A Grammar of Motives, Kenneth Burke (NY: Prentice-Hall, 1954)
Reading Notes.
introduction: xiii] ambiguity, transformation, alchemic/alembic [note how this links to his essay on emerson and machinery of transcendence]
Distinctions, we might say, arise out of a great central moltenness, where all is merged. They have been thrown from a liquid center to the surface, where they have congealed. Let one of these crusted distinctions return to its source, and in this alchemic center it may be remade, again becoming molten liquid, and may enter into new combination…
his version, perhaps, of emerson’s view of langauge in nature, the making of dead metaphor. to the extent that he wants to return rhetoric and language and distinctions (definitions, ideas) to the molten ground of its existence, before the hardening (abstraction?)–might it be said he is thinking of re-metonymyzing (or de-metaphorizing) those distinctions? He doesn’t use the word metonymy here (and later in four tropes does emphasize how they all overlap); but does seem to set up a view of a dynamic of thinking that is close to what E means by ‘learn metonymy’
first chapter: ‘containter and thing contained’: see it here in his emphasis on context–on the relation between scene and act (scene-act ratio)
Chapter 2: Antinomies of Definition. In his qausi-deconstructive etymology of ’substance’ (showing that what is presumed to be interior actually means outside, extrinsic), another place where this focus on context suggests that his project overall is again to reveal in the grammar of our motives a need to understand our language in terms of its metonymy.
23: the word in its etymological origins would refer to an attribute of the thing’s context, since that which supports or underlies a thing would be a part of the thing’s context.
24: Here obviously is a strategic moment, an alchemic moment, wherein momentous miracles of transformation can take place. For here the intrinsic and the extrinsic can change places. To tell what a thing is, you place it in terms of something else. This idea of locating, or placing, is implicit in our very word for definition itself: to define, or determine a thing, is to mark its boundaries…
so all definition is ‘contextual definition’–and again i sense here opportunity to see metonymy as the kind of thinking that focusins upon this locating and placing–to the extent that it highlights context. whereas metaphor may be definition that has been concealed, too bounded–that is where the context has been forgotten (where the placing in terms of something else has forgotten the place.
Could use this definition of definition as placing/locating–for discussion of environmental perspective in literature. Is metonymy the figure of environmental criticism? note page 31: cites ‘biosphere’ where organism and environment are merged as a single process. [so from an ecological perspective, the environment/scene determines the 'substance' or is the substance of the agent--think how this shifts view away from androcentric] Has anything been done with Burke and environmental criticism? [see Ecocriticism and Kenneth Burke, from the KB journal for more]
28: “live and dead metaphors (‘abstractions’)”: so, refers to dead metaphor as abstraction. perhaps live metaphor then is when the dynamic is taking place, before congealed. but to extent that context is fresher, isn’t this then metaphor when it was closer to metonymy?
33: dialectic substance–the more inclusive category (interchangeable for kb: dialectially or dramatiscally considered)
dialectic as ‘process of transcendence’ [link to emerson essay]
further link to emerson/transcendence essay–when he turns to Nature here in chapter on Pragmatism (IV, Agency and Purpose; ‘the philosophy of means’ ) and refers to “the incipient pragmatism in Emerson’s idealism” (277)
focuses on Emerson’s “an education in the doctrine of Use” and “Nature is thoroughly mediate. It is made to serve.” secular agency in Emerson is function of divine purpose (278)
Another place to think metonymy as a grounding of thinking for Burke: beginning of chatper 3, Scope and Reduction.
59: “Men seek for vocabularies that will be faithful refelctions of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality. Insofar as the vocabulary meets the needs of reflection, we can say that it has the necessary scope. In its selectivity, it is a reduction. Its scope and reduction become a deflection when the given terminology, or calculus, is not suited to the subject matter which it is designed to calculate.”
Recalling that reduction is a name for metonymy (four master tropes), can it be said that all thinking is analogizing (as Emerson says); but moreover, that the danger of thinking is when this process of reduction moves to deflection, and terminology becomes (potentially) dead metaphor? So, again, is Burke after in his alchemy a way to re-metonymize such ill-suited terms? note also that this is under the section ‘representative anecdote’. So the distinction could be whether we define representativeness in terms of metaphor (potentially deflection) or metonymy (reduction). The spectacle or the specimen.
Toward end (325), a distinction made between metonymic and syecdochic (part ot whole) anecdotes. But in doing so, with reference to Coleridge and concentric circles, further sense that the larger issue (if we view syecdoche as subset of metonymy, even if KB doesn’t) for Emersonian thinking (informed by Coleridge, by relation between reasona nd understanding) is metonymic thinking.
