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  On Human Nature

  On Human Nature A Gathering While Everything Flows, 1967–1984 Kenneth Burke

Edited by William H. Rueckert and Angelo Bonadonna

Arranged and Annotated by William H. Rueckert

  University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England

© 2003 by the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Burke, Kenneth, 1897-

  

On human nature : a gathering while everything

flows, 1967–1984 / Kenneth Burke ; edited by William

  p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0-520-21919-8 (alk. paper) 1. Philosophy.

  I. Rueckert, William

  H. (William Howe), 1926– II. Bonadonna, Angelo.

  III. Title. b945.b771 r84 2003

814'.52—dc21 2002011198

Manufactured in the United States of America

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  1 The paper used in this publication is both acid-free and totally chlorine-free (TCF). It meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) ( Permanence of Paper).∞

  

For my wife, Barbara, whose meticulous and

heroic labors helped make this book a reality

  Contents

  Preface

  ix

   Introduction

   part one ·

  1.

  

  2. On “Creativity”—A Partial Retraction, 1971

  35

  3.

  54

  4.

  

  5.

   part two ·

  6. 7. 139

  8.

  9. Symbolism as a Realistic Mode: “De-Psychoanalyzing”

   part three

  10. A Theory of Terminology, 1967 229

  11. Towards Looking Back, 1976 247 part four ·

  13. Eye-Crossing—From Brooklyn to Manhattan: An Eye-Poem for the Ear, 1973 305

  14. Counter-Gridlock: An Interview with Kenneth Burke, 1980–81

  336

Preface

  Though Burke published only one new book—his Collected Poems (1968)—after Language as Symbolic Action, he continued to write and publish essays, poems, and reviews up through l984 when the long, new afterwords to Permanence and Change and Attitudes toward History ap- peared with the third editions of those two books by the University of California Press. The long essay “In Haste” also appeared that year in the special Burke issue of Pre/Text. Had he been so inclined, he could easily have assembled a final large collection of his later works (essays, poems, reviews, interviews, and transcribed taped talks) for the Univer- sity of California Press. But, though many of us urged him to do so, and even offered to do it for him, he refused and only agreed that if such a collection were ever published, it should be entitled On Human Nature:

  

A Gathering While Everything Flows, a title he had once thought of us-

  ing for Philosophy of Literary Form. He never made a final selection of his later works for such a collection, so we do not have a definitive list of what he would have included, nor any indication of how he would have arranged the material. The sad fact of the matter seems to be that after his wife Libbie died in 1969, Burke lost all interest in making new books, in part, he said, because he wrote his other books to keep prov- ing to her that he was worthy of her love.

  After Burke’s death in 1993 and after we had time to compile a de- finitive bibliography of everything that he had published after 1966, I collect his later essays and that we persuade the University of California Press to publish them. They agreed and also agreed that I should try to put together the original Symbolic of Motives as Burke conceived and wrote it during the early and middle fifties. I got to work reading and rereading the material that would make up On Human Nature and soon realized two things: A complete collection would be too long for the Press to even consider, and my work on this project would be much fa- cilitated if I had a younger helper. I persuaded Angelo Bonadonna to be- come the coeditor and we set to work making the selections.

  It is easy to be overly optimistic in these matters, just as it is easy to be fearful that you will omit or miss some essential essay or review. The first proposal we made up and sent to the Press was much too long, so we began to purge our list. There was some editorial confusion at the Press about how to manage the Burke file now that he was dead; Burke’s sons were sorting through his files and trying to learn about the realities of the publishing world and the treasure trove of uncollected and un- sorted material Burke had left behind; there were interruptions in our lives as well. All of these things slowed us down a lot, and it was not un- til the summer of 1997 that Angelo and I finally arrived at what we think is a representative selection of late (post 1966) works by Burke. Angelo Bonadonna scanned them all and put them on a disk; we then printed, proofread, and arranged them in chronological order by publishing date. We agreed on how we would divide up the editorial labors. We prepared an Introduction and brief headnotes to complete the manuscript so it could go off to the Press for their decision.

  Our goal in bringing these fourteen pieces together in a book is to make available Burke’s final logological position as he laid it out in his various “summing-up” essays. Many students of Burke used to stop at

  

Language as Symbolic Action as if Burke had not gone on thinking, writ-

  ing, and publishing for many more years—at least until 1984. Burke re- mained active and vigorous until that date when, at eighty-seven, he fi- nally began to slow down. He had been active and productive for more than sixty years since the publication of his first book, The Complete

  

White Oxen: Collected Short Fiction, in 1924. Most of us last saw him

  in May 1990, in New Harmony, Indiana, at the first official conference of the Kenneth Burke Society. He was ninety-three and still attentive and holding forth at the many official and unofficial meetings during the con- ference. Burke was not able to attend the next conference of the Kenneth Burke Society in May 1993, at Airlee, Virginia, and died in November of that year at his home in Andover, New Jersey, where he had lived since the early twenties.

  This collection is only a selection of Burke’s later essays. It does not include any of the reviews he wrote during these last years, and only one of the many poems from his post-1968 years is included—the long, memorable poem “Eye-Crossing.” We have not included any of the hun- dreds—probably thousands—of letters Burke wrote during these years. He was often interviewed, taped, and videotaped during the sixties, sev- enties, and eighties. We have only included the long interview “Counter- Gridlock,” which seems to get us closer to the essential Burke than most of the others. We were interested in the published record because it was there that Burke was best able to clearly formulate and reformulate his ongoing dialogue with himself, a dialogue that began most obviously in

  

Permanence and Change and continued in every book and major essay

  that followed right up to the afterwords in the final editions of Perma- nence and Change and Attitudes toward History in 1984.

  We are sorry not to be able to offer here a complete collection of Burke’s published work after 1966; it would have been nice to have a complete record and in this way avoid the subjectivity that is intrinsic to the selection process editors impose on any body of material. We could have offered a more complete record if we had agreed between us to edit individual essays and offer snippets from this piece or that piece that re- vealed Burke at his witty, incisive best. But this would have been con- trary to the very spirit of Burke’s own work and critical tenets and it would only have allowed us to further intrude into his work and lay our ideas of what Burke was about on top of his or, worse, substitute ours for his. So we agreed that every selection would be a whole selection, for better or worse. Burke was sometimes excruciatingly tedious and boring as he did things that he thought were necessary to the kind of argument or analysis he was conducting, or when he was pursuing one of his pet topics, such as the thinking of the body or the scatological and/or sym- bolic implications of one of his own dreams, poems, or fictions. But af- ter a good deal of discussion back and forth between us, we decided we would not edit any text to suit us and would go the whole way with whole texts. Readers can do their own cutting and editing.

  William H. Rueckert

Acknowledgments

  Angelo Bonadonna and I made all of our decisions jointly on which es- says should be included. Some of the choices were easy, some less so, in- volving many acceptances and rejections. The ideal solution would have been a two-volume set so that more of the late essays could have been included. We had no way of knowing which of these essays Burke would have preferred. I want to stress here that the choices were ours, based on what we thought were the best and most important of the late essays. Angelo did all of the initial scanning and formatting. My wife, Barbara, did all of the later reformatting and proofreading and correcting. I wrote all of the notes as well as the Preface and Introduction. I am also re- sponsible for the arrangement of the material into its present four-part groupings. All of the material in this collection was originally published elsewhere, as indicated in the headnote for each item, and all selections are reproduced here in their original form, but with minor editorial changes here and there.

  Various members of the University of California Press staff were most helpful in getting this manuscript ready for publication. Randy Heyman, assistant acquisitions editor, was mostly responsible for get- ting the book started on final production; Matt Stevens, the copyeditor, was thorough and very sympathetic to the sometimes idiosyncratic ways Burke did things; Kate Warne, the senior editor in charge of this man- uscript guided it safely through all the final stages of preparation for publication. Anthony Burke took care of all the early negotiations with the Press and was responsible for getting all of the permissions neces- sary to use previously published material. My thanks to all of them.

  William H. Rueckert

Introduction

  After 1966, Kenneth Burke certainly changed what he was doing. There were no more text-centered analyses. He tended to write to a request or a conference or seminar topic of some kind. He relentlessly explains and applies logology; and just as relentlessly “attacks” hyper-technologism for the ways in which it is polluting the globe and threatening us in other ways. Most everything was written as a talk and then revised (enlarged) for publication. He reuses his main material over and over. Looking back on it now (1998), I would have to say that some of it is quite rep- etitious and sometimes tedious because of this. There is no place to go beyond logology, and all he really has left to do is apply it and/or pit it against some other -ology or -ism. That and recapitulate himself. Hence all the self-referential comments and the self-quoting. Logology is his fi- nal position so far as the published work is concerned. “Bodies that learn language” is a final, ultimate definition of humans. The motion/action dualism so central to logology is an ultimate, final one. The pursuit of knowledge by way of the study of printed text and language in general (symbolic action embodied) is one of the main concerns of all the late essays.

  The attack on technologism, which began way back in A Grammar

  

of Motives (1945), is intensified in the late essays because of Burke’s in-

  sistence on the direct connection between language and the perfection (entelechy) of technology. Burke phrases this point in a number of ways, son and that reason is both constructive and destructive, even suicidal, as we see from what technology is doing to the natural world and to those who developed it. Modern weaponry is a development of hyper- technologism; nuclear weapons are so powerful and destructive no one even dares to use them for fear of retaliation. But, then, modern advances in medical practices are also a development of hyper-technology, espe- cially electronic technology, as is the computer, which is rapidly revolu- tionizing the ways in which we communicate and live in the world. With- out modern technology, there would have been no space travel and exploration—or exobiologic travel, a new manifestation of the relentless human push to explore, to discover and colonize new worlds. As he says in one of these essays, Burke was obsessed with technology and what he took to be the certain future of humankind. Had he lived long enough to experience and study the current computer revolution, including the World Wide Web and Internet, he might well have been even more pes- simistic (tragic) than he was about our future in the seventies and early eighties. Burke only wrote marginally about computers and certainly missed the exponential growth of them and their “invasion” of every phase of American and global life. He would certainly have hated the way in which so much problem solving has been shifted to computers. He would have attacked it as a form of “unearned” (something for noth- ing) rewards.

  The last dividing point in Burke’s career is the publication of Lan-

  

guage as Symbolic Action in 1966. All of the essays published after that

  date belong to his “late” period, even though it may be a residue from an earlier period, as with his long essay, “Dramatism.” Burke wrote and published until 1985, when he was eighty-eight years old. Here are some statistics. Between 1967 and 1985, according to Thames’s updated bib- liography, Burke published at least forty essays, ten reviews, two books ( Collected Poems, Dramatism and Development), long afterwords to

  

Permanence and Change and Attitudes toward History, and the long “In

  Haste,” and numerous poems. What he actually wrote during this period is not yet known, though we do know that he wrote a lot of poems that he never published. During much of this period, Burke was on the road. He slowed down some when his wife, Libbie, became terminally ill. She died in 1969, after which Burke went back on the road, going all over the United States and even to Europe (France) for the first and only time in his life. He remained quite active through the 1980s and finally only slowed down in his nineties. riod. Unfortunately for us, he chose not to select and collect his essays and arrange them, as he did for Language as Symbolic Action, in a way that suited him. He probably had at least two books worth of finished work to choose from. We have been through all of this material, made our difficult fourteen choices, and arranged the material into four groups. A second volume could easily be compiled to go with this one. The two volumes would make available to students of Burke all of his major essays from this late period as well as a substantial group of po- ems. Maybe that will happen in the future, but meanwhile, back to what we have assembled here.

  The main concerns of almost all of Burke’s late essays are logology, technology, and ecology. Logology goes back to The Rhetoric of Reli-

  

gion (1961), especially to the key essay, “The First Three Chapters of

  Genesis.” But late logology is not exactly the same as early logology, most of which was worked out and written up in the late fifties. By the time Burke returned to it after wrapping up “Dramatism” in Language

  

as Symbolic Action, his focus had shifted. Logology is Burke’s final go at

  a universal language theory and methodology; technology (hyper-tech- nologism) was his final enemy; ecological sanity became his final ideal- istic goal. With the exception of Burke’s essay on his novel, Towards a

  

Better Life, “On Stress,” and his “Eye-Crossing” poem, every other es-

  say in this collection is about some part of logology. Most also make the logology-technology connection and many of them deal directly with what Burke takes to be one of the major ecological problems caused by technology, with its global pollution. Burke’s term for the “problem” was the “technological psychosis.” This term (condition; phenomenon) replaced the old “hierarchic psychosis” (from A Rhetoric of Motives) as his central concern.

  Burke’s late essays, like much of his earlier work, are almost always admonitory, sometimes disturbingly so. He used to warn us about the sadomasochistic threats in victimization—that is, the victimization of others, as with the Jews in Europe by the Nazis; and self-victimization as in the many acts of mortification we do against ourselves. He warned us about the cold war and the threat of a nuclear holocaust; he warned us about the hierarchic psychosis that he argued was intrinsic to life in any social hierarchy (which would make it ubiquitous in human and, one might argue, in many forms of highly structured animal life—if animals in fact can suffer from a psychosis or even a neurosis.” He warned us about terminological inadequacies and not having a large enough range as Burke, by way of Coleridge, insisted, then the question of an adequate range of terms becomes central. And he has certainly warned us, at length, about the dangers inherent in modern, hyper-technology. Science discovered by modern technology built the atomic and hydrogen bombs, just as science designed and modern electronic technology built the com- puters we use today. Burke’s most disturbing warning about the dangers of high technology is partly contained in his Helhaven satire, which deals with global pollution; and is partly contained in such essays as “Towards Looking Back,” his centennial lecture, in “Variations on ‘Providence,’ ” another look into the future essay, and in “On ‘Creativity’—A Partial Retraction.”

  Burke’s warning in these essays (and others in the collection) is more subtle than his warning about pollution and is based on taking the de- velopment of science and technology to the end of the line. In so doing, he takes the amazing creativity at work in the physical sciences and in technology itself and follows it to a point where it turns from creative to destructive. What you have at the “end of the line” is a vast human tragedy which might have been averted if humans had paid heed to their own knowledge of what more and more technology might bring. We are not talking about pollution here, but about foreknowledge and the abil- ity or failure to act on it. The other factor is the failure to foresee the con- sequences of an action or a development. Burke’s favorite example is modern weaponry, which is the epitome of the devotion of the creative genius of science and technology to destructive ends. But Burke also pur- sues another line of thought, which starts with language that the nature of the human brain makes possible, and then moves on to what language makes possible besides itself. Science and technology, like literary works and the law, are human inventions. The flowering of our creative genius in science, the physical sciences, and technology has resulted in some truly miraculous products. Burke argues that these products represent the “perfection of reason” and that they are one of humankind’s great- est achievements, along with great cities (see his poem “Eye-Crossing”), modern computers, space travel, modern medical procedures, and, maybe up ahead, gene theory, gene splicing, genetic engineering, and cloning. Cloning, in fact, is the perfect example of what Burke is think- ing about. Because it is now possible to clone sheep and theoretically possible to clone a human being, some scientists want to just go ahead and do it without regard to the possible horrifying consequences. Cloning and genetic engineering are the ultimate (so far) human attempts Knowledge and high technology have made this possible and the ent- elechial motive, which is intrinsic to humans, drives us ever onward in our attempt to understand and control nature and to be able to create life. In some ways, Data and his identical brother—the bad Data (from Star Trek), and androids in general, represent the culmination of this drive. They did, that is, until scientists learned how to clone and recre- ate biological rather than artificial life. Data, after all, is all circuitry and can be turned on and off. He is a technological wonder. We would not say that of a cloned human or the cloned sheep, Dolly, who is after all a “real” biological sheep.

  So, as Burke might ask, Where are we now? Developments that are al- ready happening are part of Burke’s nightmare. He might have called them the curse of knowledge or the tragic ingredient in knowledge. His main question was always whether we could save ourselves from our- selves or whether our drive for more and more knowledge and the tech- nology needed to translate it into action would finally be fatal—not for nature and the life force, which are immortal, but for us mortals. There is a wonderful episode in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five in which the Tralfamadorians, a highly advanced civilization far beyond even the wildest dreams of our scientists and technologists, blow themselves and their world to bits testing a new fuel for their space ships. They knew the risk involved, but took it anyway. So it goes, as Vonnegut says. He cer- tainly had in mind a comparable earth situation involving nuclear weapons and the aftermath of any nuclear or any conflict in which chem- ical weapons are used. Thanks to modern science and technology, we are now able to exterminate ourselves.

  Burke worried about this fundamental human dilemma right to the end. We acquired language, no one quite knows exactly how or exactly when, and were liberated from our total dependence on nature by it. We created “ counter-nature,” which is Burke’s term for what humans have added to nature. What the use of language has added to human life is more obvious than the question of where language will take (or lead) us in the various possible futures open to us. Most of the essays in the col- lection are meditations on some part of this “language question” which is the basic logological question. There is a neat parallel here between the technologists who, Burke says, propose more technology to solve prob- lems caused by technology, and Burke’s logological proposal, which is to use more words about words to solve the problems caused by words— or, if not “solve” them, at least bring us knowledge of what they are.

  Not all of the essays, of course, explore these weighty, global ques- tions. Some, such as “On Stress, Its Seeking” are about Burke himself. Though this essay explores the general topic of its title, it also explores the autohypnotic effects of writing a novel such as Towards a Better Life. Burke used to describe this as making yourself over in the image of your imagery—or trying to, as Hart Crane and Walt Whitman clearly did. This idea or process was always a part of Burke’s theory of symbolic action. A reading of his Collected Poems will reveal just how extensively this es- sential part of Burke’s thinking about literature will apply to his own po- ems. It also clearly applies to his long poem “Eye-Crossing”, which was written while his wife, Libbie, was slowly dying of the progressive failure of the muscular systems that enable the body to move and act. At the end of its course, it leaves you with a mind and a useless body (including the language muscles) which must still be fed and tended to. It is a horrifying end to a life as full and vibrant as Libbie Burke’s. And it must have been excruciatingly stressful and painful for Burke to watch it destroying his beloved wife. As he often did, Burke wrote his way through his problems and crises, exemplifying his own theory of symbolic action and the purgative redemptive function of literature in particular and writing in general. Finally, there is the long interview “Counter-Gridlock,” which is not only filled with information about Burke the man, but also provides us with a fine opportunity to experience Burke’s mind in action.

  Are these essays the best of Burke? Some most certainly are, but oth- ers show signs of age and Burke’s late compulsion to refer back to ear- lier and other works of his, and to quote himself often. He also had a habit in the late essays of using the same examples over and over again. In spite of these “faults,” these essays are essential reading if we want to have a comprehensive view of Burke’s overall development from the twenties to the mid-eighties. Burke’s longevity and his sixty years of pro- ductivity are both exceptional. He was, in fact, still carrying on in 1990 when we had the first meeting of the Kenneth Burke Society in New Har- mony, Indiana, to celebrate his ninety-third birthday.

  Here are some selections from Burke’s “Flowerishes,” which were se- lected and arranged by Libbie Burke:

  

At the very start one’s terms jump to conclusions; Even humility can go to

one’s head; Animals are ideas walking in their sleep; All we need fear is lack

of fear Itself; Poets with little to say learn to write as though guarding a

secret; Wars with clean bombs; Rusty with irony; Fields lying silent in the

songful dawn. ‘Echo’ he shouted—and Echo answered ‘Ego.’

  Burke loved ironic, compressed wisdom—whole stories reduced to an aphorism or a title, a tragedy reduced to a tragic tension, a motive or a literary form reduced to a definition, a methodology reduced to four for- mulas. It is a good way to remember him. Like Faulkner, also born in 1897, he was a small man with a big mind, or is it a short man with a tall mind. They were self-taught American geniuses.

  pa rt o n e

Creativity

  c h a p t e r 1

  On Stress, Its Seeking 1967

Kenneth Burke wrote this essay in 1966–67 soon after the republication of his

first and only novel, Towards a Better Life (1932), in 1966 by the University of

California Press. The occasion for the essay is identified by Burke in paragraph

one. The many references to the novel are to this second edition, which also has

a new preface in which Burke reinterprets the novel as a ritual of rebirth rather

than a ritual of riddance. A unique and interesting biographical feature of the

preface to the first edition (dated September 9, 1931) is its cryptographic dedi-

cation of the novel to libbie (his second wife) using the first letter of each para-

graph. Burke’s first and second wives were sisters. He had married Lily in 1919

and divorced her in the early thirties; he married Libbie in December 1933. No

doubt, the personal trouble he refers to in the essay was partly caused by the

breakup of his first marriage and his involvement with his wife’s sister. Burke

wrote the novel during a period of profound stress and change in his personal

and professional life, as well as in the life of his country. He discusses these briefly

in the section entitled “Sociopsychology of Stress.” Burke’s essay does not tell us a lot about his novel or the ways in which we

know it must have functioned as symbolic action for him. The essay makes no

attempt to work out an interpretation of the novel but uses it as a source of

readily available illustrations for an exploration of the topic Burke identifies in

his title—which is stress, generated from within and without, and deliberate

stress seeking as a “call.” A man who climbs Mount Everest or sails single-

handedly around the world is obviously a “stress seeker”; as are professional

athletes and soldiers, CEOs of big corporations, and traders on the stock mar-

ket. What Burke does in the essay is explore some of the ways in which his own

fiction is stress driven and stress seeking; he also explores some of the ways in

which fictions in general may help us to better understand these most basic of

human motives.

• My first—and some might say my lamest—excuse for offering this arti- cle is that our inquiry has to do with stress-seeking, and the article is con- cerned with a fiction featuring a character who is forever stressing his no- tions about stress and thus distress—as a vocation, the deliberate answer to a “call.”

  My somewhat more justified but perhaps more embarrassing excuse ing and, since the story was originally published about thirty-five years ago, my discussion of it could have at least the advantage of being both

  

ab intra and ab extra. For, in one sense, the book is nearly as alien to me

  as to anyone else. Yet I do know many things about it that no one else can. And since I have long been on the friendly fringes of the social sci- ences—much to the distrust of some colleagues—I dare hope that this area in common will have some effect.

  The problem, basically, is this: First, I must set up an account of the work as viewed ab intra. Here several sheerly aesthetic considerations must be treated. However since I take it that our inquiry should ultimately focus upon an approach ab extra—an approach that looks upon the work as symptomatic of something or other—even in the “aesthetic” section I keep incidentally pointing toward the discussion that is to follow.

  All told, the article is concerned with three orders of motives, orders by no means mutually exclusive, though we can at times distinguish them clearly enough. These three orders of motives are: the aesthetic, or poetic; the personal, or psychological; and the environmental, or sociological.

  Let’s illustrate the three in their obvious distinctness:

  1. It’s an aesthetic or poetic fact that a fiction might put stress upon a stress-seeking character because such character helps keep a plot going. In this sense, the theme of stress is as handy to a storyteller as, for instance, vengeance, or excessive religiosity. And, in fact, when going over old notes that I had taken but not used in preparation for my novel, I found among them that gloriously resonant line from the Aeneid, Dido’s curse (IV, 625): “Arise, some avenger, from our bones” (exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor).

  2. It’s a personal or psychological fact that—as will be noted at many points in our discussion—the author variously reproduced or transformed for purposes of the fiction material that was experienced by him differently in the course of living.

  3. It’s an environmental or sociological fact that the book was written during the period immediately leading up to and away from the cultural and economic situation rife in the United States at the time of the “traumatic” market crash in 1929.

  It is necessary to begin with a consideration of the work in its inter- nality before gradually widening the range of our speculations to include the stylistics of stress

  A man, who is envious and jealous, deliberately sets up the situation whereby a friend of his is surprised, on a fatal night, into sharing the same apartment with the woman whom he himself had coveted. He bit- terly resents the union that he had thus strategically helped to con- summate. And his resentment is aggravated by his claim that the lovers profited from a kind of unearned increment. First, he accuses them of carrying over into real life the roles they had played in a decadent drama about the incunabula of the Christian culture. (The play de- picted Mary, for all her exceptional delicacy and love of her husband, as having been successfully courted by a fiery young Greek. The aging Joseph had known about this state of affairs, which he had sympa- thetically left unmentioned when the wise men came to honor the vir- gin birth.) Our Hero’s other accusation against the lovers concerns the dignity they derived from their putative roles in plans for a colony. Though these plans never eventuate, for a while they look promising, particularly since Our Hero’s rival suddenly comes into possession of the money that would make them feasible. In frustrated imitation, Our Hero starts extravagantly spending his own funds, on the hunch that something favorable will happen. Nothing does. Hence, at the end of part one we see him bankrupt and leaving town. He has picked a des- tination at random, in the country—antithetically to the metropolitan situation that has marked the conditions of his distress. The last two sentences of this section enigmatically foretell the subsequent develop- ments of the story:

  

Reaching the little country station at dawn, in a valley still blank with mist,

I stood on the cinders with my suitcase, in the chilly morning air, while the

train continued on its way through the valley, and the vibrations of the

engine diminished irregularly to silence. I noticed then the twitter of many

unrelated bird-notes, with the rustle of water somewhere behind the mist—

and a dog was barking, imposing fresh sharp sounds upon his own blunt

echoes. (60)

  The middle section of this tripartite novel marks a notable turn in the direction of its motives. Here the narrator recounts the steps he takes, af- ter he has left the city and married for money in the country, in arrang- ing for a troupe of actors to give a performance at a nearby town. Among them appears the girl from whom he had fled. After he has been falsely boasting of an idyllic love affair, although they are actually still apart, hotel. His true account of this episode is of a wholly different quality. Breaking down, she tells him of various unsavory incidents in her life since his disappearance, including the fact that his friend had jilted her.

  The upshot of it all is that in his eyes she has lost her magic, and the sec- tion ends on his decision to see no more of her.

  The final section (part three) unfolds the motives implicit in this change. “I had been pushing against a great weight,” he says; “and with this weight gone, I fell forward. While her train hurried down the val- ley, I experienced such gloom as terrified me. For even a life of bitter- ness was desirable as compared with a life without purpose.” She had made him live “as though . . . living were a vengeance.” But now “ ‘You have no reason,’ I whispered to myself, ‘for doing any single thing’ ” (131–32).

  Alone by the tracks, he begins turning his words “into a military rhythm,” and “making a tune to fit at random.” He calls his conduct “clownishness,” and a “mechanical attempt to ward off the growth of melancholy.”

  But melancholy came, like the fog even then rising from the river.

[Finally] . . . the arm of the nearby signal sank, showing that the track was

free. “I will do only what I have to do,” I said slowly into the emptiness,

but I knew that this place would be henceforth unbearable. (132)

  The story now progressively reveals the nature of this “free” track, enigmatically indicated by the sinking signal. First, the narrator becomes engrossed “in chipping crude, unfinished shapes out of stone. . . . Then I would punish the grotesque things by smashing them with one blow of a mallet, though I do not know why I either made them or destroyed them” (133). But surely their secret nature as vessels of a new motive is indicated when he says, “Since the beginning of my new pilgrimage, I have hacked at stone with venom. Let granite be abused, I have said, un- til its relevant particles drop from it, and it stands forth, a statue.” In sum, this “store” which he “had accumulated unawares” and is now “tapping” is of an inward turning, reflexive nature, a symbol of self- violation (134–35).

  At various places in the story there are references to another girl, who loved the narrator with a simple, defenseless devotion, and whom he treated badly. At this point he takes up with her again, takes her with him on his “pilgrimage,” and mistreats her to the point where she finally leaves, abandoning him to his self-imposed self-torment. After her de-

  

If I were not myself, but something that looked down upon this that was

myself, I should brand it, I should in quietude put an effective curse upon it, I should corrode it with the slow acids of the mind. (157)

  The other aspects of the motivational recipe bear mentioning. At many points throughout the text a principle of divisiveness (a kind of “separating out”) manifests itself. It takes many forms. Here I shall cite but a few:

  

Need one who is uneasy on finding himself in two mirrors (81). . . . [while

talking desolately in a phone booth, he is grinning so that] the man beyond

the glass, waiting to speak here next [might not suspect his condition]

(221). . . . it was at this time, on glancing into the awry mirrors of a shop

window, that I mistook someone else for me. When the phone next door

was ringing, I thought it was ours (45). . . . he mentioned a bell which,

installed at the door to announce the entrance of new patrons, gratuitously

marked their exit (53). . . . I can remember stepping slowly into a lake, until

my eyes were even with its surface, the water cutting across the eye-balls

(135). . . . So, like a ventriloquist’s doll, I suffered injurious remarks to rise

unbidden to my lips (146). . . . the negligible shred of comfort he had got

for himself recently by talking in two voices. (168)

  This pattern of observations has its analogue in various kinds of char- acters with whom the narrator feels a kinship, sometimes hateful, be- cause of traits or situations that he finds duplicated in himself. Two in particular should be mentioned. In chapter 5 of part one, there is the de- spairing lover who, while the narrator offers no resistance, commits sui- cide. The incident is summed up thus:

  “ Incipit vita nova,” he confided smilingly as he left the table for this

Leucadian leap into the unseen litter of the courtyard. And I felt that the

new life he spoke of was to be my own. “He died for me,” I whispered with

conviction, though he had not yet descended. And for days afterwards I

found myself repeating, “He died for me.” (47)

  In the third section there is a different but related mode of identifica- tion: “One evening when we were in his apartment, and he had inter- preted an operatic score for me with unusual zest, after we had drunk somewhat, seeing that we were alone, and not liable to be interrupted, like youngsters we toyed with each other” (166). Since this figure is called “Alter Ego,” in my present role as analyst I see it as a roundabout way of distinguishing the pattern of self-involvement by narratively split- ting the motive into two roles. For such is the direction in which the “free” track is leading. And when Alter Ego vanishes, this is only another chapter in which the narrator ambiguously courts a “mad girl in white” (the sheer essence madness?). In keeping with the nature of the sinking signal, there are only dumb passes between them; here again he is with a woman in a dingy hotel room. And before that is a chapter in which Our Hero valiantly fights with friends, although he “could as easily have loved these people” (145).

  There is an interlude, a story by the narrator. We should note its ul- timate internality even as sheer form, since it is a story within a story. In my subsequent criticism I have been much concerned with this aspect of the reflexive principle, whereby a work gets to the ultimate point of be- ing inside itself. And as regards our sheerly sociopsychological inquiries here, I might point out that, although this chapter in its present form is the product of considerable revision, it stems from a story that I wrote as an adolescent student beset by an acute sense of isolation.

  By then its development had reached a stage of “symbolic regression” that would attain its most accurate formal representation by reduction to a story within a story, a withinness-of-withinness that was ideal for my purposes, but that I could not have made to order. For I could not have so directly reimagined such conditions of my past that were now closed to me, so far as conscious retrieval was concerned. Yet here was the essence of the regression with which I was dealing. An accommo- dating fate had preserved one copy of the story and let me find it. And as regards content, I needed a kind of document that actually stemmed from a period of fierce male virginity, as experienced from within. Yet, in keeping with the nature of the work, it had to be a fiction. Among my unused notes I found a conceit that might be introduced figuratively: “The new application of this old story is as though, after learning a for- eign language, I were to remember word for word a fatal conversation I had overheard in that language before I knew it.”

  One detail, however, is omitted. In the original version, the narrator thinks that he might throttle a boy he had seen clinging to the wooden figure upon which the victim of the “narrator’s” story gets his fixation— in its nature as a rigid statue, guilty; but in its nature as a policeman, ad- monitory. When I think of the choking in Othello, along with the refer- ence to one whom Othello likened to himself and whom he “seized by the throat” precisely when killing himself, I realize that this detail of fan- tasy should have been left in. I took it out because at the time when I was working on the book I did not interpret the chapter as I do now, and I simply found the notion too repellent to retain. where he is caught in a vicious circle. His loneliness begets loneliness, and there is no way out except for the flare-up of a compensatory fan- tasy, the vision of a mystic reversal whereby he is not alone, but is one with Universal Purpose.

  Is his vision a lie, or not? At least, it comes to a focus in the image of an ark. Hence all this regression might somehow add up to rebirth? In the last chapter, the narrative ambiguously tries it both ways. The de- velopment may be inexorably back, back, back into silence—i.e., the womb in the absolute—or things may be directed towards resurgence, as some of the final jottings explicitly promise.

  I think that we are here involved in vacillations ultimately having to do with the relations between tragedy and comedy. The pattern is this: The character builds upon a cult of tragedy, deliberately designed to rule out the amenities of humor. “Under the slightest of reverses, I would wel- come bad weather, would go out to scan a broad, lonely sky at sunset, saying, ‘This I know; this is a return, a homecoming’ ” (36).

  There are two aspects of this motive. First: “There was gratification from the thought that I might derive even my defeat from within” (55). Second: “Let us endure minor reversals by inviting major calamities; let us dwarf annoyances, or even melancholy, by calling upon life’s entire structure to collapse” (59).

  All told, he celebrates his “despisals” as a “vocation” in which he must “persevere, even at the risk of great inconvenience” (145). He chooses “to grow sullen where I might have dismissed a dilemma by laughter—laughter which leaves us untried, which is a stifler in the in- terests of comfort, surrendering in advance, renouncing prior to excess, enabling a man to avoid the ultimate implications of his wishes” (198). A secondary effect arises thus: “Though no one would choose failure, we may yet maintain that failure is a choice, since one may persist in atti- tudes which make his failure inevitable” (200). And: “One should live in such a way that he has with him these three considerations daily: mad- ness, the Faith, and death by his own hand” (168).