When
back in the seventies, I wrote that Burke’s method–his comedic
frame–prevented the expression of warrantable outrage, he replied: “Bjeez!
That guy’s on to me.” How do you warrant outrage if the people whose actions
you object to are foolish rather than vicious? And if you don’t generate
outrage, how can you mobilize people for action against Evil and in behalf of
the Good? The answer, it would
appear, is that you can’t. Melodrama appeals for that very reason.
At the 1984 Burke conference in Philadelphia, a number
of us wrestled with that problem, Burke included. One camp insisted that
Burke’s writings were replete with outrage and warrantably so.[2] Burke
had been uncharacteristically quiet during this exchange. But then he offered up
a Zen-like story. Remember the doc he’d gone to see about a pain “that came
and went and then came back again”? The doctor, memorialized in his poem,
“The Momentary, Migratory Symptom,” had been something of a
charlatan–charging him double for diagnosing his trouble. Burke had been
outraged, and his blood pressure dangerously up, but then he decided to see if
he could learn from that swindler. Sitting with his friend, Jack Daniels, he
wrote out all the doc’s tricks. By the time of first light, he had the son of
a bitch figured out. “And you know something, the outrage was gone and the
blood pressure was way down.” Another conceded my point but insisted that
Burke’s conversion of rage into comic irony or stoic resignation was the
genius of his system. Said Trevor Melia, wouldn’t we all be better off without
the zealots and fanatics of the world shouting their slogans of hate? If there
is to be a better life, we had better be prepared to give up on our own claims
to warrantable outrage.
Well, maybe. But, then again, what about a Hitler or a
Stalin, or as Ed Appel recently asked on the Burke-L listserv, what about a
Slobodan Milosovic? Need we be zealots or fanatics ourselves to take action
against zealots and fanatics? Writing on the issue of warrantable outrage in the
July, 1986 issue of the Kenneth Burke Society Newsletter, William Rueckert
defended Burke in claiming that “Burke is a critic, not a politician, and
inquiry rather than action is his proper business.” But the Burke of the 1935 Writers Congress insisted that
criticism was a form of politics, and Burke’s own criticism–for example, of
those on the dock in the Moscow show trials–was surely a form of action.
Let me synopsize. Melodrama energizes but its method is demagogic. It evokes righteous indignation, but not necessarily warrantable outrage. Comedy, as Burke characterizes it in “Poetic Categories,” is the antithesis of melodrama. It offers up the “maximum of forensic complexity.” But, in so doing, it converts villains into fools. And Burke’s method of humble, comic irony renders all of us into fools, thus greatly weakening the capacity of good people to stand up for what we believe. Surely there must be thought and expression that proceeds beyond humble irony. Hence the question: After humble irony, then what?