“Understanding” Again: Listening with Kenneth Burke and Wayne Booth

Abstract

Under headings that include rhetoric of assent, critical understanding, pluralism, rhetorology, and listening-rhetoric, Wayne Booth’s scholarly work for over thirty-five years hinged on a simple question: “How can I get each side to understand the other?” Booth’s imbroglio with Kenneth Burke demonstrates that “understanding”—Booth’s key concept—is not confined, as Booth had suggested, to respecting opposing views, searching for common ground, and finding reasons that warrant shared assent. Understanding is also enabled and obstructed by a number of factors, including six I examine: form, process, emotion, differences, power, and additional rhetorical/material constraints. Analyzing Booth and Burke’s published exchange in Critical Inquiry (1974), along with their correspondence from 1972 to 1983, reveals how their disagreement evolved; how their prolonged dispute highlights limitations in Booth’s theory; and how Booth’s engagement with Burke, along with Booth’s subsequent reflections on their exchange, extends Booth’s project to offer a more rhetorically robust theory of understanding.

Acknowledgments

I want to thank The Kenneth Burke Literary Trust and the family of Wayne Booth for giving permission to cite the letters between Kenneth Burke and Wayne Booth. A special thank you is due to Phyllis and Alison Booth; although they might not share all of my conclusions, their generous feedback on a near-final draft substantially improved this essay. I also want to thank the archivists at the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library and Pennsylvania State University’s Pattee Library—particularly Sandra Stelts and Jeannette Sabre—for help navigating the archives; the RSQ editor and two anonymous reviewers for making the review process productive and humane; and Laura Michael Brown, Rosa Eberly, Debbie Hawhee, and Jack Selzer for support and feedback from the project’s beginning to end.

Notes

¹ Understanding was Booth’s key concept, but he warned readers against letting this become the one and only god-term. In Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism, he focused on three concepts: vitality, justice, understanding. “Anyone of them, taken alone, will lead to absurd excesses,” Booth explained, but “placed together in critical interchange, they correct each other’s excesses and provide a set of tests that both depend on pluralism and reinforce it with every application” (232). Frederick J. Antczak has argued that in Booth’s pluralism, “truth is less important than the way of life critics create for themselves and each other when they talk” (7). Antczak also offered a helpful description of these three terms: “vitality, the end of cultivating rather than stilling further discourse; justice, which calls each critic to apply a consistent standard; and understanding, the capacity to set aside even the strongest convictions and deepest presumptions long enough to enter another’s critical framework and mind, to take in another self in a continually enriching field of selves” (7).

² Part of Burke’s frustration was that Booth did not provide any footnotes in the early version of his essay that Burke used for his published reply.

³ Almost all of the letters between Booth and Burke cited hereafter are from The Kenneth Burke Papers at the Pennsylvania State University. However, there are three exceptions. Booth’s letter to Burke on March 6, 1974, and Burke’s letter to Booth on March 29, 1974 are part of the Wayne C. Booth Papers, held in University of Chicago’s Joseph Regenstein Library. I also reference Burke’s unsent letter to Booth, dated March 26, 1974, which I found at Kenneth Burke’s home in Andover, New Jersey.

⁴ “Publicly” is used deliberately here because, as Booth’s work reminds us, it is a mistake to conflate an authorial persona with the flesh-and-blood person. Furthermore, Chris Ingraham—who was hired by Booth in 2001 to organize his papers—writes that Booth’s papers “suffused me with the illusion that I knew the flesh-and-blood man, but his living presence in flesh-and-blood made it impossible for me ever to let that illusion to deceive me completely” (19).

⁵ For further evidence, see Dave Tell’s essay on the exchange between Burke and Fredric Jameson. Tell writes, “Burke believed that intellectuals should engage each other’s work carefully and thoughtfully,” yet “this is a critical norm that Burke himself would find difficult to practice” (71).

⁶ In his private correspondence, Sacks’s tone with Burke was supportive, even encouraging: “Though I too was originally bothered by your annoyance at some things in Wayne’s article, I can’t help feeling that your spirited response to Booth’s interpretation is itself an exciting and important clarification of your views. I feel honored to be able to publish ‘Dancing with Tears in My Eyes’ in our first issue of Critical Inquiry” (May 30, 1974).

⁷ After reading Burke’s reply, Booth used square brackets to insert changes into his own article. He prefaced his claim by saying that comparing Burke to Crane was one wrong way of trying “to think like Burke himself” (4).

⁸ Misspellings in the correspondence will be left unchanged, so that the playful, informal tone of Burke and Booth’s letters might be preserved.

⁹ Booth wrote, “I’ve tried several times to phone you, since your response came, and always with a ‘not in’ or no answer” (April 18, 1974). Burke was staying and teaching in Pittsburgh for the spring semester. After failing to reach Burke by phone, Booth inserted small changes into his own article using square brackets, with the hope that these changes would address Burke’s objections. They did not.

¹⁰ According to Phyllis Booth, “when Wayne says ‘You Bastard!’ he means it in the ‘non-pejorative sense’ (This is a small joke that Wayne liked to use). He was joining Burke’s style of discussion.” Her comment thus highlights the challenge of interpreting letters without personally knowing the correspondents and raises questions about how literally we should read the insults and anger that appear throughout the correspondence.

¹¹ They may have spoken on the phone after Booth’s April 18, 1974 letter. Burke wrote on April 21, 1974, “Wow! I never knew what ‘dialogue’ really meant until you and I started one.” Aside from this, the note only mentioned Burke’s plans to return home to Andover, NJ.

¹² After Booth admitted his confusion, Burke explained: “First, the pun on the name meant nawthin at all. You had signed yourself WB. That suggested to me WeB, which in turn suggested Webster, which in turn suggested a Daniel come to judgment” (August 12, 1979).

¹³ Burke himself made a similar point in their correspondence when he wrote several months later, “The more I think on these matters [their Critical Inquiry exchange and correspondence, including references to pluralism, logology and historiography], in fact on any matters, the more I incline to become convinced that the fundamental dialectical distinction btw. words-that-put-things-together and words-that-take-things-apart turns up everywhere along the line.” Implying that Booth might have helped shape Burke’s own writing, Burke wrote in parenthesis “I am now writing a new preface to Permanence and Change, for a U. of Cal. Press edition. Next I do one for Attitowards” (February 20, 1980).

¹⁴ Thanks to one of the peer reviewers for a form of this very question.

¹⁵ There are some moments when Burke expresses his vulnerability. Yet even in these moments when Booth assumes the authoritative role, he does so to reaffirm Burke’s greatness. Booth writes, for instance, “Obviously attendance at an MLA session is not a clear indicator of where you stand now, or where you will stand ten or a hundred years from now. Yr stuff will endure, if anything written in this century endures—and if, as I sometimes doubt—serious writing and thinking endure. Live in peace. Your books will go on making their way” (February 11, 1983).

¹⁶ The last letter between them available in the Kenneth Burke Papers at the Pennsylvania State University is from 1986, but after 1983 their letters do not directly engage the Critical Inquiry exchange. However, they might have made additional progress in person. They both attended a conference in March of 1984 on “The Foundations of Critical Pluralism” at the University of Nebraska. Booth’s contribution was published as “Pluralism in the Classroom” for a special issue of Critical Inquiry. Burke’s comments were not published, and in a letter dated May 22, 1986, Burke explained: “Yet I can blame no one but myself.”

¹⁷ Burke’s reaction is not wholly unique to Booth. Ross Wolin pointed out that throughout Burke’s life, he believed that his books were “often misunderstood” and “his ideas used piecemeal or for purposes not Burke’s” (205).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Craig Rood

Craig Rood is a Doctoral Candidate of Communication Arts and Sciences at Pennsylvania State University, 234 Sparks Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA. E-mail: [email protected]