Kenneth Burke: Form and Desire in Modern Poetry

Kenneth Burke argues for the importance of desire in the functioning of literature. More specifically, he sees a text as a structure that works with or against the reader's emotions:

"form is the creation of an appetite in the mind of the auditor, and the adequate satisfying of that appetite. This satisfaction--so complicated is the human mechanism--at times involves a temporary set of frustrations, but in the end these frustrations prove to be simply a more involved kind of satisfaction, and furthermore serve to make the satisfaction of fulfilment more intense" ("Psychology and Form" 31).

Most of Burke's examples of the writer's ability to build, frustrate, and eventually satisfy desire are narrative in nature. So, for example, he refers to Hamlet's triumph over Guildenstern, which is especially satisfying because it develops through the metaphor of the pipe that Hamlet offers to Guildenstern to play as he had attempted to "play" Hamlet.

Though Burke mostly makes use of narrative form in his examples, he also suggests that resolutions of the desire elicited by the text can come from its change in "quality": "the presence of one quality calls forth the demand for another, rather than one tangible incident of plot awaking an interest in some other possible tangible incident of plot" (38-39).  The interplay of desire and restriction, in other words, does not need to come about as a result of narrative or dramatic form, but can arise from changes in tone or attitude. His example is particularly useful for the critic of poetic modernism; he uses the pub scene in The Waste Land, which ends with the sudden quote from Shakespeare. The agonies of low culture, as Burke sees it, is suddenly rescued or resolved by the allusion to high culture.

Whether or not one agrees with Burke's reading of this particular scene, it is important to recognize that Burke is advancing (or transforming) the typical "New Critical" interest in tension or irony. Rather than being a critic who simply recognizes formal properties such as mixing high and low, Burke contends that form operates by human emotions -- specifically desire.  The text is not isolated or inert; it is structured to elicit and satisfy human desire.

A more prosaic example, but one that helps illustrate his perspective, is his footnote on the slow motion film of a man vaulting. Though Burke points out that the still images of each moment of the man's jump provide scientific facts, he nevertheless rejects it: "so far as the aesthetic truth is concerned, this on the screen was not an athlete, but a squirming thing, a horror, displaying every fact of vaulting except the exhilaration of the act itself" (42). Aesthetic language, for Burke, invokes or unleashes emotion.  It is meant to elicit exhilaration.

In "The Poetic Process," Burke follows his insights about the emotive dynamism of literature with an interesting inversion of psychoanalysis. He is quite familiar with Freud, of course, but he builds his own explanation for the dynamism of desire -- one that naturalizes formal desire as a common product of the human mind. He posits the priority of the mind's abilities in Platonic terms: "art has always appealed [. . .] to certain potentialities of appreciation which would seem to be inherent in the very germ-plasm of man, and which, since they are constant, we might call innate forms of the mind" (46). The mind is drawn to crescendo or contrast, for instance, because...it is drawn to crescendo or contrast. The ur-form of the human brain works that way.

Burke's thought is not quite tautological, but it refuses to investigate beyond the fundamental principle that the mind is ready to work in these ways. We simply have a "germ-plasm" for these sorts of things. The abstract, content-less abilities of the mind (such as crescendo or contrast) are manifested or "individuated" when they attach to materials of individual experience.

But, for Burke, the abstractness of the mind, the content-less potential for forms such as crescendo, precede any of its externalizations or individuations. In fact, the urge for forms makes possible the details which subsequently attach to it. This idea is crucial for Burke because it defines the artist's task. Rather than present facts or details in literary texts, the artist must activate the formal processes of the mind, for no set of details will move everyone in the same way. Burke's example shows the emphasis on form in the artistic process: "If the artist were to externalize his mood or horror by imagining the facts of a murder, he would still have to externalize his sense of crescendo by the arrangement of these facts" (51). The accurate details of a murder, for instance, are not enough to activate horror; the formal process of crescendo makes horror possible.

Up to this point, I have merely been summarizing Burke's important contribution to our understanding of how literature works -- an understanding that, I believe, is not shared by enough critics because they often fail to recognize the relationship between formal properties and desire. However, from my perspective, Burke too firmly eternalizes the mental forms he discusses. That is, crescendo is a form, a sort of Platonic ideal beyond the reach of change, but literary history has shown that there are very dramatic breaks in technique. It seems to me that crescendo itself changes over time. 

My example must be very brief, but if one compares a poet like Whitman to T. S. Eliot, one sees that the form of crescendo itself changes. Whitman repeats a crescendo of physical attraction and sensual interaction with the world, while Eliot develops a crescendo of frustration and rejection. It might be more accurate to say that Whitman's crescendo is a release while Eliot's is an intensification because not-released.  The problem might be resolved by calling what Eliot does something else, say "reversal," but this latter term does not capture the intensity that accompanies a crescendo. Eliot's The Waste Land most certainly is a crescendo, but Burke's terms are not fungible enough to respond to obvious changes in poetic effects.  Tracking these changes in form, rather than eternal forms, is the task of the literary historian. Though we can be helped by Burke's concepts, they must be fluid enough to accept the formal varieties that poets continue to find.