A Grammar of Motives by Kenneth Burke

First published: 1945

Type of work: Literary criticism

Form and Content

Kenneth Burke presents the theory of dramatism, which drives the approximately five hundred pages of A Grammar of Motives, in a brief introduction. He begins with a question: “What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it?” Burke observes that any complete statement about motives will offer some kind of answer to the questions “what was done (act), when or where it was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency), and why (purpose).” Burke states at the outset that he is seeking “not terms that avoid ambiguity, but terms that clearly reveal the strategic spots at which ambiguities necessarily arise.”

The book proper, divided into three parts, begins with 125 pages on the problem of placement or potential strategies of emphasis among the five terms, which are implicit in any account of motives. The “paradox of substance,” discussed in this section, is at the heart of part 1 and of the book as a whole. Burke observes that the word “substance,” which denotes intrinsic being or essence, etymologically connotes the substance which stands beneath or supports that essence. Burke’s pursuit of motivational ambiguities by means of such etymological figures or “puns” is typical, and he often employs etymological philology to trace transformations or transubstantiations of grammatical relations over time. The paradox of substance is an important source for the kind of transformations which Burke seeks to analyze insofar as it presents a perennial point of ambiguity: The source or motivation of an act can be traced either intrinsically to a substantive source, or it can be grounded primarily in the substantive scene.

Having indicated an entire series of typical strategies of placement, Burke rewrites in part 2, in a kind of dramatistic shorthand, “The Philosophical Schools” of the Western tradition, exposing their respective distributions of emphasis, or basis in an ancestral term, from among the five terms. Thus, the materialists (including Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Charles Darwin, the Stoics, and the Epicureans) distinguish themselves by their featuring of scene, the Idealists (George Berkeley, David Hume, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, the Marxists, G.W.F. Hegel, and George Santayana) by their focus on agent, the pragmatists (John Dewey, William James) by their stress on agency, and the mystics by theirs on purpose, while the realists Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas emphasize act.

Part 3, “On Dialectic,” presents a test case, what Burke calls the work’s representative anecdote, selected to illustrate the variety of dialectical possibilities produced by his system. As with his inquiries into etymological figures, the illustrative anecdote is characteristic of Burke’s analysis: A historical or textual excerpt is adopted as the point of departure for a deconstructive analysis. Burke does not employ the anecdote in order to deduce a set of abstract principles; rather, the anecdote serves to illustrate an interpretive method. The author’s intention is to train and educate one’s linguistic skepticism with regard to any account of motives. One begins to see that Burke’s theory presents a humanistic resistance to theory and constitutes not so much a speculative construction as an open-ended interpretive method, or praxis. In part 3, the author’s concern with questions of substance translates into a concern with the problems of constitutionality generally and with the motivational grammar which informs the American Constitution in particular. The result is what the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson has termed for “the time a shrewd diagnosis of the cultural and ideological conflicts of the capitalist public sphere and an often damaging critique of the latter’s strategies of legitimation.” The work concludes with four appendices, representing technical and literary illustrations of Burke’s method: They include an important reading of John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” as well as a dramatistic perspective on the four master tropes, or metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony.

The book bears the motto Ad bellum purificandum, that is, “toward the purification of war.” Once people become sufficiently self-conscious and skeptical about language, once they master the “grammar of motives,” they will cease to persecute one another by “demonic” ambitions which have “their source in faulty terminologies.” According to Burke, writing during World War II, human thought needs to be directed toward the “purification of war” so that motivations of combat can be refined to the point where war “would be much more peaceful than the conditions we would now call peace.” Moreover, Burke urges a turn “in the direction of a neo-Stoic cosmopolitanism, with ideals of tolerance and resignation to bureaucratic requirements implicit in the structure of modern industry and commerce.” Burke’s ideal is what he calls “neoliberal,” that is, an attitude of neo-Stoicism and linguistic skepticism realized in the dramatistic method of analysis. “Surely,” he writes, “all works of goodwill written in the next decades must aim somehow to avoid these two extremes [parochialism and imperialism], seeking a neoliberal, speculative attitude.” Burke aims for a speculative and skeptically ironic distance between the observer and language and history; his method is informed by what Frank Lentricchia has termed the wisdom of a comic sense of history.

Critical Context

According to Armin Paul Frank, Burke’s dramatistic worldview derives from his approach to literary works as ritual drama as described and applied in The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (1941). A Grammar of Motives represented the application of his literary dramatistic method to the general field of human motivation. It was this extraliterary program which Burke continued to “round out” in the major works which followed: A Rhetoric of Motives (1950), The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (1961), and Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (1966). Lentricchia, on the other hand, has seen A Grammar of Motives in terms of Burke’s major early works Counter-Statement (1931), Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (1935), and Attitudes Toward History (1937).

According to Lentricchia, Burke’s “comedic formalism” developed in response to a period of traumatic economic and political crisis: “The formalisms of Burke, Brooks, and de Man have a social context, and they promise . . . in the wisdom of their comedic sense of history: a secular and literary paradise . . . in which the fruit of transcendence is not the end of history but the maximum knowledge of what history is, has been, and will be, from a privileged vantage point beyond its conflicts.”

Jameson for his part observes that, in spite of the detached and ironic distance which Burke’s dramatistic analysis establishes between the observer and history, within the historical context of the 1930’s and World War II

Burke’s stress on language, far from reinforcing as it does today the ideologies of the intrinsic and of the anti-referential text, had on the contrary the function of restoring to the literary text its value as activity and its meaning as a gesture and a response to a determinate situation.

Bibliography

Burke, Kenneth. “Methodological Repression and/or Strategies of Containment,” in Critical Inquiry. V (Winter, 1978), pp. 401-416.

Frank, Armin Paul. Kenneth Burke, 1969.

Jameson, Fredric. “Ideology and Symbolic Action,” in Critical Inquiry. V (Winter, 1978), pp. 417-422.

Kahn, Victoria. “Humanism and the Resistance to Theory,” in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, 1986. Edited by Patricia Parker and David Quint.

Rueckert, William H., ed. Critical Responses to Kenneth Burke, 1924-1966, 1969.

White, Hayden, and Margaret Brose, eds. Representing Kenneth Burke: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1983.