‘Literature Makes Something Happen’: Frank Lentricchia on Kenneth Burke

KENNETH BURKE 303 solipsism. Glen desires political change in the 1980s, finds powerful hope for it in Blake, but too often only withdrawal in Wordsworth. The weakness of this argument derives from Glen's neglect of writings by Wordsworth other than Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth believed that the poet should break the bondage of custom, class, and pride that induces mankind 'to dwell upon those points wherein men differ from each other, to the exclusion of those in which all men are alike.' In their recent book, Romanticism, Clubbe and Lovell, drawing from a wide range of Wordsworth's works, discern resemblances where Glen perceives difference. Wordsworth, they argue, stressed 'the spiritual kinship ofall menas wellas theircommonsocialand politicalcommunity' (p 39). In other less important ways Glen expresses herself too absolutely: the Lyrical Ballads 'do not explore the social implications of those psychic strategies which they question' (an exaggeration denied by her own evidence); in the 1800 volume most of the poems end 'without conclusive resolution'; Blake's Songs 'have no obvious argument ... at all.' And she pushes a few explications beyond credibility, and usually quite unnecessarily, as in her comparison ofCowper's 'Truth' with Blake's 'The Shepherd.' Very rarely, she trips herself up, as when she turns 'Holy Thursday' of Innocence into a poem of conventional edification. But these reservations do not affect her main contribution of explaining well why Blake and not Wordsworth has seemed to so many readers the poet ofrevolutionary change. 'Literature Makes Something Happen': Frank Lentricchia on Kenneth Burke GREIG E. HENDERSON Frank Lentricchia. Criticism and Social Change Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1983. 173. $18.75 Frank Lentricchia's Criticism and Social Change is an illuminating discussion of Kenneth Burke as historical thinker and rhetorical critic as well as a powerful critique of Paul de Man and deconstructionist attitudes towards history. Though his sympathies with Burke are never in doubt, Lentricchia's purpose is not to pose Burke's 'dramatism' as an exemplary alternative to the nihilistic bliss of deconstructionist free play, but rather to use Burke and de Man as vehicles for exploring the relationship between criticism and society. Whereas one may disagree with Lentricchia's avowedly Marxist programme for social change, one cannot help but admire his argumentative tenacity and his keen penetration into issues that beset literature, education, culture, society, and politics, especially in their roles as enforcers and reinforcers of ideological values, as agents of what he calls (following Antonio Gramsci) hegemonic discourse. As Lentricchia himself puts it, 'this book is about culture, intellectuals, the authority and power of intellectuals how intellectuals, in their work in and on culture, involve themselves inescapably in the political work of social change and social conservation' (p 6). UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 54, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1985 304 GREIG E. HENDERSON Lentricchia seeks to undermine the debilitating distinction between the work of culture which goes on inside the university and the work ofpolitics which goes on in society at large. He sees this distinction as a preserver of the status quo and a ratification of the self-imposed and self-perpetuating powerlessness of those literary intellectuals who, in their failure to recognize the ubiquity of the rhetorical motive and the purposiveness ofall representation, consign themselves to political quietism, the compensation ofwhich is specialized expertise in matters cultural. His well-taken point is that, even if representation cannot be ontologically anchored in some transcendental signified or objective frame of reference, it is nonetheless socially powerful and rhetorically effective. 'As a form of action in the world the literary is fully enmeshed in the social - it is not an imaginative space apart' (p 25). Given this stress on action, it is easy to see why Lentricchia finds Burke's dramatism attractive. In an appendix to Permanence and Change Burke contends that 'the ultimate metaphorfor discussing the universeand man's relations toitmustbe the poetic or dramatic metaphor.'! His characteristic regarding of 'the poem as act' is central to dramatism, for through the lens of the metaphor of drama one regards 'language and thought primarily as modes of action rather than as means of conveying information.'2 One is thus oriented to the contextual liquidity ofverbal expression rather...