The final idea Burke had that was better than his Pentad was the Representative Anecdote. There are a few theories like this one floating around now, but aside from Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth/Hero’s Journey (1949; which it predates), and perhaps discussion of “Shadow Texts” [I’m missing a source for this one :-(], the Representative Anecdote was one of the better known methods for evaluating stories in the 1980’s, thanks to Barry Brummett’s work.
The Judeo-Christian Anecdote
For Brummett, Burke was just reading a text and finding out what story the plot line followed (i.e. what text it “shadowed”). However, Burke predominantly found the same Anecdote in his readings: the Abraham/Christ sacrifice. The two stories are themselves parallel within the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. Burke argues that because Western society is Judeo-Christian (being that these are the dominant religions), it’s not surprising that when we try to put things [events, people, objects, institutions and ideas] into the form of a story, our minds jump to biblical examples.
Burke’s premises of this story reflect his theory of Dramatism. He argues that Dramatism, and therefore rhetoric is hortatory–it attempts to exhort, suggest or outright tell people what to do [e.g. “Thou shalt not…”]. Because we–flawed humans that we are–are doomed to fail some of the time, guilt is inherent within this hortatory system.
Because we humans are “Rotten with perfection,” always seeking to be better [even is “better” is erroneously, loosely, un- defined], our guilt necessitates that we seek redemption. And how were we redeemed in the Abraham/Christ story? Through the death of a sacrifice. The killing of the sacrifice represents our transformation via rebirth–we are “saved.” And so we find something to victimize to facilitate our transformation, a process Burke called Victimage.
Types of Victimage
Burke argued there were two types of Victimage: Scapegoating and Mortification. Scapegoating was, as the name suggests, finding someone else to hold responsible. This plays out in the plots of most stories: Crime doesn’t pay, Bad guys are punished, etc.
Mortification, on the other hand, was a kind of self-flagellation, where we attempt to flog or beat ourselves (physically or metaphorically) as penance. This process is a bit trickier when applied to stories. Burke argues that when we watch a story, we don’t just identify with the hero. Instead–at least in the best stories–we identify with ALL the characters. We assign our own positive attributes to the “good” characters, and our own negative attributes to the “bad” characters. [If we didn’t find the characters believable enough to invest part of ourselves in, the story probably isn’t that popular!] When the “bad” people are punished, we experience mortification in seeing our proxy punished. This is another aspect of literature as “Equipment for Living”–it serves a real purpose in helping us process our guilt.
Where can we find the Anecdote? And why should we?
However, this wasn’t even the most interesting part of all of this. Burke’s most useful part of Dramatism wasn’t to read literature, plays, movies and television for evidence of the Abraham/Christ myth [or for clusters of “good” terms and their “agons”, which can work in tandem], but to read speeches, memos, policy documents and laws. To read documents that are not stories and discover terms that act like characters in a story-line or plot, –terms that are victimized or redeemed–was pretty radical and requires some thought to accomplish, but once you’ve noticed the Anecdote, you can’t go back to reading arguments in the same old way.
When we find the Anecdote, it is important to ask:
- What is sacrificed?
- To what/whom?
- What is redeemed?
- What are the entailments? So what [Cui bono]?
Again, to assuage our guilt, the “bad” terms [or ideas, people, practices, institutions, etc.] and their “agonistic” clusters are usually scapegoated, redeeming the “good” terms [ideas, people, etc.]. Yes, this might make us feel better, but it also plays on our need for redemption in order to present real-world consequences to real ideas, people, practices, institutions, etc. And we need to determine, “Is the cost worthwhile?” “Is the squeeze worth the juice?”
Sources:
Barry Brummett (1984). “Burke’s Representative Anecdote as a Method in Media Criticism.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 1(2), pp.
Barry Brummett (1984). “The Representative Anecdote as a Burkean Method, Applied to Evangelical Rhetoric.” Southern Speech Communication Journal, 50(1), pp.
Kenneth Burke (1945/1969). Rhetoric of Motives. University of California Press/Berkeley.
