traditional modes of inquiry and placement. But it has a somewhat “existentialist” aspect, in that we constantly re-begin from unique experiences (since each book that we take as our point of departure leads into our generalizations from one unique set of conditions, and accordingly compels us to see them in a perspective never quite duplicated, if we take any other book as our “informing experience”). Later, when discussing the negative, we shall consider another point at which this position closely parallels the existentialist one, if we have interpreted it correctly.
The study is thus built pedagogically about the “indexing” of some specific “symbolic structure,” in the attempt to study the nature of a work’s internal consistency and of its unfolding. But in contrast with courses in “literary appreciation,” the generalizations at which we aim are not confined to a concern with the work’s “beauty.” Our quest concerns its linguistic nature in general; and then, beyond that, the insight it may afford into man’s ways as symbol-user.
We proceed on the assumption that the “perfect case” for analytic purposes is a definitive literary text. This view, in turn, is doubtless but a variant of the traditional analogy whereby “nature” was likened to a “scripture” which would be legible if one but knew the language it was written in. In this case, the “signs” manifested by a human personality or by a social incident (or social order, or social movement, or cultural trend in general) would be treated as relatively obscure aspects of motivational structures that are least obscure in literary texts. There would thus be no difference “in principle” between textual analysis and social analysis. But though textual analysis would be the “ideal norm” here, there is no reason why specialists in other sciences could not apply the same procedures, mutatis mutandis, to their subjects (as with Freud’s systematic attention to the “free associations” of his patients, or the use of questionnaires in polls of public opinion). Our major difference (if there is any essential difference!) is in the over-all direction we would give to such procedures.
When the great executive has finished his murder thriller, and relaxed into a well-earned sleep after having gone, by a certain disciplinary route, from the killing of the victim to the killing of the mystery, our vigil has but begun. We must ask: “What does the victim equal? . . . What does the killer equal? . . . What does the virtuously or disingenuously instigatory heroine equal? . . . What are the stages of this journey?” etc.
And we do this, not just to learn something about the given work, but ultimately in the hope of learning something about the ways in which the “personality” of the work relates to the “personality” of a social order; and then, in accordance with our project for methodic drooping, we look for ways whereby the work embodies, however assertively, even militantly, the malaise of a given property structure (with the goads, and “mortifications,” and demands upon our “patience,” and invitations to victimage, that are intrinsic to any such order).
Tragedies are quite convenient for our purposes, since we accept Aristotle’s statement that tragic poetry aims at a kind of “catharsis”—and the explicitly civic, stately, or courtly nature of the tragedies traditionally accepted as great, makes easier our search for routes that clearly link mere “personal equations” with the “great persecutional words,” such as fate, law, right, justice, Themis, Moira, Nemesis, necessity. But other species of expression are also inspected for kinds of catharsis or transcendence proper to their nature.
There are principles and rules of thumb to guide the task of “indexing.” And one has available a set of at least partially coordinated statements about the nature of symbolic action in general. With this to start from, teacher and class are on a voyage of discovery together. Ideally, we keep open the channels that take us back and forth between general principles and casuistry, and, whereas certain methods for tracking things down have already been developed, teacher and class are engaged in a joint enterprise for perfecting these. But, whereas the original reading might have sought to track down a “villain,” we rather would seek to track down the nature of the author’s idea of “villainousness” conceived, not just historically, with regard to the “climate of opinion” that prevailed in a given social order but, universally or formally, with regard to the modes and motives of such symbolizing in general.
We proceed by systematically “suffering” a given text, in the hope of discovering more about the symbolic activity in its particular kinds of sufferance. “Formal discipline” is identical with the carrying out of such an investigation. “Truth” is absolute, in the sense that one can categorically make assertions about certain basic resources and embarrassments of symbols. It is nearly absolute, as regards certain “factual” statements that can be made about the terms of a given work. It is highly problematical, as regards the question that ultimately concerns us most: What is the nature of a symbol-using animal? Here, at least ideally, however emphatic we may become on the spur of the moment, we adopt as our primary slogan: “All the returns aren’t in yet.” And we would continue to keep alive this attitude (the “Deweyite” emphasis) by embodying it in methods that practically compel one to be tentative, at least during the preparatory stage when one is trying to locate all the significant correlations in a book, without deciding whether they are “good” or “bad,” but trying rather simply to find out exact1y what they are.
Since every course in the curriculum is a symbolically guided mode of action, a placement of all courses from the standpoint of symbolic action violates none of them, though with regard to many scientific disciplines the linguistic approach can be irksome to instructors who would persuade themselves and their classes that they are talking about “objective reality” even at those times when they happen to be but going through sheerly linguistic operations. Since every specialty has its terminology, it can be studied like any poem or philosophic treatise, for its “equations.” And, indeed, if you inspect any given scientific writer’s terminology closely enough, you can hope to find the bridges that join his purely technical nomenclature with the personal realm.
But though such statements are required for a full account of human action in the realm of physical motion, a “dramatistic” approach by no means requires that laws of motion as such be equated with action. Indeed, we have tried to show how the very self-consciousness of our stress upon action forces us to distinguish action from sheer motion (a distinction that is obscured, for instance, in Aristotle’s term kinesis, though that very ambiguity is helpful in warning us how the two usages can cross, as when Aristotle himself “dramatistically” discusses the realm of physics in terms of “action” and “passion”).
Though the student would not be abiding by the spirit of the enterprise if he merely set about such a fragmentary search as often characterizes doctoral theses, in all methods there is a large percentage of “neutrality,” in the sense that a theory of ballistics could be called “neutral,” since it could be employed by either side to slay the other. Accordingly, analysis can be carried into lines that take us far from our primary search (any method being ambiguous enough in its potentialities to become detached from the attitude for which it was designed).
Indeed, one can even imagine situations where, even if mankind did amass an authoritative lore on the odd kinds of “somnambulism” to which our nature as symbolists makes us susceptible, there might arise some calamitously endowed “throw-back” who used it all to make things worse rather than better, somewhat as when rules for the cure of souls are transformed into the techniques of “psychological warfare.” For, since every point of view has its corresponding “pragmatics,” this dilemma of the ambiguities in power or method is not confined to pragmatism. And, at least, the admonitory aspects of our position can prevent us from thinking of any human resource, such as “mind,” “spirit,” “eloquence,” “imagination,” “intellect,” “understanding,” “rationality,” as intrinsically good, rather than as prone to the trickeries (and the grandeurs!) of the symbolic order upon which such resources so strongly rely.
The principle of “negativity” which is basic to the “dramatistic” approach, being essentially
