Post-Poesque Derivation of a Terministic Cluster

Author(s): Kenneth Burke

Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Winter, 1977), pp. 214-220
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Chorale n
De - um

lau-da-

mus

quo om-nia bo-na

sunt,

I
.I

gra - ti- as

da - mus

ni - po-tens,

sic

3T-V

--

Do - mi

et in ae - ter-na

sae-cu - Ia.

ip-sum qui est mor-ten pas-sus ut du-cer-

Hail

thou

sum of

et, nos

Power

all,

Powers.

-I

oI-.

We

,-,,,4L

-0-

U-

S-'

De

no.

Nunne se-qua-mur

ad

te.

out (4f whom all

-0-

in our weak-

o
V

ness

ii

call

4
.1

us oinm-

un-to

thee.

Artists on Art

Post-Poesque Derivation of a Terministic Cluster

Kenneth Burke

With regard to the writing of his poem, "The Raven," in his essay,
"The Philosophyof Composition,"Poe contractedto show "that the work
proceeded,step by step, to its completionwith the precision and rigid consequencesof a mathematicalproblem."
But my aim here is not to show how certain interrelated commonplaces
were deduced. Rather, I would offer a rationale whereby they would be
deducible. I had hit upon a quite traditional hymn-like tune for which I
needed words. To this end I made up some along standard lines, and
without any thought of "derivation." Since then I have developed some
"logological" speculations which were not under explicit consideration at
all when I undertook the hand-to-mouth job of writing words for my
quite orthodox tune, the whole to be entitled "Chorale Omega."
The words run thus:
1. Deum laudamus, e quo omnia bona sunt. Gratias damus Domino.
Deus omnipotens, sic et in aeterna saecula.
2. Nunc sequamur Ipsum qui est mortem passus ut duceret nos ad te.
3. Hail, Thou Sum of All, Power out of Whom all powers. We in our
weakness call unto Thee.
Let's start from where the verses end, "We in our weakness call unto
Thee." I take it that prayer, the principle of supplication, is perhaps the
most radically grounded aspect of language as a communicative
medium. It starts from a kind of response which is not language at all.
The newborn infant's outcry in a state of pain is no verbal message. It is a
purely physiological reflex. However, in time the infant learns the rudi215

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KennethBurke

Post-PoesqueDerivation

ments of address, when learning by experience that the cry functions as

a call for solace.
We thus confront the making of two Absolutes: the cry ab intra, the
solace ab extra. And what are the nearest, most immediatelypersonal
grammatical substitutes for that relationship? Obviously, an "I" and a
"Thou."
Why then, as befits the principle of infantile weakness, shouldn't the
first person pronoun be singular rather than plural? Obviously because a
hymn is to be sung by a congregation in which many "I's"are all addressing the same "Thee."
And why not "cryunto Thee" rather than "call unto Thee"? True,
the most radical petition would be as from the Wailing Wall (which
superficial persons associate with despair, but in its uttermost depths it is
a cry of hope). However, a hymn is for a less extreme form of addressand whereas "cry" is on the purely physiologicalside of our beginnings,
"call" is the counterpart where considerations of verbal address are in
order, as is a verse-form of the sort we are here concerned with.
But why "We in our weakness"?Petition, in effect saying "Please," is
to that extent in principle implying weakness. The infant cried in need,
later the child calls in need. The pronominalized absolutes of such a
relationship are as with the weakness of the petitioner in comparison
with the power of the petitioned. And absoluteness prevails in infancy
because there is no material for relativity, and even children quite older
tend to feel either very good or horrid (a vestige of absolutism which
works out badly in inducing to juvenile delinquency).
So we began with the end, in English, involving weakness, power,
petition. Let's now turn to the two stages which had preceded.
In keeping with my basic emphasis upon the thought that we begin
in this life as sheerly physiologic organisms and then in time learn to
communicate in such mediums as my "Chorale Omega," I ask: Out of
what, in our sheer physiology, does "We praise God" start? For our role
as divided natures (half-dumb bodies, half involved with symbol systems
such as tribal languages) moves us far from the state of inarticulate
physiological motion. But I take it for granted that the basic commonplaces of religion which my verses are but repeating are grounded in
Kenneth Burke develops in this essay some behavioristic speculations that first exercised him in an early volume, Permanenceand Change
(1935). Those speculations are pursued further in an essay, "(Nonsymbolic) Motion / (Symbolic) Action," which will appear in a future issue of
CriticalInquiry.

Critical Inquiry

Winter 1977

217

our sheer physiology, though not a single one of such utterances is

reducible to that realm (which lacks the "grace" of speech).
Might then the sheer physiologyof the impulse to praise begin as an
absolute response to the solace of the "other" that came in answer to the
weakling's need? Later, in being praised, the child learns, even without
knowing what it's learning, how praise induces favorable response to a
petition. And thus, the more absolute the power, the greater the impulse
to makefear of a helpful power and praise of that power into convertible
terms. Thence to amplification: imputing all things praiseworthy to the
same source, extending the power boundlessly, and into eternity. Also,
implicit in the praiser's giving of thanks there are gracefully submerged
connotations of "thanking you in advance."
All told, the twenty-six bars of the first section epitomize the integrally interrelated topics of praise and thanksgiving, with relation to an
absolute power that is amplified in terms of manifoldness, omnipotence,
eternity.
The second section, of six bars ("Now let us follow Him who suffered death that He might lead us to Thee"), is at the very center of the
genius in the dialectic underlying the Christian story. Note first, with
regard to the Chorale, how it serves as a transition between the Power
theme that the Thou of the first section exemplifies and the theme of
weaknesson which the third section ends. Its formal role as "mediator" in
this context is but a special case of the Mediatory role that the Ipse plays
with regard to all ultimate matters of well-being, which are summed up
under the head of relationships between frailty and strength. And the
related story carries this Mediatory role even to the ultimate ("absolute")
extent whereby the problem of death becomes transformed into a promise. Also despite our frailty, we are absolutely dignified in that a divine
Leader dies for us.
The implicit turn from the "age of the Father" to the "age of the
Son" could be cited as grounds for the difference in tempo and temper
of the music in these six bars. But as a matter of fact they are salvaged
from a much longer piece that I once worked at, with quite different
intentions in mind (the whole a tangle that culminated in this clear
emergence).
Why so far in Latin? (1) Because of the role played by Latin in the
history of the Western Church. (2) Because of the ironic fact that
whereas Dante, in developing his ideal medium for the Divine Comedy,
had to abandon Latin for the vernacular (the idiom learned in the nursery), the experience of Latin was for me the closest way of retaining the
"radical" step from infancy (speechlessness) into speech. For Burke
learned it stumblingly, as the infant learns his first language. Yet he

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could watch the steps of his development in a way that he could not have
watched the steps of his development into English. And the stylistics of
his churchiness were nearer to the linguistic sociality of "call"than to the
speechless immediacy of "cry."
Incidentally, once when copying the word "duceret"he spelled it
"doceret,"thereby stumbling upon a quite relevant pun, turning "lead us"
into "teach us." (Christ as the Logos.)
In the English there is an intentional bilingual pun, "Thou Sum of
All." I personally thought of "Sum" in connection with the Vulgate translation (Exodus 3:14) of"I AM that I AM." Namely, "EgoSum qui Sum."
I wish that "Hail" weren't so close to sounding like "Heil." But I do
like the close-knittedness of "We in our weak/ness." And with regard to
that somewhat formulaic expression, at vexing outlaw moments I wonder whether I took to the sheer sound of it not just because of the
"we-weakness" tonality, but also because about the edges of "weakness"
there flits the cliche "weak knees."
And oh, yes-I nearly forgot. On the side I sometimes wonder
whether the term "Summa" (as with St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa
Theologica) was thought of in the same breath with the Exodus "Ego
Sum." Coleridge might well have gone along with the idea. And in all
likelihood, someone somewhere along the line might turn up with precisely the "mediatory" reference I'm looking for, particularly in view of
the fact that any such overall line-up was looked upon as technically
"divine." (I hasten to add my apologies for this logological statement of
the case.)
Underlying these pages is the assumption that, since we begin life as
speechless bodies, the radicality of religious and poetic utterance somehow retains its relation to these origins, though in maturing we develop
far from the order of reality we began with. Such expression must be
rooted in man's primal essence as a speechless body, albeit there develops the technical "grace" of language (and of symbolicity in general, that
"perfects" nature and is not reducible to terms of such sheerly physiological grounding).
I take it that the body, as a physiological organism, is always behavin
the "specious present." Though we, as "persons," may anticipate
ing
or recall, the body as such is always behaving in a certain way now.
If a believer is praying, his body cannot lie. If he is offering a prayer
of thanks and really means it, his body behaves in one way. If he doesn't
really mean it, his body behaves in a different way, though the vocables
uttered in the prayer may be the same in both cases, and they may sound
much less sincere to us if we hear them uttered by a genuine believer
than as uttered by an accomplished tartuffe. In that sense it is by the
speechless body that the person communicates with the nature of things.

Critical Inquiry

Winter 1977

219

However, the correlation between one's behavior as a person and

the corresponding behavior of one's body is problematical. I suspect
that, in less radical cases, the same kind of uncertainty prevails. That is,
whereas the person, as a citizen, may be engaged in some operation that
he and his fellow citizens deem quite reputable, his body's corresponding
behavior may be getting him into considerable trouble. The most obvious example of such a predicament is the case of a man who is conscientiously at work on a job that, unbeknownst to him, is exposing him to
some noxious chemical or form of radiation. Though he doesn't "know"
it, there is a sense in which his bodydoes.
The ways in which the behavior of the body duplicates the person's
public actions can be quite duplicitous. There is, or at least there should
be, an open season in our hunt for info about the correlations between
our public acts as citizens and their corresponding goings-on in the
realm of purely physiological motion. Obviously the body is behaving
differently when a fiction (which is in the realm of symbolic action)
evokes in an auditor such physiological responses (in the realm of motion) as laughter and tears. Similarly, there must be attenuated correspondences with such responses as smiles or sadness, the physiological
behavior of attitudes like a sense of friendliness, resentment, nostalgia,
comic pornography, as distinguished from prurient (itching) pornography. And surely when quantitative analysis becomes astute enough,
we'll be able to distinguish between the bodily behavior of a person
under the pressure of "real" terror and the bodily behavior of a person
who is experiencing terror as a species of what Aristotle called the "tragic
pleasure" (evoked by the symbolic action of a dramatic "imitation").
The relation between symbolic action and bodily motion is not clear.
But I'd still hold to the position I stated in my early essay, "Symbolic
Action in a Poem by Keats," where, discussing the "Ode on a Grecian
Urn," I offered grounds to conclude that the symptoms of his tuberculosis are present, though in a "transcendent" form, in the poem's
imagery. I concluded the essay thus:
We may contrast this discussion with explanations such as a
materialist of the Kretschmer school might offer. I refer to accounts
of motivation that might treat disease as cause, and poem as effect.
In such accounts, the disease would not be "passive," but wholly
active; and what we have called the mental action would be wholly
passive, hardly more than an epiphenomenon, a mere symptom of
the disease quite as are the fever and the chill themselves. Such
accounts would give us no conception of the essential matter here,
the intense linguistic activity.
However, there are possibilities of a reflexive process (in current
cant, "feedback") whereby the active transcending of physiological be-

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havior through intense symbolic enterprise can work in the reverse direction, thus reinforcing the very modes of physiological behavior that it
had transcended (as Keat's Ode transcended the nosological connotations of its imagery). I would tentatively assume: such a relationship
can be implicit in the role that "psychogenic illness" might play in the
elusive complications of "creativity." That is, the bodily symptoms of
mental or physical illness may become transcended in terms of symbolic
actions whereby the very exploitation of such "insight" (for all distresses
do have their corresponding "insight") can reinforce the very symptoms
that the creative symbolicity had had as its point of departure. The
disease would be but one strand in the motivational complex of the tense
symbolic act that transcends it. But conceivably there would be cases in
which the very concentration on such symbolic potentialities might incidentally "reactivate" those same symptoms.
In this sense the writings of all authors who died, let us say, of
dropsy might be examined for some distinctive manifestations that they
had in common, and that thus might be labeled as traces of a "dropsical
style." But an investigation of this sort should not by any means imply
that the source of their symbolic activity should be reduced to this one
motivating factor. However it would imply the possibility that the
nosological situation and the stylistic activity were interrelated in a way
whereby each reinforced the other. In my Philosophyof LiteraryForm (pp.
119-23), I offer a fairly plausible hypothetical case built around a reciprocal relationship between alcoholism and a certain brand of humor.
But there the relationship was too drastic-and the person I had in mind
"solved" the problem of such reciprocality by giving up both the alcohol
and the humor.