Burke_About the Pentad

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Questions and Answers about the PentadAuthor(s): Kenneth BurkeSource: College Composition and Communication, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Dec., 1978), pp. 330-335Published by: National Council of Teachers of EnglishStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/357013 .

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QuestionsndJnswersabout hePentadKENNETH BURKE

MAYBE my concern with matters of lit-erary theory might be of some sugges-tive value to persons concerned with theteaching of literary composition. Butwhat should I say? Having seen a "con-temporary handbook of rhetoric, lan-guage, and literature," The Holt Guideto English by William F. Irmscher andhaving noted that it puts to good usesome terms I worked with in my Gram-mar of Motives, I see a feasible point ofdeparture there. For my relation to theterms differs somewhat from their rolein the Irmscher handbook, yet therewould be nothing invidious in the dis-tinction. Both uses have their place. Thediscussion of the terms as I use them isquite roundabout and a bit unwieldy-but that's my reason for risking an expo-sition which is somewhat like a bit ofnarrative.

The roundaboutness figures alongthese lines. In the twenties, I began the-orizing about the nature of literary form.Gradually such speculations developedinto theories about the nature of lan-guage in general. I called these notions"Dramatistic" because thev viewed lan-guage primarily as a mode of actionrather than as a mode of knowledge,though the two emphases are by nomeans mutually exclusive. I next ex-tended the field to include "symbolic ac-tion" in general. That is, other fieldssuch as music, painting, dance, sculp-ture, the many scientificologies and themany religious, philosophical, and po-litical "-isms" would also be treated asinstances of symbolic action. And Irounded things out by considering hu-man relations in general in terms of thehuman species as the typical symbol-using animal.

The original literary theories alreadyhad in germ the overall philosophicposition I have ended with. They in-cluded a pronounced behaviorist strand,thoughts on the respects in which, thoughsymbolism as such is a dimension thattranscends the body, it is rooted in thebody as a purely physiological organism,essentially as nonlinguistic as a fetus inthe womb. Symbolic action is public,social; but we live and die as individualbodies in the realm of nonsymbolic mo-tion, a wholly private existence in thesense that each body's pleasures andpains and sensory representations of theenvironment are immediately its ownand none other's. The realm of the wordis tiny indeed, as compared with thevast extent of wordlessness throughtime and space. And though our kind ofanimal identifies itself by emerging frominfancy (that is, literally, "speechless-ness") into familiarity with some tribalidiom and the cultural realm that sym-bolism makes possible, no symbolic ac-tion is possible without a grounding innonsymbolic motion.So much by way of general orienta-tion. Let's come now to the terms, the"Dramatistic" pentad, that both Burkeand Irmscher build around: act, scene,agent, agency (for which Irmscher usesthe synonym, means), purpose. Burkelater added "attitude," about whichmore anon. In the meantime, note thatBurke's Grammar had a section on theterm "attitude,"with particular referenceto I. A. Richards's Principles of LiteraryCriticism, George Herbert Mead's Phi-losophy of the Act, and Alfred Korzyb-ski's Science and Sanity, all three ofwhich have a behaviorist strand. Irm-scher introduces the pentad thus:

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THE PENTADAre there ways of helping thoughtsgrow?Are there devices that will helpus generate thoughts without limitingthe capacityof the mind to rangefree-

ly? Undoubtedly,there are many. Aris-totle set down twenty-eight ways, butfor practicalpurposes,most individualsfind a smaller number more manage-able.The twentieth-century rhetoricianKenneth Burke has provided a simpledevice that applies to any situation;hecalls it the pentad, a set of five terms,each leading logically to related ques-tions. These terms are action, actor-agent, scene, means, purpose. Tryingto answer the questions that springfrom the terms becomes a way of gath-ering resources for writing. (HoltGuide, 2nd ed., pp. 29-30)

Later, in another connection, Irmscherquotes a passage from an earlier book ofmine. But since the passage is alsoquoted in the Young-Becker-Pike vol-ume, Rhetoric: Discovery and Change,and is better presented there, I'll shift totheir statement

A questionarouses n the readerantici-pations that, when satisfied,give him asense of form. In Counter-Statement,Kenneth Burke puts it this way, "Awork has form insofar as one part of itleads a reader to anticipate anotherpart, to be gratified by the sequence."Like music, a written work carriesthereader through a sequence of psycho-logical tensions and releases.Even though a passage may not be-gin with a question (most do not), thewriter creates a similar sense of antici-pation and closure by other means.The initial sentence of a paragraphusually serves to arouse the reader'santicipation of what will follow. Thisinitial sentence,which poses a questioneither explicitlyor implicitly,is usuallycalled the topic sentence of a para-graph. (In description and narrativeprose, topic sentences are often onlyimplied.) ... This view of paragraphsas structures hat arouseand fulfill an-ticipationshelps to clarifyan importantediting problem. A common, and fun-

damental,defect in many paragraphssthat they arouse anticipationsthat arenever fulfilled. (pp. 323-4)I shall now try to bring out, for whatthe demonstration might be worth, thedifference between Irmscher's andBurke's relations to the five terms (intheir sparseness much like the so-called"Journalistic W's,"-who, what, where,when, why, etc.-except that mine werechosen to accentuate the "dramatistic"nature of the lot, with "act" as "fore-most among the equals"). This shall bean account of how one thing led to an-other.It starts with the theory of form as thearousing and fulfilling of expectations.In the early twenties, I had publishedseveral critical articles written in theaesthetic tradition, viewing art in termsof self-expression. Among my choice ofmodels for study were the plays ofShakespeare. And in the course of tryingto decide what was going on in them, Ishifted from self-expression to communi-cation as test, since it was so obviousthat his dramaturgy was designed to en-list the consent, or cooperation, of theaudience in both the ingenuities of ev-ery sentence and the work's overall un-foldings. Though many of the charactersin the play were often confused, for in-stance, the audience always knew howthings stood; there were many arrowspointing the direction of the plot; and

the characters were so presented thatthe audience's attitudes toward themfitted in well with the way they fared inthe play's outcome.I still hold to my principal judgmentthat there are three, and only three, ba-sic formal principles: progressive form(a structure so arranged that the audi-ence is in tune with its development);repetitive form (the maintaining of in-ternal consistencies, as when a givencharacter continues to act in character);conventional form (for instance the roleof the chorus in Greek tragedy, a con-

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COLLEGE COMPOSITIONAND COMMUNICATIONvention surviving from the religious ritesout of which the Attic theatre hadevolved). Gratifications of this sort can,of course, be highly subtilized, as whenthe audience consents to the sacrifice of,say, a Desdemona. But if the work isproperly formed, the consent is given.And of course there are works that de-liberately flout such norms. For instance,what Aristotle called the "tragic plea-sure" can be "sophisticated" by sadistic-masochistic twists.

Incidentally, in that first line-up, I ac-tually quoted the formula that wouldlater be the basis of the pentad (or hex-ad); namely, the mediaeval Latin hex-ameter: quis (who), quid (what), ubi(where), quibus auxiliis (by whatmeans), cur (why), quomodo (how),quando (when). I could have cited, if Ihad known it, a related passage in theNicomachean Ethics where Aristotlesays, "A man may be ignorant of who heis, what he is doing, what or whom he isacting on, and also what instrument heis doing it with, and to what end . . .how he is doing it (e.g. whether gentlyor violently)"-which would indicatewhy I would class "how" (quomodo)with "attitude."But Irmscher makes one mistake incomparing the pentad with Aristotle'stopics. In the Rhetoric, for instance,Aristotle's list is telling the writer whatto say, but the pentad in effect is tellingthe writer what to ask. Whereas theterms may look positive, they are butblanks to be filled out, as Irmscher him-self makes clear by his comments oneach of the terms. "Action,"for instance,equals "What happened?" or "What isit?"-etc. Among the neatest examplesof how the topics operate in Aristotle ishis statement: "For purposes of praiseor blame, we must assume that qualitiesclosely resembling a person's real quali-ties are identical with them. For in-stance, that the cautious man is cold anddesigning, the simpleton good-natured,the emotionless gentle." Call a cantank-

erous man frank, an arrogant man mag-nificent and dignified. Call a foolhardyman courageous, a spendthrift generous,and so on.Maybe I can now make clear my par-ticular relation to the dramatistic pen-tad, involving a process not quite thesame as either Aristotle's or Irmscher's.

My job was not to help a writer decidewhat he might say to produce a text. Itwas to help a critic perceive what wasgoing on in a text that was already writ-ten. Irmscher uses the "dramatistic"terms as suggestions for "generating atopic." My somewhat similar expression,"generative principle," is applied quitedifferently. My job was to ask of thework the explicit questions to which itsstructure had already implicitly sup-plied the answers. The kind of thinkingwhich I associate with the pentad andwhich needs further development shouldguide the framing of these questions. In-sofar as the analysis did serve theseends, the work could be considered astheoretically "derived" ("generated")from the formal principles. And in thattechnical sense the text could be said tohave been "prophesied after the event";but not only is such a procedure thesafest kind of prophecy, it also serveswell as a way of demonstrating the fullmuscularity of the text as a symbolicact.But my stress is less upon the termsthemselves than upon what I would callthe "ratios"among the terms. Maybe thequickest way to make that point wouldbe by a quotation from my article on"Dramatism" in The International En-cyclopedia of the Social Sciences:

Insofar as men's actions are to beinterpreted in terms of the circum-stances in which they are acting, theirbehaviorwould fall under the headingof a "scene-act ratio." But insofar astheir acts reveal their differentcharac-ters, their behavior would fall underthe headingof an "agent-actratio."Forinstance, in a time of great crisis, such

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THE PENTADas a shipwreck,the conduct of all per-sons involved in that crisiscould be ex-pected to manifest in some way themotivating influence of the crisis. Yet,within such a "scene-act ratio,"therewould be a range of "agent-actratios,"insofar as one man was "proved" o becowardly, another bold, another re-sourceful,and so on.

A further very important considera-tion here is "circumference." For in-stance, what is the overall scene interms of which we are to discuss the na-ture of human conduct and human rela-tions? The "human condition" has beenconceived against a background of manygods quarreling among themselves, interms of a contract with one god, or ofgodless nature, or of different periods inhistory, etc. Aquinas formulated as cir-cumference of widest scope a God whomoves all creatures, but each accordingto its particular nature. In the article Imentioned on "Dramatism,"I argue thatthe question of the human animal's re-lation to an ultimate circumference mustbe a philosophic issue rather than a sci-entific one; even a scene of limited em-pirical scope resists scientific determi-nation. For exactly how many terms areneeded to specify the motivating natureof a scene? The issue seems to involvethe adoption of an attitude towards anunquantifiable Quantity X (the term "at-titude" here being used in the sense ofWeltanschauung, "attitude towards life").

In my next book, Permanence andChange, I ran into a concern with stylis-tic devices that exemplify the expecta-tion principles in paradoxical reverse.My term for it, "perspective by incon-gruity," is perhaps most radically exem-plified in Nietzsche's brilliant, some-times half-mad devotion to a "transval-uation of all values," though I try toshow that the term also covers manymilder forms of intellectual challenge,for which the overall formula might be:"an insight got by wrenching a termfrom contexts in which it was felt to be-

long and applying it to contexts fromwhich it had been excluded as a matterof course."Then, next, the theme of "attitudes"took over, in a book surveying a spec-trum of personal, poetic, and rhetoricaladjustments and maladjustments to theyes-no swinging of history's pendulumbetween acceptances and rejections.Next, I should state my debt to theanthropologist, Malinowski, who pro-posed "context of situation" as his wordfor "scene." In these abstruse days ofhermeneutics, semiotics, structuralism,

deconstructionism, and transformationalgrammar-though all of them are intheir ways quite noteworthy-it's helpfulto recall Malinowski's prime representa-tive anecdote for the study of symbolicaction: a group of illiterate savagesusing language as a tool in the coopera-tive act of catching fish. Introducingthat into my constant concern with po-etical and rhetorical devices now seenas primitively exemplified in proverbs, Isummed up our ways with words asstrategies in situations, the term "strat-egy" having attitudinal connotations.When thoughts on communicationwere thus reduced to terms of "strate-gies" in "situations,"the pattern becameexpanded to plans for a book "On theImputing of Motives" (asking itselfwhat's going on when anybody says whyanybody does anything). In revision,that project became my Grammar ofMotives. The revised version was suchthat Grammar begins with the pentadthat my first draft had ended up with-and that's probably why the use of thepentad in the Irmscher Handbook dif-fers from its use in Burke's Grammar, sothat in one case the procedure leads toa text; in the other, it starts from a text.Fortunately, limitations of space requireme to spare us the saga of what all wasinvolved in my getting that first draftturned around. But maybe I can nowoffer a fairly clear consideration of thedifferent outcomes.

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COLLEGE COMPOSITIONAND COMMUNICATIONAt one stage in the first draft, whentrying to choose a "representative anec-dote" such as Malinowski's fish catch) asa generative model for the study of lan-guage as symbolic action, I settled onour Constitution. It was an enactment inthe fullest sense of the term. At thesame time, its scope (circumference) asan act was so comprehensive that it setup and defined the over-all motivationalscene, in terms of which countless per-sonal acts of its citizens would be both

performed and judged. In this respect,the citizens (co-agents) are related to itand to the legal authorities who pro-nounce what acts are or are not per-mitted by the Constitution, much as, inthe Biblical dispensation, all humans arevariously related to the judgments ofGod, as determined by prophets orpriests. Similarly, on this basis, our Su-preme Court pronounces what legisla-tive acts are '"Constitutional,"what "un-Constitutional."But there is a notable difference. Bythe sheer dialectics of the case, thescene in which the Constitution was en-acted had to be "un-Constitutional" inthe sense that conditions outside theConstitution provided the "context ofsituation" in which the document wasenacted. The Constitution, being verbal,is in the realm of symbolic action. Thenatural resources (land, minerals, for-ests, bodies of water, etc.) under its ju-risdiction were in the realm of sheernonsymbolic motion. The Constitution isin itself a verbal enactment. But in de-fining a realm of motives for the citizens'acts with regard to the nation's materialresources, it constitutes a socio-politicalscene for those acts. Yet all such re-sources in themselves constitute a non-verbal kind of Constitution-Behind-the-Constitution. And in the course of time,this scene-behind-the-scene has beenundergoing constant demographic, en-vironmental changes, many due to tech-nological innovations, many reflectingaltered "global" relationships.

By the logic of the scene-act ratio, inso-far as situations to which Constitutionalclauses were addressed have changed, tothat extent they became functions of adifferent scene and, to that extent, dif-ferent acts.I cannot here summarize the detailsof my discussion (which, by the way,was done without benefit of two booksideal for my purposes, but publishedlater: An Introduction to Legal Reasoning, by Edward H. Levi, and The Su-preme Court and Social Science, by PaulL. Rosen). My point is simply to indi-cate the different drift of my concernwith the schematic potentialities of the"Dramatistic" nomenclature.Presumably the realm of nonsymbolicmotion was all that prevailed on thisearth before our kind of symbol-usingorganism evolved, and will go on slosh-ing about after we have gone. In themeantime, note that, for better or worse,by evolving our kind of organism, thewordless Universe of nonsymbolic mo-tion is able to comment on itself. But wedo not grow over-arrogant at the thought.For our very ability thus to exercise isby the same token disposed to tell usthat, in all likelihood, throughout theUniversal Infinity, there are other count-less spots where meetings like this are insession. How can I admonish these ses-sions? Perhaps by saying, "Not just thepentad. But the ratios and circumfer-ence.But in closing I should say: Althoughthe logic (or logologic) of the hexedpentad (with its many twists and corre-sponding functions in terms of ratiosand circumference) affords a service-ably over-all structure for the analysis ofboth literary texts in particular and hu-man relations in general, I usually beginwith more direct ways of sizing up atext. Here is one major shortcut:First, whether explicitly or implicitly,

the nomenclature of every text embodies"equations." For instance, "reason" maybe equated with deference to authority

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THE PENTADHE PENTADor distrust of authority. Images oftenfunction here, as with an expression likeChurchill's "iron curtain." Second, thereare "implications." Implicit in the ideaof an act there is the idea of an agent;and for an agent to act there must be ascene. Or there are polar terms, as"order"and "disorder"imply each other.Third, whereas "equations" and "impli-cations" are nontemporally related, thereare "transformations"whereby a narra-tive goes from one to another (as fromorder to disorder, or vice versa). Or po-lar terms can become reversed, as whena former disruptive principle of resis-tance to authority takes over and frownson the principle of resistance.Current technology's various special-ized nomenclatures (of physics, chemis-try, biology, and the like) imply the pos-sibilities of further development. Thus

or distrust of authority. Images oftenfunction here, as with an expression likeChurchill's "iron curtain." Second, thereare "implications." Implicit in the ideaof an act there is the idea of an agent;and for an agent to act there must be ascene. Or there are polar terms, as"order"and "disorder"imply each other.Third, whereas "equations" and "impli-cations" are nontemporally related, thereare "transformations"whereby a narra-tive goes from one to another (as fromorder to disorder, or vice versa). Or po-lar terms can become reversed, as whena former disruptive principle of resis-tance to authority takes over and frownson the principle of resistance.Current technology's various special-ized nomenclatures (of physics, chemis-try, biology, and the like) imply the pos-sibilities of further development. Thus

any effort to track down such implica-tions is as though guided by the techni-cal equivalent of a vision; and everysuch effort, when "implemented," trans-forms nontemporal relationships into de-velopmental processes.We can build countless complicatedvariations on those themes, which areclose replicas of the three formal prin-ciples I began with. There are the mak-ings of conventional form in the setting-up of equations (as per the use ofChurchill's "iron curtain"). There is re-petitive form inasmuch as implicationinherent in one term is explicitly dupli-cated in another. And any unfolding oftransformations is by the same token anexample of progressive form.KENNETH BURKEAndover,NJ

any effort to track down such implica-tions is as though guided by the techni-cal equivalent of a vision; and everysuch effort, when "implemented," trans-forms nontemporal relationships into de-velopmental processes.We can build countless complicatedvariations on those themes, which areclose replicas of the three formal prin-ciples I began with. There are the mak-ings of conventional form in the setting-up of equations (as per the use ofChurchill's "iron curtain"). There is re-petitive form inasmuch as implicationinherent in one term is explicitly dupli-cated in another. And any unfolding oftransformations is by the same token anexample of progressive form.KENNETH BURKEAndover,NJ

'WhileVritinga PoemI sit gazing at thestupid little thingsgnatting against windowslike so many thoughtsnattering against words.Some find the freeing fissure.Others lie dead upon the sill.

'WhileVritinga PoemI sit gazing at thestupid little thingsgnatting against windowslike so many thoughtsnattering against words.Some find the freeing fissure.Others lie dead upon the sill.

JOYCECARROLLRutgers UniversityNew Brunswick, NJJOYCECARROLLRutgers UniversityNew Brunswick, NJ

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