well-off) Marxist intellectuals sustained their hope, or their need-induced wish, to sever themselves from their past social and economic histories while reforging a new alliance with the working class. At the same time, they attached themselves in solidarity with the rage of proletarian need-induced wishes to extricate themselves from complicity with the social domination of owner-masters. But Rorty asks which motive predominates in the mix—egoism or altruism? The “thirst for world-historical romance” is a function of the Leninist identity of the academic Marxists with whom Rorty identifies, albeit critically.24 The phrase points to the need those Marxists feel to be a relevant and effective part of something much bigger than their own identity, which is good, and the need they feel to elevate their own social stature and disown some responsibilities, which is bad. Rorty tells a sacrificial story that informs the symbolic acts of many Marxists. Through the scapegoating sacrifice of the “bourgeoisie,” he claims, “we” Marxists were able to “both overcome our fear of elitism and gratify our blood lust by letting us picture ourselves as swept up by the aroused masses—borne along toward the final slaughter bench of history, the altar where the bourgeoisie will be redemptively sacrificed.”25 The slip is the denial of any identification with the bourgeoisie. He argues that we ought no longer “use the term ‘working class’ to mean both ‘those who get least money and least security out of market economies’ and ‘the people who embody the true nature of human beings’ ” and that only the first definition of the term should apply.26 He is not here suggesting that we replace evaluative judgments with purely descriptive ones. Getting the least money and the least security are bad things—things harmful to human flourishing—and are injustices in a society that holds social equality as an ideal. But the evaluative judgments of the latter definition of working class do not follow from the evaluative judgments I’ve just offered.

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Without scapegoating, angelizing the working class becomes as difficult as demonizing the bourgeoisie.27 This particular essay of Rorty’s makes full use of the sorts of comic criticism Burke and Ellison offer to us. It views “sacred” motives as mixtures of altruistic and egoistic desires. Rorty’s critique of both Leninism and certain deconstructive strategies relies upon an emphasis upon the comic that he directly credits to Burke.28 Comic criticism such as that put forward by Burke and Ellison remind us that trash and treasure come mixed. The comic frame of criticism calls for discounting rather than debunking. Burke and Ellison offer comic resources to an American tradition of religious thought heavily influenced by Christianity’s particular tendencies to valorize tragedy and trivialize comedy. The model of comic criticism they elaborate offers an alternative approach to social antagonism by buffering the violence, whether internally or externally directed, that tragedy valorizes. Giles Gunn has examined the deep roots of this American comic tradition in useful detail.29 Particularly important is Gunn’s emphasis upon the comic criticism of civil religion. Whether the group identity in question is the American nation and its civil religion or Christian tradition, either group has its classic texts and rites of identity. Burke and Ellison highlight the need for vernacular contributions to those classics; they use the venacular process as a source for the critical revisions that keep those communal conversations alive.30 These vernacular resources generate comedy when the sacred crosses the line over into the realm of kitsch. Gunn pays attention not only to the overtly moral dimensions of human activity, but also to the usable religious resources from pragmatic tradition that address human limitations—that look to a point when human effort must sanely cease. This should call to mind both Burke’s discussion of humor and Ellison’s emphasis upon “hibernation” as an alternative to martyrdom. Both Burke and Ellison are culture critics advocating melioristic political action, but both are also concerned that such action not be pushed to the point of martyrdom. Burke and Ellison show us that we need to pay attention to what in particular, on a case by case basis, is meant by transcendence. These men would sensitize us to words about transcendence and sublimity where appeals to the good or the true mingle with appeals to the beautiful. Because we need to be hypervigilant about our own scapegoating processes, formulations of transcendence that appeal to tragic modes of interpretation ought particularly tocatch our eye. Both Burke and Ellison rely heavily on “comic” transcendence to bridge differences and to make joy out of limitations. They want to project possibilities that will bridge gaps in identities. How is this like or different from other modes of transcendence that have been characterized by writers such as

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Santayana, West, Rorty, and James Livingston as mystical, hopeful, romantic, or redemptive? I have tried to show in chapters 4 and 7 that much of the relevant understanding of “the comic” has its origins in the work of Santayana. Santayana distinguished this view he proposed as different from a “mystical disintegration” that retained “no hearty allegiance to any human interest.”31 Like Cornel West, Santayana wants to avoid any Emersonian understanding of transcendence that, like mysticism, erodes the capacity for action when it is needed.32 Likewise, the mystic’s transcendence is not the one aimed at by Burke and Ellison. Burke’s and Ellison’s view of transcendence does confront but, just as important, tries to cope with the existence of absurdity in the world. One might suppose that a world with absurdity in it would paralyze actors and turn them into mystics or self-pitying passive victims. In Ellison’s view, seeing the absurdity does not undermine agency. Consciousness of multiple and conflicting points of view, the masklike nature of identity, and the logical absurdity of holding multiple possible selves together in one person does not end in paralysis for the Invisible Man, as it does for Dostoevsky’s underground man. Quite the contrary; though absurdity depresses him, it also frees up the agent for the active projection of a possibility as opposed to the passive acceptance of a predefined role. For Rinehart, it generates possibilities for action. We may not approve of all those possibilities—we as a society will have to turn away from some of the possibilities presented to us—but this view does turn masks into something we can choose to put on in order to project one of our possible selves, rather than some kind of prison that attaches to the face. When the sufferer sees herself as performing a preassigned role in a tragedy, she gets to feel active while in fact being passive; she is scripted. She is assigned her role in a big, meaningful story. However, her painful role is significant, not absurd, which is a compensatory consolation. The tragic interpretation of events amplifies significance while it undermines agency. It buys meaning in the currency of quietism. Tragic interpretations allow sufferers to console themselves for the losses they endure with the knowledge that the role they play is vital to some greater good. Tragedy is not an alternative to mysticism; it is a form of mystification because, with symbols, it makes dignified art out of ethically relevant events and human interactions. In the making of the art, one has to leave out certain details for the sake of beauty (or, in literary parlance, eloquence). What gets left out is what gets covered over in mystification. Ellison divides things up differently. Agency is possible precisely when we recognize absurdity. Absurdity undermines the pull of tragedy and exposes the details that tragedy hides in clouds of mystery. Were absurdity not recognized, a victim would end up playing a role in a tragic drama in which she is cast as scapegoat—a drama that is meaningful (rather than absurd) because of this hero’s acceptance of her assigned victim status.

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Some religious thinkers worry that refusing tragic interpretations will end up having the undesirable effect of producing people who do not take suffering seriously. They also rightly worry that refusal of tragic modes of interpretation disposes us to a myopic optimism rather than a realistically pessimistic view of existence at a detailed level. But to ask whether optimism or pessimism is the proper religious attitude to hold is to ask a question about how things really are. The answer decides one’s attitude toward ontology rather than one’s attitude toward history. We use these words to delineate alternative moods justified by the nature of existence. As such, “optimism or pessimism” is a quandary that worries folks concerned with either metanarratives or deep structures that explain how the world really is. But if existence doesn’t have an essential nature, as most pragmatists would agree, but rather is constantly under construction and destruction in the interplay of selves and societies, human attitudes would be either melioristic or despairing, and oriented toward the possibilities of action. The relevant religious questions to ask would mull over what probable differences actions could make in particular situations; they would ask whether we need to work more on self or society in contingent contexts. So what does transcendence amount to in this view I’m putting forward? Burke asks, “What can people sing about?” This is an action-focused and novel way to rephrase the former question.33 If Burke and Ellison don’t mean mysticism when they refer to transcendence, do they mean hope or romance, the candidates Rorty puts forward? Ellison describes as transcendent “those moments of exultation wherein man’s vision is quickened by the eloquence of an orchestra, an actor, orator or dancer, or by anyone using the arts of music, speech or symbolic gesture to create within us moments of high consciousness; moments wherein we grasp, in the instant, a knowledge of how transcendent and how abysmal and yet affirmative it can be to be human beings.”34 Burke, on the other hand, notes that “much genuine folk culture has arisen out of unfair circumstances—it is precisely the descendants of slaves,” he writes, “who, as a race in America, have been most given to song.”35 Something about these art forms allows people to act “as if” ideals could be realized, if only for the moment. Acting “as if” doesn’t necessarily make it so, but it might, if a possibility is being projected. These art forms and performances provide something akin to hope or “romance,” as Rorty puts it, even when those attitudes seem unjustified. Rorty distinguishes two views of the transcendence supplied by religious romance: the conviction that “a power not ourselves will do unimaginably vast good” on the one hand, and the hope on the other hand that “we ourselves will do such good.”36 But there is more play between the two visions than Rorty’s formulation makes visible. Let us grant for the moment that there is not much at stake aside from publicity or privacy in the choice between the words “con-

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viction” and “hope.” Let us grant also for the sake of argument the interchangeability of the two words. Taking what I’ve learned from Santayana, Burke, and Ellison, I want to reformulate the terms of Rorty’s alternative descriptions into two phrases that say pretty much the same thing, rather than describing two different understandings of religion—theist and humanist—to choose between. The former hope—the prayer (to insert Burke’s language)— is that persons not ourselves, as part of the environment we do not control and outside the limits of our own powers, will extend the limits of our solitary powers by accepting us as full members of their community. The latter conviction is that at the limits of “me”—even at the current limits of “we”—there is reason to hope, something to live for, and an ideal worth acting in light of. In my reading, the view of transcendence Burke and Ellison put forward calls for nothing more (or less) than consistently acting and cultivating habits of acting as if our hopes and claims might yet be satisfied, even when we have no good reason for believing those convictions to be true, even when we have to pretend. This acting amounts to projecting a possibility. I think it is mistaken to read “comic” transcendence as “redeeming value,” as James Livingston has interpreted Burke’s comic frame.37 I worry about redemptive interpretations of transcendence because of what they imply about justice and justification. They imply that historical triumphs reveal something significant about divine justice, which I do not take to be the case. When redemptive metaphors about biblical heroes are put to social use, they facilitate “identification allowing for a ritualistic kind of historiography in which the poet could, by allusion to a Biblical story, ‘substantially’ foretell the triumph of his vanquished faction.”38 Nowhere in Burke or Ellison’s work do I see a call for a metaphor that instantiates a sacred history or a secularized version of sacred history. Further, I think that redemptive interpretations of transcendence encourage martyrdom. In hibernation, Ellison’s Invisible Man offers this view of martyrdom from his resting place: “Too often, in order to justify them, I had to take myself by the throat and choke myself until my eyes bulged and my tongue hung out and wagged like the door of an empty house in a high wind. Oh, yes, it made them happy and it made me sick. So I became ill of affirmation, of saying ‘yes’ against the nay-saying of my stomach—not to mention my brain.”39 I propose that we resist both the pedestal and martyrdom when they are offered or proposed to us, one usually being the paycheck for the other. It would be more life-affirming to make use of rest and “hibernation” in their stead. Ellison offers “hibernation” as an alternative to martyrdom. Rather than pushing himself past the brink, the Invisible Man rests awhile underground. When vulnerable, like a snake about to shed its skin, he goes into retreat. He might look dead but, crucially, he is not. When the time and conditions are

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right, when he has the strength, he will emerge again. Having gone underground as the sheathed snake for protection and rest, the Invisible Man insists, “I must shake off the old skin and come up for breath.”40 I resist redemptively interpreted metaphors for transcendence because I share John Neal’s cynicism on this point: “we should all be saviours of mankind if we could,” he claims, “and would even slay one another for the privilege.”41 This sick joke is already too much enacted in the current world situation. It comes down to distinguishing our religious “genius” from our trained incapacities in matters of sacrificial motives. We have developed religious habits that have helped us in the past but hinder us in changed circumstances. Burke explains how genius turns into incapacity: “Through living under difficulty, one learns the mode of thinking, feeling, and acting best suited to cope with difficulty. No wonder he prizes a discovery which he has made at so great inconvenience to himself, and will not relinquish it but calls upon it to maintain precisely those adversities which it was at first designed to remedy.”42 We want to keep the world from which we know what to expect, even when we expect the worst. We want to maximize our chances to predict and control the environment, even if it comes down to starving our hopes. But doing so may cost us both the positive possibilities of change as well as a lot of sacrificial bloodshed. At its best, religious rhetoric as symbolic action protects us, homeopathically. “We may, through being burned a little,” writes Burke, “understand the signs for being burned a lot.”43 But when we actually start torching each other with our rhetorical acts, it is time for self-consciousness about what we are doing. I would urge, along with Burke, that “all must join together in seeking for ways and means . . . of undoing the damage being done by the human animal’s failure to control the powers developed by that same organism’s own genius.”44 Only in this way will we be able to begin to disentangle the best of human capacities from the worst of them.

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NOTES

CHAPTER ONE: IDENTITY AND THE RITES OF SYMBOLIC ACTION 1. Kenneth Burke quoted by Gregory Clark in a eulogy, “Notes on Kenneth Burke’s Death,” circulated on the Internet. Original dated November 30, 1993. 2. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 22. 3. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 69. 4. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 164–165. 5. Burke, Attitudes toward History, 285. 6. Hyman, Armed Vision, 347. 7. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 29. 8. The phrase is Cornel West’s describing Emerson, but it also adequately names an attitude I can embrace. 9. See Rueckert, Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations and Encounters with Kenneth Burke; Henderson, Kenneth Burke. 10. Inglis, Clifford Geertz, 43. 11. John F. Callahan, “Introduction,” in Ellison, Collected Essays, xvii. 12. Orlando Patterson, in Rituals of Blood, has pointed out Ellison’s religious treatment of lynching as a form of sacrifice and has furthered Ellison’s claim by providing rich and detailed sociological argument. My own argument will be less about how to interpret lynching (Ellison and Patterson sound right on the money to me) and more about an argument Ellison was presenting on the nature of sacrifice and its connections to transitions in identity in a more general and theoretical way. Again, the Burke/ Ellison connection will make the broad application of Ellison’s claims more noticeable. 13. Geertz might become more central to the canon of pragmatist thought once more people read Fred Inglis’s intellectual history of Geertz, in which Inglis highlights these connections in brilliant detail. 14. See Geertz’s study of Ruth Benedict’s style in Works and Lives (particularly p. 112). Her work informs his own style. 15. My work is deeply indebted to Giles Gunn, particularly to his book Thinking across the American Grain. That debt shows up particularly in my analysis of scapegoating, piety and criticism, and antagonistic cooperation. 16. See Burke’s explanation to Malcolm Cowley of his project in Permanence and Change: “Pre-evolutionary thought naively overstressed the constant aspect of human society—evolutionary thought compensatorily overstressed the shifting aspect—a machinery of documentation and logic now seems available for making our century distinctive as the merger of these two principles.” Kenneth Burke to Malcolm Cowley, June 4, 1933, in Jay, Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley, 204. 17. Kenneth Burke to Austin Warren, April 25, 1933, Rare Books and Special Collections, Pattee Library, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania (hereafter cited as Pattee Library Special Collections). Burke also wants to integrate critical approaches with each other. He is concerned with what Ellison described as

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“the problem of the irrational, that blind spot in our knowledge of society where Marx cries out for Freud and Freud for Marx, but where approaching, both grow wary and shout insults lest they actually meet.” Ellison, Collected Essays, 335. 18. Kenneth Burke to Malcolm Cowley, June 4, 1933, in Jay, Selected Correspondence, 205. 19. Burke, Attitudes toward History, 28. 20. See Santayana, Reason in Religion, 33. Santayana’s idea of vegetative change as opposed to mechanical change figures in Burke’s plea for the organic over the mechanic metaphor for change. Santayana argues that natural development, unlike the mechanics of cause and effect, can make for “a break, often a complete diversity and disproportion, between effort and result.” Nature, including natural human spirit, affords more surprises than mechanics can account for. Hence, Burke distinguishes his version of naturalism from reductive mechanism. Burke’s partial ally in this project of putting natural vigor and organic metaphors for change to work in combating mechanistic reductionism, Henri Bergson, puts him on to the idea of social “by-products” as potential social medicines or poisons. Even Burke’s Marxism has a Bergsonian evaluation: It is the critical vigor of 1930s Marxism, not its last word on truth, that captures Burke’s imagination. See Jay, Selected Correspondence, 198–199. 21. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 187. 22. Ellison, Collected Essays, 421. 23. Ibid., 466. From Burke and Ellison’s Emersonian point of view, the contingent attachments identity groups feel toward the sources of their well-being are not necessarily better (or worse) than the contingent attachments of differing others, but they are fitter for those people situated in history and environment in the particular ways that they are. In Burke’s language, those attachments provide a niche that supports the life of particular groups of people. Burke hooks his Darwinian language back up with Emerson’s (but now with a new twist on Emerson) by calling the occupation of particular neo-“Malthusian” niches by particular groups the “genius” of the group. Thus does Burke make use of the word genius in a way less like the German Romanticism adopted by Emerson and more like the Darwin-tinged vocabulary of William James— the difference being the moral space Darwin, if not his epigones, left between “better” and “fitter.” Groups can, however, overburden their niche and come to misery through the blindnesses of their “genius.” 24. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 229. 25. Ellison quoting Yeats. Ibid., 163. 26. Ibid., 164. 27. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 137. 28. Ibid., 189. 29. Ibid., 193. 30. Ibid., 57. 31. Lewis, “Identifications and Divisions,” 98. 32. I appreciate Lewis’s remark and want to echo in my own way his argument that “Burke sounds at times like a deconstructionist influenced by Freud though Lacan.” Ibid., 100. 33. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 98. Burke’s language also shows up in Ellison’s writing on the education of “disadvantaged” children: “These kids with whom we’re

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concerned, these dropouts, are living critics of their environment, of our society and our educational system, and they are quite savage critics of some of their teachers.” Ellison, Collected Essays, 551; emphasis added. 34. Lewis, “Identifications and Divisions,” 98. 35. Ibid., 99. 36. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 66. 37. Ibid., 138. 38. Bloom, “Introduction,” 3. 39. Ibid. 40. Bloom, Agon, 31. 41. Ibid., 158. 42. See “I, Eye, Ay—Concerning Emerson’s Early Essay on ‘Nature’ and the Machinery of Transcendence,” in Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 186–200. 43. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 242. 44. Bloom quoting Emerson in Bloom, Agon, 149. 45. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 18. 46. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 15–16. 47. Ibid., 16–20. 48. Emerson, “Poetry and Imagination,” in Letters and Social Aims, 8. 49. Emerson, “The Comic,” in Letters and Social Aims, 142. 50. Levinson, Santayana, Pragmatism, and the Spiritual Life, 25. See also Clebsch, American Religious Thought. 51. Ralph Ellison to Kenneth Burke, November 23, 1945, Pattee Library Special Collections. 52. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 56. 53. Kenneth Burke, undated page of notes, Pattee Library Special Collections. 54. Ellison, Invisible Man, 474. 55. Ibid., 507. 56. Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, 148. 57. West, American Evasion of Philosophy, 11. 58. Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures, 68. 59. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 166. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. Emerson, Emerson in His Journals, 245. 63. Emerson, Journals, 329. 64. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 177. 65. Critiques of Invisible Man tend to divide along lines that claim Ellison as an Emersonian and others that claim him as a critic of Emerson. See Deutsch, “Ralph Waldo Ellison and Ralph Waldo Emerson,” an exemplar of the former trend; and Nichols, “Ralph Ellison’s Black American Scholar,” an exemplar of the latter. Few notice, because they misread the intentional ambiguities of Emerson’s writing style, because they pay no heed to Burke, or because they are too invested in one identity or the other, that he is both—and that the “both-ness” is all to the point. 66. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 958.

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67. Ibid., 954. For more detail, see Cornel West’s elaboration of Emerson’s views on personality and race in West, American Evasion of Philosophy, 28–35. 68. Ellison, Invisible Man, 41. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., 40. 71. Ibid., 108. 72. Ibid., 45. 73. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 958. 74. Ellison, Invisible Man, 40. 75. Emerson, “Fate,” in Essays and Lectures, 949. 76. Ibid., 41. 77. Ibid., 42. 78. Ibid., 578. 79. Ibid., 577. 80. Ibid., 577–578. 81. Ibid., 40–41. 82. Burke, “Ralph Ellison’s Trueblooded Bildungsroman,” 359. 83. This is Burke’s phrase. See Burke, “Ralph Ellison’s Bildungsroman,” 355. 84. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 165. 85. Clark, Burke Internet eulogy. 86. Kenneth Burke to Isidor Schneider, May 11, 1936, Pattee Library Special Collections. 87. Santayana’s influence shows here. From Santayana, “Ultimate Religion,” 472– 473: “Reason may be the differentia of man; it is surely not his essence. His essence, at best, is animality qualified by reason. And from this animality the highest flights of reason are by no means separable. The very life of spirit springs from animal predicaments: it moves by imposing on events a perspective and a moral urgency proper to some particular creature.” 88. Burke’s refusal to anathematize the body sounds like Santayana, who writes that to “renounce the flesh you must renounce the world; things called indecent or obscene are inextricably woven into the texture of existence; there can be no completely honest comedy without them.” Santayana, “The Censor and the Poet,” in Soliloquies, 158. 89. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 263. 90. Burke, Attitudes toward History, 264. 91. Ibid., 263. 92. Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 5. 93. Ibid., 5–9. 94. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 81. 95. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 328. 96. Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 9–13. 97. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 329. 98. Morris Cohen to Kenneth Burke, April 14, 1935, Pattee Library Special Collections. Emphasis added. 99. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 11. 100. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 299. 101. Ibid., 170.

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Ibid., 176. Ibid., 38. Ellison, “Song of Innocence,” 32. Busby, Ralph Ellison, 117. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 243.

CHAPTER TWO: KENNETH BURKE’S NATURAL PIETIES OF IDENTITY 1. Burke, Attitudes toward History, p. 267. 2. Burke, Permanence and Change, 80. 3. Ibid., 86–87. 4. Ibid., 76. 5. See Levinson, Santayana. 6. Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, 148. 7. Ibid., 145. 8. Ibid. 9. Santayana, Reason in Religion, 186. 10. Ibid., 184. 11. Ibid., 179. 12. Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, 147. 13. Ibid., 141. 14. Burke, Permanence and Change, 76. 15. Ibid., 75. 16. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 262. 17. Burke, Attitudes toward History, 268. 18. Kenneth Burke to Dave Mandel, October 28, 1941, Pattee Library Special Collections. 19. Burke, Attitudes toward History, 21. 20. Santayana, Reason in Religion, 179. 21. Ibid, 191. 22. Burke, Permanence and Change, 69. 23. Santayana’s naturalism is similar to Nietzsche’s sentiment expressed in this passage from The Gay Science: “I have discovered for myself that the human and animal past, indeed the whole primal age and past of all sentient being continues in me to invent, to love, to hate, and to infer. I suddenly woke up in the midst of this dream, but only to the consciousness that I am dreaming and that I must go on dreaming lest I perish—as a somnambulist must go on dreaming lest he fall. What is appearance for me now? Certainly not the opposite of some essence: what could I say about any essence except to name the attributes of its appearance!” Nietzsche, Gay Science, 54. 24. Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, 147. 25. Santayana, “Ultimate Religion,” 470. 26. Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, 145. 27. On this point Burke’s emphasis was more like that of Dewey and James than Santayana’s. 28. Burke, Permanence and Change, 69.

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29. Kenneth Burke to Perce Winner, February 14, 1935, Pattee Library Special Collections. 30. Burke to Warren, April 25, 1933, Pattee Library Special Collections. 31. Santayana, “Ultimate Religion,” 466. 32. Burke, Permanence and Change, 69. 33. Kenneth Burke to Malcolm Cowley, March 30, 1934, Pattee Library Special Collections. The “Declamations” refers to Burke’s rhetorical novel, Towards a Better Life, written during his own secular “conversion” experience. 34. Santayana, Reason in Religion, 40. 35. Santayana, Soliloquies, 158. 36. Santayana, Reason in Religion, 42. 37. I am not proposing an interpretation of the relevant work of Plato and Marx; rather, I am offering an account of the use Burke makes of certain ideas in Plato and Marx when he discusses Santayana. 38. See Burke, “The Status of Art,” in Counter-Statement. In this piece Burke deals with the historical question of the relationship of art to human values, with special attention to the understandings of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Art is and always has been involved in the transvaluation of values, he claims, but social emphasis on utility as a kind of productive work placed art between a rock and a hard place during this period. Art, he thinks, has usually been related to morality as something immoral, where immorality means counter to the prevailing norms of morality. But as a protective strategy, artists began to consider their work amoral rather than immoral. On the whole, his approach considers the artist in terms of natural selection: How do the artist’s particular value mutations fit with the value environment of the wider society? 39. Nietzsche, Gay Science, 18. 40. Burke, Grammar of Motives, 215–216. 41. Ibid., 221. 42. Santayana, “Ultimate Religion,” 470. 43. Burke, Grammar of Motives, 222–223. Burke sees that Santayana embraces without irony what Nietzsche ambiguously describes with it: “Life—is a long death. Fool that I was to shorten the lives of so many! Was I made to be a benefactor? I should have given them eternal life: then I could have watched them die forever.” Nietzsche, Gay Science, 36. 44. Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, 149. 45. Burke, Permanence and Change, 74. 46. Plato, Euthyphro, 4. 47. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 20. 48. Burke, Permanence and Change, 78. 49. Ibid., 148. 50. Ibid., 74. 51. Emerson, “Nature,” in Essays and Lectures, 10. 52. To take Burke’s essay as pertinent only to the literary critic is to miss its value as an analysis of naturalized religious piety. Burke’s work throughout the 1930s tended to concern itself with areas of culture broader than the strictly literary, unlike his earlier work Counter-Statement (1931) and later writings. In the Freud essay, Burke claims to be concerned explicitly with literary criticism, and indeed The Philosophy of Literary

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Form, which includes this essay, marks the beginning of his transition back to a more narrow literary focus. Burke began teaching English at Bennington in 1943 and continued there until 1962. One might speculate as to how much the career change informed the shift to a more narrow literary focus in his work. But I do not think that reading Burke’s concerns as wider than the needs of strictly literary criticism constitutes a misreading, in light of his continual concern with war and communion. 53. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 258–259. 54. Ibid., 259. 55. Ibid., 260. 56. Ibid., 260–261. 57. Ibid., 262. 58. Ibid., 268. 59. See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 48. 60. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 268. 61. Ibid., 269. Burke makes nothing of it, but I find it of interest to note that both models are found in nature. The metaphor itself may be borrowed from Santayana: “Words and images are like shells, no less integral parts of nature than are the substances they cover, but better addressed to the eye and more open to observation.” Santayana, Soliloquies, 131–132. 62. Ibid., 269. 63. Ibid., 272. 64. See Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 271. I refer to Wordsworth’s poem “My Heart Leaps Up” (1802): My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! The child is father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety. (Wordsworth, Poems, 137) 65. Emerson, “Nature,” in Essays and Lectures, 9. 66. Burke, Permanence and Change, 71. 67. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 276. 68. Ibid., 272–273. 69. Ibid., 273. 70. Ibid., 274. 71. Burke borrows the language of “eulogistic” and “dyslogistic” and the nominalism behind their use from Jeremy Bentham. 72. I am not able to transcribe this word with any degree of certainty. 73. Kenneth Burke’s response written in the margins of a letter to him from David Daiches of the University of Chicago English department. See David Daiches to Kenneth Burke, March 3, 1939, Pattee Library Special Collections. 74. Burke, Permanence and Change, 97.

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75. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 276–277. 76. Ibid., 280. 77. See Santayana, “The Censor and the Poet,” in Soliloquies. “Dramatic poetry,” claims Santayana, “. . . throws back our perception of what is going on into the latent dream which this perception has for its background: for a perception, apart from its object, is only one feature in a dream.” Santayana, Soliloquies, 157. 78. Ibid. 79. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 281. 80. Ibid., 282. 81. Burke, Permanence and Change, 125. 82. Ibid., 126. 83. Kenneth Burke, page of notes, August 25, 1936, Pattee Library Special Collections. 84. Ibid. 85. Burke, Attitudes toward History, 264. 86. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 283. 87. Ibid., 284. 88. Ibid., 290. 89. See Permanence and Change, 156. 90. James Daly to Kenneth Burke, February 19, 1935, Pattee Library Special Collections. 91. Nietzsche shares this proclivity with Emerson. Santayana writes that when Emerson used category-shattering techniques, his audiences attributed the power of his rhetoric to divine revelation. “What seemed, then, to the more earnest and less critical of his hearers a revelation from above was in truth rather an insurrection from beneath, a shaking loose from convention, a disintegration of the normal categories or reason in favour of various imaginative principles, on which the world might have been built, if it had been built differently.” In Santayana’s and Burke’s naturalistic views, perspective by incongruity owes its revelatory power to the new possibilities it reveals and the joy experienced in that revelation. Emerson’s audiences “were stifled with conscience,” writes Santayana, “and he brought them a breath of Nature.” Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, 132–133. 92. Burke, Permanence and Change, 77. 93. Santayana, Reason in Religion, 183. 94. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 290. 95. Burke, Permanence and Change, 78–79. 96. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 290–291. 97. Burke to Cowley, June 16, 1933, in Jay, Correspondence, 207. 98. Burke to Cowley, August 9, 1931, in Jay, Correspondence, 195. 99. Burke to Cowley, June 1, 1931, in Jay, Correspondence, 193. 100. Burke to Winner, February 14, 1935, Pattee Library Special Collections. 101. Ibid. 102. See Emerson, “Nature,” in Essays and Lectures, 9. 103. Burke, Towards a Better Life, 87. 104. Ibid., 108. 105. Burke, Attitudes toward History, 228.

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106. Ibid. 107. Burke, Towards a Better Life, 168. 108. Plato, Euthyphro, 7. CHAPTER THREE: CARTHARSIS AND TRAGEDY 1. For instance, in “On Catharsis, or Resolution,” 338, Burke writes: “The present study of Catharsis aims to establish a position to which the intimate, family aspects of the problem and the socio-political aspects are equally available. In this sense, we would see, brooding over society, not specifically the Oedipus Complex, nor even, more generally, a conflict between ‘Eros’ and ‘Thanatos,’ but still more generally, the ‘Sacrificial Motive,’ the theme of ‘mortification’ and its variants. This would be taken to sum up the element of suffering, of victimage, which is basic to tragic conflict.” 2. Burke, “On Catharsis,” 342. 3. Burke, “Catharsis—Second View,” 107. 4. Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 186. 5. Burke, “Othello,” 166. 6. Ibid. 7. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 65. 8. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 247. 9. Ibid., 252–254. 10. Ibid., 254. 11. Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 187. 12. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 255. 13. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 46. 14. Burke, “Othello,” 178. 15. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 263. 16. Ibid., 22. 17. Kenneth Burke to the editors of The Windsor Quarterly, July 10, 1934, Pattee Library Special Collections, quoting his own “Art under Capitalism.” 18. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 20. 19. Ibid., 252. 20. Burke to editors of Windsor Quarterly, July 10, 1934, Pattee Library Special Collections. 21. Burke, “On Catharsis,” 360. 22. Burke, “Catharsis—Second View,” 108. 23. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 19. 24. Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 189. 25. See Gunn, Thinking across the American Grain, 12–15, on the socialization of loss. I find the connections Gunn makes about James and Dewey on the production of meaning in response to experiences of loss, Burke’s treatment of sacrificial motives, and the psychological work of Peter Homans in his discussion of loss and “the ability to mourn” extremely suggestive and potentially fruitful. 26. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 45. 27. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 216. 28. Burke, “On Catharsis,” 361.

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29. Burke, Permanence and Change, 15–16. 30. Ibid. 31. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 44. 32. Burke, Towards a Better Life, xviii. 33. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 191. 34. Ibid., 191–192. 35. Burke, “On Catharsis,” 361. 36. Ibid. 37. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 220. 38. Ibid., 196–198. 39. Burke, “Othello,” 169. 40. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 192–194. 41. Ibid., 27. 42. Ibid., 28. 43. Burke, Grammar of Motives, 406–408. 44. Ibid., 406–407. 45. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 17. 46. Ibid., 13. 47. Burke, “Thanatopsis for Critics,” 374. 48. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 20. 49. The early Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy mourned the loss of metaphysical status attributed to death; he “was exercised,” according to Burke, “with the difference between the Socratic medicine (as interpreted by Plato) and the medicine of the tragic playwrights. Celebrating the cult of tragedy (the cult of the kill, resolution in terms of extreme victimage), Nietzsche attacked Socrates for being a reformer whose policies implied the death of tragedy” Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 190. And yet in Nietzsche’s later writings he decided not to mourn the death of tragedy but to celebrate it, as Burke will in his celebration of comedy, which I will discuss in the next chapter. Nietzsche, like Burke, must have realized that tragedy provides death with a dignity that comedy can never provide to it, but eventually both thinkers came to believe that this dignity was something that they could live without, given its price. 50. See Burke, “Thanatopsis for Critics,” 370; Burke, “On Catharsis,” 349; and Burke, “Three Definitions,” 183. 51. Burke “Three Definitions,” 183. 52. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 14. 53. Ibid., 19. 54. Burke, Attitudes toward History, 222–223. 55. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 13. 56. Burke, Grammar of Motives, 407. 57. See Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever, for a full-length elaboration of a very similar argument. 58. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 15. 59. Ibid, 14. 60. Ibid., 13–14. 61. Ibid., 14. 62. Burke, “Catharsis—Second View,” 116. 63. Burke, “Three Definitions,” 183.

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64. Burke, “Catharsis—Second View,” 117. He writes: “The cathartic process of a drama occurs in an irreversible temporal order. But its “moments” along the way are also related like a set of terms that mutually imply one another, without regard to any one temporal or narrative arrangement.” 65. Burke, “On Catharsis,” 362. 66. Burke, “Catharsis—Second View,” 117. 67. Ibid., 119. 68. Burke, “On Catharsis,” 367. 69. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 14. 70. Burke, “On Catharsis,” 366. Burke also shows that in the narrative mode, a series of interruptions to a character can serve as “a secular equivalent of mortification.” Burke, “Othello,” 186. 71. Burke, “Thanatopsis for Critics,” 369–370. 72. Burke, Attitudes toward History, 29. 73. Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 188. 74. Burke, “On Catharsis,” 352; emphasis added. 75. Burke, Permanence and Change, 195. 76. Ibid., 196. 77. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 253. 78. Ibid., 254. 79. Burke, “On Catharsis,” 340. 80. Ibid., 349. 81. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 18. 82. Burke, “Othello,” 166. 83. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 46. 84. Kenneth Burke to Malcolm Cowley, April 28, 1936, Pattee Library Special Collections. 85. Burke, Attitudes toward History, 36. 86. Burke, “Othello,” 178. 87. See Weir, Sacrificial Logics, for an extensive treatment of sacrifice in terms of philosophical logic. 88. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 20–21. 89. Burke, Grammar of Motives, 405–406. 90. Ibid., 261–262. 91. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 45. 92. Ibid., 28–29. 93. See this argument in Stout, Ethics after Babel. 94. Burke, “Three Definitions,” 184–185. 95. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 258. 96. Burke, “Three Definitions,” 180. 97. Burke, “On Human Behavior Considered Dramatistically,” appendix to Burke, Permanence and Change, 284. 98. Ibid., 286. 99. Burke, Towards a Better Life, 9. 100. “On Human Behavior Considered Dramatistically,” in Burke, Permanence and Change, 278. 101. Burke, “A ‘Dramatistic’ View of ‘Imitation,’ ” 239–240.

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102. Ibid., 241. 103. Ibid. 104. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 6. 105. Ibid., 9. 106. Ibid. 107. Ibid., 10–11. 108. Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 200. See also pages 187 and 189 of the same article for repetitions of the concepts of a HERE and a THERE, or a HERE and an ELSEWHERE beyond it. 109. Ibid., 188. 110. Ibid. 111. Ibid. 112. Burke, “Three Definitions,” 180. 113. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 253; emphasis added. 114. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 50–51. 115. Burke, “Catharsis—Second View,” 125. 116. Ibid. 117. Burke, “On Catharsis,” 345. 118. Ibid., 344. 119. Ibid., 347. 120. Burke, Towards a Better Life, 168–169. 121. Burke, “On Catharsis,” 339. CHAPTER FOUR: THE SPIRITUAL UTILITY OF COMEDY 1. Chaplin, The Great Dictator. 2. Burke, “On Catharsis,” 339. 3. Burke, “Why Satire?” 318. 4. Ibid., 315. 5. Ibid., 317–318. 6. Burke, “Toward Helhaven,” 20. 7. Ibid. 8. Burke, “Why Satire?” 321. 9. Ibid., 332. 10. Ibid., 313. 11. Burke, “Toward Helhaven,” 24. 12. Burke, “Why Satire?” 328. 13. Burke, “Toward Helhaven,” 21. 14. Burke, “Why Satire?” 327. 15. Ibid., 322. 16. Burke, “Toward Helhaven,” 22. 17. Burke, “Why Satire?” 312. 18. Ibid. 19. Burke, Attitudes toward History, 49. 20. Burke, “Why Satire?” 321. 21. Burke, “Toward Helhaven,” 21.

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22. Burke, Attitudes toward History, 59–60. 23. Ibid., 228–229. 24. A critic might point out that he is less willing to democratize didactic techniques—that is, less willing to teach others how to teach others. See Burke, Attitudes toward History, 229. 25. Jay, Correspondence, 207. 26. Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 100–101. 27. Burke quoted in Hyman, Armed Vision, 357–358. 28. Ibid. 29. Burke, Attitudes toward History, 252. 30. Ibid., 40. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Santayana, Reason in Religion, 224. 34. Burke, Attitudes toward History, 41. 35. Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 400. Aristotle’s case for New Comedy was elaborated by his student Theophrastus. For a discussion see McFadden, Discovering the Comic, 51. 36. Burke, “Why Satire?” 313. 37. Freud, Jokes and the Unconscious, 118. 38. Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 400. 39. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 419. 40. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 38. 41. Freud, Jokes and the Unconscious, 254. 42. Ibid., 106–107. 43. Ibid., 113. 44. Ibid. 45. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 61–62. 46. Ibid., 64. 47. Burke, Attitudes toward History, 339. 48. Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 343. 49. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 414. 50. Ibid., 415. 51. Ibid., 417. 52. Ibid., 416–417. 53. Jay, Correspondence, 205. 54. Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 342–343. 55. Burke, Attitudes toward History, 237. 56. Ibid., 335. 57. Ibid., 20. Though he mistrusts humor, Burke is not above making use of it when he needs to. Observe this excerpt from a 1931 letter to Malcolm Cowley that reveals Burke’s growing economic worries: It seems doubtful whether people must eat, but it is certain that publishers must publish. Do you know, Malcolm, that I sing from morning to night—with trench morale? That I first shiver, and then giggle, to learn that U.S. Steel earns the faithful

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exactly five cents a share in three months. That I note with hilarity how the real break threatens to begin, a year and a half after the greatest debauch of financial gloom in all history. How long will’t be, I ask myself, until we start to nibble at corners of the estate—until this pathetic little Sir Walter Scott dream, so essential to my scheme of self-respect, begins to turn nightmare? (April 29, 1931, in Jay, Correspondence, 192) 58. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 417. 59. Burke to editors of Windsor Quarterly, July 10, 1934, Pattee Library Special Collections; emphasis added. 60. Burke, Attitudes toward History, 15. 61. Ibid., 33. 62. Ibid., 30–33. 63. Burke, Counter-Statement, 65. 64. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 161. 65. Burke, “Why Satire?” 322. 66. Burke, “Toward Helhaven,” 25. 67. Burke, “Why Satire?” 316. 68. Ibid., 333. 69. Burke, Attitudes toward History, 344. 70. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 131. 71. Ibid., 320–321. 72. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 6. 73. Burke, Attitudes toward History, 344. 74. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 6. 75. Burke, Permanence and Change, 112.

CHAPTER FIVE: RALPH ELLISON AND THE VERNACULAR PIETIES OF AMERICAN IDENTITY 1. Ellison, Collected Essays, 852. 2. Ibid., 853. 3. Ibid., 444. 4. See Burke, Permanence and Change, 246. 5. See Busby, Ralph Ellison, for an example. 6. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 65. 7. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 135. 8. Ibid., xx. 9. Ibid., xxii. 10. Ibid., xxii–xxiii 11. Ellison, Collected Essays, 466. 12. Ibid., 483. 13. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 125. 14. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 149. 15. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 143. 16. Santayana, Reason in Religion, 179.

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17. Ellison, Collected Essays, 389. 18. See my discussion in chapter 2, and Burke, Permanence and Change, 76–77. 19. Ellison, Collected Essays, 390. 20. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 243; emphasis added. 21. See “The Man Who Lived Underground,” in Wright, Eight Men. 22. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 57. 23. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 129. 24. In explaining Ellison’s attitude toward tradition, Busby cites an unlikely Ellisonian ally. He quotes one of the uncharacteristic “complexities” of an influential T. S. Eliot essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” for support of Ellison’s position: “[I]f the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ‘tradition’ should positively be discouraged” (Busby quoting Eliot in Ralph Ellison, 81). 25. Ellison, Collected Essays, 355. 26. Dixon, “O Mary Rambo, Don’t You Weep,” 101. 27. Burke, “Ralph Ellison’s Bildungsroman,” 357. 28. It is possible that in creating such a character as Mary Rambo, Ellison has consciously tarred himself with his own brush—has made himself the butt of his own joke—to whatever small extent he can be identified with the narrator of the novel. 29. Ellison, Invisible Man, 567. 30. Busby, Ralph Ellison, 8. 31. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 275–276. 32. Ibid., 70. 33. Ibid., 276. 34. Ellison, Invisible Man, 577. 35. See the essay “Tell It Like It Is, Baby,” in Ellison, Collected Essays, 27–46, for more of Ellison’s reflections on his father. 36. Ellison to Burke, November 23, 1945, Pattee Library Special Collections. 37. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 257. 38. The influence of Constance Rourke shows most tellingly in Ellison’s essay “The Little Man at Chehaw Station,” in which he writes, “In lieu of a usable cultural tradition, there were always the cultural improvisations of the Afro-Americans, the immigrants, or design-gifted religious groups like the Shakers.” Ellison, Going to the Territory, 29. Both the catch phrase “usable cultural tradition” and the reference to “design-gifted Shakers” are allusions to Rourke’s work in The Roots of American Culture (published posthumously in 1942). 39. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 22. 40. Ellison, Collected Essays, 356. 41. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 256. 42. Ibid., 255. 43. Ellison, Collected Essays, 369. 44. Ibid., 371. 45. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 140. 46. Ibid., 142. 47. Ibid., 108. 48. Ibid., 21. 49. Ibid., 219.

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50. Ellison, Collected Essays, 373. 51. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 219. 52. Ibid., 68. 53. Ibid., 111. 54. Ibid., 66. 55. See “I, Eye, Ay” in Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 186–200. 56. Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” 57. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 120. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., 142–143. 60. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 19–20. 61. Ibid., 245. 62. Ibid., 246. 63. Ibid., 144. 64. The title of this section is quoted from Ellison, “In a Strange Country,” 43. 65. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 9. 66. Ibid., 8. 67. Ibid., 140. 68. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 162. 69. Ibid., 13. 70. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 11. 71. Ibid., 136. 72. Ibid. 73. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 11. 74. Ibid., 300. 75. Ibid., 234. 76. Ibid., 189. 77. Richard Wright quoted in Ellison, Shadow and Act, 119. 78. See Ellison to Burke, November 23, 1945, Pattee Library Special Collections. 79. The choice of Henry James as Wright’s associate is an interesting one. Since James is a white source of Wright’s literary being, Ellison’s point is reinforced. But in light of Giles Gunn’s recent reinterpretation of Henry James’s work, Ellison’s choice of Henry James may work to his disadvantage. Ellison’s use of James as an exemplar of impiety may just be incorrect and may weaken the claim Ellison wants to make. 80. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 120. 81. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 213. 82. Ellison, Collected Essays, 417–418. 83. Ellison to Burke, November 23, 1945, Pattee Library Special Collections. 84. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 210; emphasis added. 85. Ellison, Collected Essays, 376. 86. Busby observes, “Ellison concluded that Wright’s naturalism would not allow him to create a character with as highly developed a consciousness as Wright himself.” Busby, Ralph Ellison, 124. 87. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 300. 88. Ibid. 89. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 120. This is a recurrent theme in Ellison’s essays. Notice his similar critique of LeRoi Jones in “Blues People.” “Jones’s theory,” he complains,

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“no more allows for the existence of such a Negro [one who does not fit racist economic, educational, and cultural stereotypes] than it allows for himself.” Ibid., 252. 90. Ellison himself raises the question of audience in Ellison, Shadow and Act, 170. 91. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 276–277. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has examined the relationship of Ralph Ellison to Richard Wright at some length in Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 120–121. Gates defends an antiessentialist reading of Ellison, similar to the one I put forward, against other more ideologically pure literary critics who would criticize Ellison for attempting to disavow his connections to black culture in general and Wright in particular, but Gates is able to do so only by soft-pedaling some of the negative comments Ellison makes about Wright. Gates writes, “The blackness of black literature is not an absolute or a metaphysical condition, as Ellison rightly maintains, nor is it some transcending essence that exists outside of its manifestations in texts.” Gates is probably right in suggesting that the influence of Wright upon Ellison is far more anxious than Ellison is willing to admit in print. But Gates’s literary-critical concern to establish the textual basis for delineating an African-American literary tradition is somewhat foreign to Ellison’s moral and political concerns with the morality of identity rites in a democratic society. Ellison is far more interested in integrating the contributions of black Americans into some mainstream “American culture” than he is in establishing the basis for an African-American literary tradition. 92. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 287. 93. Ibid., 287–288. 94. Ibid., 287; emphasis added. CHAPTER SIX: ELLISON’S TRAGIC VISION OF SACRFICE 1. Ellison writes in Shadow and Act, “When I started writing Invisible Man I was reading Lord Raglan’s The Hero.” Ellison, Shadow and Act, 18. In the introduction to Shadow and Act, Ellison acknowledges his “special indebtedness to Stanley Edgar Hyman,” with whom he shared “a community of ideas and critical standards for two decades,” as well as his debt to “Kenneth Burke, the stimulating source of many of these.” (Ellison, Shadow and Act, xxiii) See also Oppenheimer, Private Demons, and Lewis, “Ceremonial Imagination of Ralph Ellison,” 35, for mention of this intellectual community. Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery,” in The Lottery and Other Stories, shows her preoccupation with scapegoating issues discussed in their Bennington home. According to Oppenheimer, the story also reflects her feeling of ostracism from Bennington social circles. 2. Ellison, Collected Essays, 391–392. 3. Ibid., 349–350. 4. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 300. 5. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 227. 6. Ibid., 228. 7. Ibid., 231. 8. Ibid., 227; emphasis added. 9. Ibid., 48. 10. Ibid., 226. 11. Ibid., 49.

190 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

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Ibid., 239. Ibid., 225. Ellison, Collected Essays, 443. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 110–111. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 35. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 233. Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature, 185. Ibid. Lee, “Ellison’s Invisible Man,” 337. Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature, 192. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 232. Ellison, Invisible Man, 575. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 14. Ellison, Collected Essays, 420. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 24. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 148; emphasis added. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 59. Ellison, “Flying Home,” 257. Ibid., 258. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 177. See Ellison to Burke, November 23, 1945, Pattee Library Special Collections. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 174. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 49. Ellison, Invisible Man, 475. Ibid. Ibid., 338. Ibid., 340. See my chapter 3. Ellison, Invisible Man, 346. Ibid., 347. Ibid., 369; emphasis added. Ibid., 372. Ibid., 373. Ibid., 374; emphasis added. Ibid., 501. Ibid., 505; emphasis added. Ibid., 394. Ibid., 506. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 177. Ibid., 162. Ibid., 177. Ibid., 177–178; emphasis added. Ibid., 175. Ibid., 333. Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 180. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 16; emphasis added.

Notes to Chapter Seven 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

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Ibid., 175; emphasis added. Ibid., 176. Ibid., 330. Ellison, Collected Essays. 407–409. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 17. Ibid., 18–19. Ibid., 124–125. Ibid., 16. Ellison, Collected Essays, 418. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 336; emphasis added. Ibid., 335; emphasis added. Ibid., 25; emphasis added. Ibid., 288. Ibid., 246.

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE BLUES OF AMERICAN IDENTITY 1. Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature, 192–193. 2. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 54. 3. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 261; emphasis added. 4. Ibid., 271. 5. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 170. 6. Ibid., 54. 7. Ibid., 53. 8. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 133. 9. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 53–54. 10. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 11. 11. Ibid., 15. 12. Ibid., 11. 13. Ibid., 127; emphasis added. 14. Ibid., 12. 15. Ibid., 266. 16. Ibid., 69. 17. Ibid., 138. 18. For a useful discussion of the Emersonian problem of the many and the one, see Burke’s letter to Ellison reprinted in Benston, Speaking for You, especially the discussion on page 353 where Burke looks at Ellison’s wordplay involving “part of” and “apart from” in Invisible Man. 19. Ellison, Invisible Man, 580. 20. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 165. 21. Ibid., 147. 22. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 55. 23. Ellison, Invisible Man, 36. 24. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 178. 25. Ibid., 185. 26. Ibid., 223–224.

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27. Ellison compares Armstrong to Charlie Parker. Parker, he suggests, never quite managed the slip from tragic to comic mode that made Armstrong a self-conscious clown rather than a sellout (Shadow and Act, 226–227.). Ellison suggests that Parker, unlike Armstrong, never fully dismissed his victim role as absurd, and hence, he allowed his audience the power to define the drama of his life as the tragic offering made for their catharsis. Ellison also elaborates “Ellington’s aura of mockery.” “His manner,” Ellison claims, “like his work serves to remind us of the inadequacies of our myths, legends, conduct and standards.” Ellison, Going to the Territory, 225. 28. Ellison, Invisible Man, 562. 29. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 193. 30. Ellison, “Flying Home,” 268. 31. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 184. 32. Ibid; emphasis added. 33. Ibid., 126. 34. Ibid., 88. 35. Ellison, “Flying Home,” 270. 36. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 280–281. 37. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 7. 38. Ibid., 6–7; emphasis added. 39. Shakespeare quoted in Burke, Counter-Statement, 35. 40. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 13. 41. Ibid., 12. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., 9–10. 44. Ibid., 8–9. 45. Ibid., 327–328. 46. Ibid., 327; emphasis added. 47. Ellison, Invisible Man, 529. 48. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 146. 49. Ibid., 197. 50. Ibid., 146. 51. Ibid., 138. 52. Ibid., 33. 53. Ellison, Collected Essays, 425. 54. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 166. 55. Ibid., 171. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 197. 58. Ibid., 193–194. 59. Ibid., 318. 60. Ibid., 37–38. 61. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 54; emphasis added. 62. For Kenneth Burke, the category of the grotesque was not a subset of the category of comedy. It is less clear how Ellison would divide things up, were he to feel compelled to do so. 63. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 185. 64. Ibid., 185–186.

Notes to Chapter Eight 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

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Ellison, Invisible Man, 193. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 231. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 246. Ibid., 94. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 204. Pearson, Goin’ to Kansas City, 83–91. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 205. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 78. Ellison, Invisible Man, 579. Ibid., 580. Ellison to Burke, November 23, 1945, Pattee Library Special Collections. Ellison, Invisible Man, 481.

CHAPTER EIGHT: BOTH A PART OF AND APART FROM 1. Ellison, Invisible Man, 239–240. 2. Seigfried and Seigfried, “Individual Feeling and Universal Validity,” 149. Seigfried and Seigfried remind the reader that James called “the habit of treating a name as excluding from the fact named what the name’s definition fails positively to include” an exercise in “vicious intellectualism.” 3. Morrison, Beloved, 251. 4. Booth, “The Many Voices of Kenneth Burke,” 194–195. 5. Burke, Permanence and Change, 122. 6. When making normative recommendations, one needs to notice the social location of those to whom one makes them. Urging courage upon the socially oppressed does not have the same effect as urging it upon the most powerful members of a society. Still, if Burke’s and Ellison’s premises are right, people located in all places in a society can learn something from the moral worlds of members differently located. Metaphoric applications of the norms will make them instructive to all, if more applicable in one case than in another. 7. Gunn, Thinking across the Grain, 37. 8. Ibid., 188. 9. Burke to Warren, April 25, 1933, Pattee Library Special Collections. 10. Burke, Counter-Statement, 56–62. 11. Burke, Attitudes toward History, 226. 12. Ellison, Invisible Man, 14. 13. Rorty, “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance.” 14. Ibid., 92. 15. There have been many other insightful criticisms of Rorty’s formulation on the basis of its public/private split. See, for instance, Davaney, Pragmatic Historicism, 124–126. 16. Jarratt, “In Excess,” 210. 17. Gunn, Beyond Solidarity, 126. 18. See Kloppenberg, “Pragmatism.” 19. Mailloux, “Sophistry and Rhetorical Pragmatism,” 2–3.

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20. Booth, “The Many Voices of Burke,” 197. 21. Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism, 183. 22. Tom Cohen, in “The Genealogies of Pragmatism,” 98, has an interesting discussion of the humanist and antihumanist wings of pragmatism, though I wonder whether these wings divide up so neatly into American and continental teams. Considering his satiric tone toward a formulation that he credits to Rorty, perhaps Cohen wonders, too. For instance, in my reading, Bloom, the gnostic, advocates “strong readings” more for antihumanist purposes than for purposes of reinforcing the possibility of human agency. Perhaps the conflict divides more along two different American traditions of thought (say, a Yale-Vanderbilt–New Criticism school as opposed to the Amherst lineage to which Richard Poirier claims allegiance). 23. Rorty, “End of Leninism and History as Comic Frame.” 24. Ibid., 214. 25. Ibid., 216. 26. Ibid., 217–218. 27. Likewise, I would add that the term modern currently serves as an insignia that does something very similar to what bourgeois does for Marxists. It affiliates high-socialstatus antimodernists with the victims of “modernity,” using a strategy that combines the motives of sympathy for the worst off with ambitions to be the better off, a strategy that Burke claims is typical of all human beings. 28. Perhaps Gunn, in Thinking across the American Grain, 111–112, has prematurely criticized Rorty’s supposed lack of emphasis upon the comic, by thinking only of Rorty’s discussion of irony and not referring to this particular essay invoking the comic. 29. Gunn, Thinking across the American Grain, 230–236. 30. Richard Poirier, in Poetry and Pragmatism, 184, reflecting on his own inheritances, urges any history of pragmatic thought to include not only what is published in books, but also what is spoken in classrooms. 31. Santayana, Reason in Religion, 215. 32. West, Evasion of Philosophy, 24–25. 33. Burke, Attitudes toward History, 335. 34. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 211. 35. Burke to the editors of Windsor Quarterly, July 10, 1934, Pattee Library Special Collections. 36. Rorty, “Faith, Responsibility, and Romance,” 96. 37. Livingston, “Politics of Pragmatism.” 38. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 19. 39. Ellison, Invisible Man, 573. 40. Ibid., 580. 41. Burke, Towards a Better Life, 3. 42. Ibid., 202–203. 43. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 270–271. 44. Burke, “Ralph Ellison’s Bildungsroman,” 358.

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INDEX

Abraham and Isaac, 57–58, 60, 68, 74, 132 absurdity, 70, 74, 77–78, 83, 144, 146, 155, 168 academic study of religion, 6, 7, 166; piety in the, 7 accidents, 28, 67, 113, 114 aesthetics: of comedy, 88–89; relation to ethics, 6, 15, 88, 178n.38 African-American literature, 4, 6, 15, 122, 189n.91 agency, 10, 151, 165 altruism, 9 ambiguity: moral, 3, 70, 103, 125; about victimage in Burke’s thought, 58 American civil religion. See civil religion American culture, 3, 109, 116 American philosophy, 5 American religious thought, 6, 13, 159; aesthetic tradition in, 15 American Writers Congress, 117 antagonistic cooperation, 4, 106, 111–12, 115, 147 antifoundationalism, 7 anti-Semitism, 6, 64, 65 “a part of/apart from,” 8, 99, 104, 120, 126, 157–58 Aristotle, 58, 68, 87, 104, 185n.35 Armstrong, Louis, 123–24, 144, 192n.27 assimilation, 2 audience, 22, 46, 59, 69, 70–71, 88–89, 98, 115, 118–19, 123–26, 139–40, 141, 142, 146–48, 192n.27 Baker, Houston, 125 Baldwin, James, 111 Baraka, Amir. See Jones, LeRoi Battle Royal, 130

Bennington, 24, 121, 179n.52 Bentham, Jeremy, 8, 40, 53, 179n.71 black church. See church, African American Bloom, Harold, 12–14, 194n.22 blues, 153, 156 bodies, 19, 20, 42, 51, 83, 90, 92, 176n.88 Booth, Wayne, 7, 158 bridge-building, symbolic, 9, 13, 77, 111 Burke, Edmund, 12 Burke, Kenneth: “both/and” thinking, 8, 99, 152; cashing in, 41, 86; cowpaths and habits, 54–55; the cult of the kill, 58, 60, 70; on didacticism, 85, 185n.24; eulogistic/dyslogistic terms, 44, 86, 91, 93, 97, 179n.71; god-terms, 14; and perfecting, 14, 19, 36, 61, 64, 81–84; prayer, 25, 28, 36; spectrums and dichotomies, 8, 56; substantiation, 11; symbol-using animals, 19–20, 158; trained incapacity, 9, 47, 171; tree symbolism in, 18, 43; unwanted by-products, 82; vicarious substitution, 61, 65, 70, 73 Busby, Mark, 22 Caldwell, Erskine, 150–51 Callahan, John, 4 capitalism, 37–38, 61, 93 caricatures, 62, 87 castration, 40–41, 107–8, 152 catharsis, 14, 18, 46, 123, 153, 154; laughter and tears as biologic indicators of, 59; and pollution, 78; process of, 68; tragic, 60, 79; and transcendence, 76–77; by victimage, 59, 63 Cavell, Stanley, 5 Chaplin, Charlie, 81, 98 character: as democratic necessity, 9; projecting a, 19; role of tradition in shaping, 8

200

•

Index

church, African-American, 103 civil religion, 135, 138, 148–49, 167 Cohen, Morris, 21 comedy, 3, 4, 12, 14, 30, 79, 80–98 communication, 11, 35, 62, 117 Communist party, 117 community, 6 complexity, 39, 100–101, 117–18, 152 complicity, 127 consubstantiality, 71–73, 127, 134, 158 contingency, 29, 32, 40 continuity: historical, 5, 8, 120; in language, 43; with one’s past, 13, 16, 25; between sacrificer and victim, 152 conversation, 6; in democratic culture, 7 conversion, 19, 28, 47, 49, 93, 99–101, 121, 178n.33 Cowley, Malcolm, 35, 52 craft, 101, 141 critics, impiety of, 8 cultural criticism, 2–6, 41, 115 cultural fragmentation, 2 Darwin, Charles, 8, 174n.23 debunking, 8, 63, 66, 85, 86

eating, 73 “either/or” thinking, 8, 82, 152, 159 elitism, 4 Ellington, Duke, 144 Eliot, T. S., 187n.24 Ellison, Ralph Waldo: his correspondence with Kenneth Burke, 108; as critic of Kenneth Burke, 18, 147; as critic of R. W. Emerson, 17; gender issues and, 107; influence of Emerson on, 16; his Oklahoma background, 100, 104, 115, 154; on piety, 99; received view of, 4; relationship to Richard Wright, 189n.91; on sociology, 103, 107, 109 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 3–5, 8, 12–19, 40, 43–44, 53, 58, 77, 106, 141, 150, 174n.23, 175n.65, 176n.67, 180n.91 equality, as American ideal, 4 essentialism, 8–9, 19, 22, 27, 41, 56, 58, 60, 65, 67–68, 85, 86, 95, 101, 103, 110, 121, 127, 159 ethics, 6; and aesthetics in sublimity, 90; and piety, 28; religious, 7; and sacrifice, 76 Euthyphro, 26, 39, 56 excellence, 123, 137, 141; standards of, 6 expiation, 40, 43–44

De Man, Paul, 11 democratic culture, 3–4, 7, 13, 112–13, 142, 152, 159 demonization, 23, 63, 65, 167 Dewey, John, 5, 177n.27, 181n.25 dichotomies, 8, 22 dignity, 9 disciplinary focus, 4–5 discounting, 44, 46, 71, 93, 158 division: gender, 6; principle of, 81, 83, 84; racial, 6; religious, 6 Dixon, Melvin, 107

fallibilism, 14 fathers, 43, 44, 108, 143 Federal Writers Project, 152 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 136 “Flying Home,” 13, 129, 145–46 Frazer, James, 42 Freud, Sigmund, 8, 28, 146, 174n.17; and Burke on piety, 39–51; on jokes, 85, 87–88 fundamental kinship with the enemy, 50, 63, 101, 129

dreams, 180n.77; Freud and, 42; prayers and charts, 42, 46, 48

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 189n.91

DuBois, W.E.B., 5

Geertz, Clifford, 47, 173 nn. 13 and 14

Durkheim, Emile, 23

genealogies, intellectual, 5; of morals, 8

Index Girard, Rene´, 65 “Great Dictator,” 80–81 grotesque, the, 97, 152, 192n.62 Gunn, Giles, 5, 159, 163, 167, 188n.79

•

201

incongruity, 92, 141–42, 144 individuality: Burke on, 19; in jazz, 115; of experience, 8 inequality, 4 influence of Burke on Ellison, 2–3

Harlem Renaissance, 101 Helhaven, 81–85 Henderson, Greig, 4

Inglis, Fred, 4

heroes: comic, 144, 150; and myths, 121,

interpretation: of Burke and Ellison, 6;

189n.1; and pious identification, 30; tragic, 45, 62, 69–71, 121, 123, 129, 146; tragicomic, 155; as witness, 127, 137 historicism, 6 Hitler, Adolf, 63–65 Homans, Peter, 181n.25 homeopathy, 47, 59–61, 69, 121, 135, 150, 171 hope, 9, 116, 154, 162, 164 Howe, Irving, 9, 11 Huck Finn, 102, 125, 134 Hughes, Langston, 114 humanism, 4, 12, 92, 154, 165, 194n.22 humor, 93–94, 96–97, 150, 185n.57; as an American tradition, 142 Hyman, Stanley Edgar, 3, 24, 85, 12, 189n.1 ideals: democratic, 9; equality, 4; justice, 4; social stability, 4. See also powers, and ideals identity, 1–2; alienated, 15; American, 2, 4, 6, 112, 133; changes of, 2; conflicts of, 4; construction of, 6; contamination of, 61; and difference, 3, 11; and piety, 26; politics of, 6; racial, 3; and rebirth, 19; social construction of, 20; transformation of, 20 identification: and division, 2, 66; with a hero, 30, 46, 70, 123; humans and animals, 19; with a scapegoat, 66; with the victim, 10 impiety: in the inheritance of traditions, 8; pious critiques, 84; and pollution, 39;

insignia, 2, 111 interdisciplinary connections, 4–5 charity in, 64; comic, 4; in Geertz, 7; in Santayana, 34; scientific vs. religious, 8 Invisible Man, 2, 15, 17–18, 107–108, 130, 140, 149, 152, 157 irony: in Ellison, 19, 125; in modern comedy, 87–88 Jackson, Shirley, 24, 121, 189n.1 James, Henry, 116, 188n.79 James, William, 5, 7, 14, 158, 174n.23, 177n.27, 181n.25, 193n.2 Jarratt, Susan, 162 jazz, 105–6, 114–16, 122–23, 136, 144, 154 jokes, 84, 88–89, 145, 153, 187n.28; American, 141, 151–52 Jones, LeRoi, 188n.89 Juneteenth, 103 Kant, Immanuel, 18, 23, 89 Kierkegaard, Søren, 60–61, 70, 74–75, 77 “killing off,” 11, 16, 44, 69, 121, 129 language: “deathy” tendencies of, 92; religious, 2–3 laughter, 59, 90–91, 145, 149, 154 Lee, Kun Jong, 125 Lewis, Clayton W., 11–12 literary criticism, 7, 178n.52 literature: African American, 4; study of, 4 little man from Chehaw station, 115, 141– 42, 147–48, 152

of Richard Wright, 118; and the

Livingston, James, 170

ridiculous, 89

lynching, 6, 133–34, 137, 144, 173n.12

202

•

Index

magic: religion and science, 31, 42 Mailloux, Steven, 165 martyrdom, 7, 66, 68, 70, 81, 167, 170

performance, 4, 12, 18, 71, 140

Marxism, 4, 37–38, 93, 126, 166, 174n.17

philosophy: of religion, 6–7; pragmatism’s

Mary Rambo, 107 masks, 9, 19, 139

Pierce, Charles, 5

perspective by incongruity, 49–50, 84–85, 151, 180n.91 imprint on, 7 piety, 3; and antagonistic cooperation, 106;

materialism, reductive, 3 medicines and poisons, 15, 39, 47, 59, 120,

Burke on, 25–56; and comic critique, 84,

121, 137 Mein Kampf, 63–64

ral, 27, 31, 179n.64; and psychoanalysis,

Melville, Herman, 139 methodology, 23, 25 minstrel shows, 123–24 Morrison, Toni, 158 mothers, 37, 39, 83, 107, 131 motives: fear, 31; mix of, 9, 27, 62, 85, 143, 167; pious 27; status, 14; unconscious, 46, 98 mystery, 147, 148; religious, 2, 12, 57; and social hierarchy, 74, 75 mysticism, 14, 168; verbal, 85 naming, 2, 19, 25–26, 43, 46–47, 128, 157, 193n.2 narcissism, 11, 30 narrative, 13, 102 naturalism, in Wright, 11, 188n.86 negativity of language, 21, 92 New Criticism, 194n.22 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 5 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8, 49–50, 53, 79, 84, 94, 177n.23, 178n.43, 180n.91, 182n.49 novel: history of American, 4; as medium of communication, 13; and myth, 13

97; in Ellison, 101; nationalistic, 4; natu47–48; toward inherited traditions, 8 Plato, 12, 38, 163, 164 poets: and critics, 85, 158; Emersonian, 30; pious, 8, 34 Poirier, Richard, 5 politics of identity, 6 polytheism, 163 postmodernism, 6 poststructuralism, 10–12 powers: and ideals, 3–4, 29, 31–32, 37, 51, 85, 92, 158; inequality of, 4; superatural, 3 pragmatism, 4–5, 159, 164, 194n.22; Burke and, 12, 64; connections to rhetoric, 7; Clifford Geertz’s, 7 privacy, 162 process-thinking, 8 prosaic criticism, 8 protest, 9–10, 116–117 purity, 27, 39, 45, 48, 60, 117 Ras, 131–32, 145 recalcitrance, 10, 42, 46, 48, 53, 55, 81, 86, 143, 151, 164 recommending by tragedy, 70 redemption, 4, 144, 154–55, 170

origin: as essence, 68, 104; fallacy of, 91

reductive materialism, 3, 37 relativism, 7, 165

Parker, Charlie, 122–23, 192n.27 parts and wholes, 8, 13–14, 30, 41, 65, 68, 98, 102, 131 patriarchy, 39, 44

religion: critics of, 7, 8; as cultural system, 7; as poetry, 8, 163; as reasoned appreciation of life, 29 religious naturalism, 3, 6, 16, 28, 174n.20

Index religious thought: American, 6; history of, 4; philosophical, 6–7

singing, 10, 92–93, 153, 169

rhetoric, 2, 4, 147, 158, 164, 165; Bloom and Kenneth Burke, 12; connections to pragmatism, 7; of jokes, 88–89

social hierarchy, 19, 74–75, 133–34,

rhetorical criticism, 7 rites: of identity change, 2, 4; improvisational, 122; of initiation, 120, 129–30, 135, 151, 153; and myths, 11; of purification, 125, 125; of victimage, 123

36–37 socialization of loss, 19, 46, 48, 62, 78, 118, 140, 181n.25 social sciences, 6–7 solidarity, 6 spirituality, 3 Stout, Jeffrey, 160 strong reading, 12, 165, 194n.22

170, 193n.15 Rourke, Constance, 109, 123, 142, 156, 187n.38 Rueckert, William, 4

symbolic action, 2, 10, 22, 135–36,

sacrificial motive, 6, 10, 58, 68, 70, 120, 144, 159, 171, 181n.1 sanctuary: of identity, 103, 160; of race, 101 Santayana, George, 3, 16, 104, 114, 139, 156, 168, 176 nn. 87 and 88, 177 nn. 23 and 27, 178n.43, 179n.61, 180 nn. 77 and 91; and Burke on piety, 28–39; and Catholicism, 37; and essences, 32–33, 38 satire, 81–84, 95, 98 scapegoating, 5, 10, 59, 62–63, 66, 71, 79, 81, 84, 98, 102, 122–23, 125, 129, 131, 133–34, 152, 153, 155, 159, 167, 189n.1; of Jews, 64–65

structuralism, 6, 10–12 sublimity and beauty, 12, 89–90, 149 suffering, 154, 169 40, 158 synecdoche, 65, 131 taboos, 39 theism, 27 theology, 158; Christian, 6; and piety, 30; and scholarship, 7–8 Theophrastus, 185n.35 thick description, 7 threat, 144, 149–51; as basis of beauty, 89; and limits of comedy, 96; to meaning, 7; in sublimity, 90 Totem and Taboo, 42 tradition, 187n.24; inheritance of, 8 tragicomedy, 155 tragedy: dignity, 67; flaw, 64, 87, 127; interpretation, 4; nature of Christianity, 69; sense of life, 70 transcendentalism, 12, 16

scene, 11–12, 18, 33, 163, 164

trickster, 141–42

scientism, 3

trope, 12

Segal, George, 57

Twain, Mark, 139

self-expression, 46, 93 self-reliance, 13, 17

Unamuno, Miguel, 70

separation, social, 2

underground, 18, 105, 146

sin: comic blotch as, 87; original, 78,

universality of appeal, 6

137

203

slavery, 109–10, 143–44

rituals: and gesture, 51; initiation, 2; naturalistic, 105; purification, 2; of rebirth, 2, 45; and repetition, 49 Rorty, Richard, 7, 161, 163–64, 166, 167,

sacrifice, 4, 6, 32, 57–79, 80–81, 87, 130, 132, 159, 166

•

usable past, 5, 109, 156

204

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Index

values, relation to analysis, 6 vernacular culture, 4, 110, 113; and heroes, 104, 121–22, 144; and process, 103, 110, 121; and style, 4, 12, 100, 114; and taste, 141; and traditions, 115, 144; literature in, 128; resources of, 167 victim: African Americans as, 111; being one’s own, 84; as butt of joke, 88; as end, 68; identifying with, 9; in Kierkegaard, 60; kinds of, 64; in Plato’s dialogues, 60; processes that use, 58, 64, 74, 79, 87; protest of the, 10; resistance of role, 101 virtue: active, 9–10; and moral failure, 9

communion, 61; moral substitute for, 136, 150; as special case of peace, 61 Washington, Booker T., 143 West, Cornel, 5, 7, 167, 176n.67 White, Hayden, 7 white supremacy, 130, 133–34, 137–38 Whitman, Walt, 14, 94–95 wishes, 11, 32, 40, 42, 44, 46, 48, 71, 162, 164 Wordsworth, William, 43, 179n.64 Works Progress Administration, 154

war: comedy in context of, 96; as disease of cooperation, 61; as perversion of

Wright, Richard, 105, 111, 114, 116–17