Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950–1955 - Kenneth Burke

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we did begin with a theory of signs in the narrower sense, we should begin realistically rather than epistemologically: that is, our basic proposition would be, “Each thing is the sign of something else” (Not the sign of everything else!). For instance, the symptoms of a disease would be considered as “natural signs” of that disease, regardless of whether they were properly interpreted. And the disease in turn would be the sign of conditions varying in scope. These conditions may, for instance, be the sign of a deficiency in diet, which in turn may in one case be the sign of dietary ignorance, in another case the sign of poverty. And the ignorance or poverty would be signs of still other conditions, our belief in their reality as signs of other things justifying us in our attempt to find out what they may be signs of (as cryptologists seek to interpret the signs of a lost language, the records of which have their particular structure precisely because they are signs, though the analyst when he begins his study has very little idea what they may be signs of). (In this way, to be sure, the quest for signs may expand to the point where the discussion of some one thing leads us into the discussion of almost everything. In this sense, by telescoping all the steps, one might say that each thing is the sign of “everything else,” somewhat as the detective may spin his whole detection from some crucial bit of evidence which could be said to “sum up” the entire chain of his evidence. But insofar as all the intermediate steps of induction and deduction are supplied, the broad interpretation of a tiny detail is not essentially “mystical” or “unscientific.” At the worst it is the inaccurate use of a sound principle.)

      Since writing the first draft of these pages I have seen the report of the seminar meeting for February 5th, where Doctor MacIver’s distinction between sign and symbol is well summed up thus: “The sign is a pointer or indicator, the symbol an evoker.” This distinction is unquestionably sufficient for many purposes. But we believe that, where poetry is concerned, the concept of “evocation” must be subdivided. For there is a notable difference between poetic expression and rhetorical persuasion, though both would be aspects of “evocation.”

      It is notable that whereas Ogden and Richards in The Meaning of Meaning favor a dichotomy much like the one Doctor MacIver opts for, Richards in his Principles of Literary Criticism attributes to poetry a kind of attitudinizing that is qualified differently from the attitudes evoked by rhetoric. Whereas rhetorical evocation should make us want to “go out and do something about it,” poetic evocation should be a closed system of gratifications. Rhetoric is a stimulus to some subsequent act; but the kind of action proper to the reading of poetry is an end product in itself.

      True, there is a sense in which everything has implications beyond itself; even a rock lying inertly by the roadside may have, as part of its “future,” the possibility of being picked up and thrown. Similarly, poetic symbolism may have effects upon our future conduct, in the most practical sense of the term. But, as poetry, its appeal is in its state of completion, not its futurity. It leads into the future only incidentally, or because the future is implicitly in it. It appeals, that is, by its finishedness, or “perfection.”

      We believe that such is the case even with so-called “propaganda” art. Imagine a work, for instance, designed to arouse in the audience an attitude of great sympathy or animosity with regard to some contemporary faction or cause. Even so clearly tendentious or didactic a work appeals poetically by the satisfactory exercising of such emotions in the immediate present. Even the sense of “futurity” that might be aroused by such a work appeals by its nature as an attitude summed up, or completed, now. (We shall consider later a notable respect in which a distinction between “sign” and “symbol” necessarily becomes confused, so far as the analysis of poetic expression is concerned; for a poetic expression may in part owe its evocative function to its function as indicative.)

      In its function as characteristic perhaps it might as well be considered as but a variant of the “first” office? For it is as much a “natural sign” as are the symptoms of an ailment, though there can be much controversy as to exactly what it may be a sign of.

      Incidentally, since we have referred to Doctor Nagel’s paper, we might close this section by saluting what we consider to be a perfectly “dramatistic” moment in it. We refer to his remarks on the principle of causality: “The principle states no ‘law of nature’ and has no identifiable descriptive content. On the contrary, the principle functions as a maxim, as a somewhat vague rule for directing the course of inquiry, as an injunction to interpret and organize our experience in a certain manner. For what the principle says in effect is this: When some occurrence takes place, look for the circumstances which are necessary and sufficient conditions for that occurrence! Do not cease your quest until such circumstances have been discovered, and count no analysis as adequate or complete which does not terminate in the construction of a theory that conforms to the pattern of a deterministic schema of interpretation! [. . .] It is perhaps a debatable question whether the total rejection of the principle does not entail the complete abandonment of the scientific enterprise.” One should also note the strongly negative cast of this statement, first in the explicit negatives, next in the implied negativity of words like “rejection” and “abandonment,” and finally in the fact that Doctor Nagel explicitly points out the negative implications of his words “maxim,” “rule,” and “injunction.” Here is an area where “pragmatism” and “dramatism” quite happily overlap.

      4 Fact, Inference, and Proof in the Analysis of Literary Symbolism11

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      This essay is part of a project called “Theory of the Index,” concerned with the taking of preparatory notes for purposes of critical analysis. The hope is to make the analysis of literary symbolism as systematic as possible, while allowing for an experimental range required by the subtle and complex nature of the subject matter.

      Fundamentally, the essay is built about the “principle of the concordance.” But whereas concordances, listing all passages where a given word appears in a text, have been compiled for a few major works, obviously criticism cannot have the advantage of such scholarship when studying the terminology of most literary texts. And even where concordances are available, there must be grounds for paying more attention to some terms than to others.

      Here, treating the individual words of a work as the basic “facts” of that work, and using for test case some problems in the “indexing” of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,12 the essay asks how to operate with these “facts,” how to use them as a means of keeping one’s inferences under control, yet how to go beyond them, for purposes of inference, when seeking to characterize the motives and “salient traits” of the work, in its nature as a total symbolic structure.

      Insofar as possible, we confine the realm of the “factual” to a low but necessary and unquestioned order of observations. Thus, it is a “fact” that the book proper begins, “Once upon a time and a very good time it was [. . .]” etc., and ends: “old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.” We say it is a fact that the “book proper” so begins and so ends. But it is also a “fact” that the text begins with a prior quotation from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and ends on a reference to duality of scene: “Dublin, 1904/Trieste, 1914.” We might get different results, depending upon which of these “facts” we worked from. But in either case, the existence of such “facts” is literally verifiable. “Facts” are what was said or done, as interpreted in the strictest possible sense.

      The ideal “atomic fact” in literary symbolism is probably the individual word. We do not say that the literary work is “nothing but” words. We do say that it is “at least” words. True, a word is further reducible to smaller oral and visual particles (letters and phonemes); and such reducibility allows for special cases of “alchemic” transformation whereby the accident of a word’s structure may surreptitiously relate it (punwise) to other words that happen to be similar in structure though “semantically” quite distinct from it. But the word is the first full “perfection” of a term. And we move

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