Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke by Crable Bryan;

Author:Crable, Bryan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Race Matters in the Burke-Ellison Friendship

Throughout the preceding pages, I have focused specifically on the unpublished correspondence linking two key texts, “Richard Wright’s Blues” and A Rhetoric of Motives, and thereby tried to contextualize Burke’s controversial citation of Ellison’s early essay. But I want to make my overall position clear; I do not hold that Burke’s discussions of race (either in his letters or in his published texts) match Ellison’s—nor would I expect Ellison to recognize himself in Burke’s words. Given Hyman’s 1950 letter to Burke, indicating that Ellison saw the Rhetoric as a “butchery” of his ideas, I think it much more likely that Ellison had serious reservations about his role within Burke’s text.27 Moreover, recall that, in a 1982 letter, Burke specifically told Ellison that “Ralph Ellison’s Trueblooded Bildungsroman” was not a retraction of his position in the Rhetoric: “I didn’t mind missing my first draft [of the essay] because I didn’t like merely commenting on what I had written in my Rhetoric of Motives, though I’m wholly satisfied with what I said then.”28

As a consequence, I would dismiss the simplistic critique of Burke’s racism—like the one offered by Pease—but would support a more nuanced claim: that race was very much a part of the conflicts and differences of perspective disrupting this friendship. In other words, rather than discarding Burke’s system as a racist edifice, I would harness it for the exploration of the “‘mystery’ of courtship” that emerged in the Burke-Ellison relationship. If we do so, I argue, we see that Burke himself shows us the limited nature of his vocabulary of race.

Drawing specifically on the Rhetoric, we can use Burkean concepts to identify a fundamental fault in Burke’s own perspective: unable to consider the issue in ultimate terms, Burke was never able to fully transcend a dialectical vocabulary of race. In other words, I believe the root of the conflict between Burke and Ellison was not Burke’s desire to remaster his young mentee, nor his system’s exclusionary foundations, but the terminology underlying and generating Burke’s understanding of race. However, in order to flesh out this argument, let us return to the difference between ultimate and dialectical orders of terminology—and apply this distinction more specifically to Burke’s published and unpublished writings on race and identity.

According to Burke’s tripartite scheme, a dialectical term transcends the sensory particulars of the positive order. Rather than naming, it instead summarizes (entitles) a host of such particulars—which necessarily brings this dialectical term into conflict with other, competing titles for the same particulars. To picture what this means, Burke tells us, imagine dialectical terms as strident parliamentary voices raised against each other. If these dialectical disagreements are allowed to proceed unchecked, the situation will devolve into little more than an unproductive cacophony of fierce, seemingly unresolvable opposition.

Burke points out that dialectical paralysis can be avoided through the creation of compromise. However, given the discord of the dialectical order, Burke warns, this may not be an appealing solution to any of the parliamentarians involved:

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