Running
through much of the Burke corpus is the sense of outrage as a primal emotion, in
need of conversion into something more civilized and more serviceable. Shortly
after the 1984 Burke conference, he reminded me in a letter (July 14, 1984)
about a passage from the Herone Liddell sequel to his anti-novel, Toward a
Better Life: “The sword of
discovery goes before the couch of laughter. One sneers by the modifying of a
smart; and smiles by the modifying of a sneer. You should have lived twice, and
smiled the second time.” Rueckert echoed this sentiment in the July, 1986
issue of the Burke Society newsletter. Said Rueckert, “‘outrage’ is not a
very useful critical response and rage, in general, is debilitating. Critical
inquiry may begin in outrage–and it often does–but it should not end
there.”
There you have it: from primal outrage to the smile that modifies the sneer. Yet
there surely must be in some cases–not all–a stage beyond the sneer of
primal outrage and the smile of comedy. The Burke provides clues as to how
outrage might be tamed if necessary but retained if warranted. Chapter Six of Attitudes
Toward History provides the primary clue: "In sum, the comic frame
should enable people to be observers of themselves, while acting. Its
ultimate would not be passiveness, but maximum consciousness. One would
"transcend" himself by noting his own foibles." p. 171.
Among
those foibles are the impulses to primal outrage, and they are often shaped and
reinforced by melodrama, an in the reporting by both sides in the Kosovo crisis.
But Burke gives us the comedic tool to check and channel that anger. Practice
discounting, he suggests in his "Dictionary of Pivotal Terms." (ATH,
p. 244). Make allowance for the fact that things are not always as they seem.[3] Practice
perspective by incongruity, he suggests in Permanence and Change,
recognizing, for example, that there is an ethic even in gangsterism and a
hierarchical psychosis even in the most noble of organizations. Recognize that
the same story can be told in many ways, he suggests repeatedly in the Grammar
of Motives." Not only does language supply communicators with resources
of ambiguity, so too the dramas that we are apt to condemn or condone are apt to
look differently depending on our pentadic lenses and sense of scope. Want to
cast Slobodan Milosovic as the sole enemy, the evil incarnate? Burke would have
urged us, I think, to widen the circumference in our thinking about the Balkans,
setting the ethnic cleansing of the Serbs alongside those of the Croations, for
example, as a kind of control group. And I suspect Burke would have enjoined us
to look at "ourselves"--i.e., those of us in the West who call
ourselves humanitarians--to see whether we have not practiced in our pasts, or
excused in our allies, the very atrocities committed in Kosovo by the Serbs.
Still, reading Burke's speech to the American Writers' Congress alongside the chapter on "Comic Correctives" in Attitudes Toward History, I don't get a sense that the humble Burke, the Burke who recognized that all of us are fools, was quite as unwilling to condemn as he earlier let on in his injunction to see usurious capitalists, for example, not as vicious but as mistaken. What remains consistent in Burke is his distaste for polemic--of melodrama. Reading "Comic Correctives," one gets a sense that the initial impulse to primal outrage needed to be checked, not that the passion that remained after the self-examination had been conducted needed also to be kept to oneself. Rather, that outrage, now a warranted outrage, needed more appropriate expression than was typically found in agitprop theater or in tracts urging Americans to think of themselves as "the masses," or as "the proletariat," or even as "the workers," when they already had a perfectly usable term for themselves: "We the people." This was the essence of Burke's "subversive" message to the American Writer's Congress."