RHETORIC OF RHETORIC
737
meaning of the story of Abraham and Isaac. He rejects the interpreta–
tion of psychoanalysis as not ultimate enough. Mr. Burke throws up his
hands at the brutality of psychoanalysis, which, he believes, unwittingly
sanctions parricide and infanticide. Psychoanalysis would impute to
Abraham a covert desire to kill Isaac. But such an interpretation is
unacceptable; it leaves us in the slaughterous "Barnyard" of the bourgeois
world, which Mr. Burke is accustomed to identify as the "parliamentary
wrangle" and whose motive is competitive murder. Father and son being
"consubstantial," says Burke, we see that Abraham's motive was not to
kill Isaac but to perform the "dramatistic" ritual of vicariously killing
himself.
"For the so-called 'desire to kill' a certain person is much more
properly analysable as a desire to
transform the principle
which that
person
represents."
Every aggressive act, in short, may best be seen as
beginning in ideology or in man's incorrigible delight in creating symbols
and becomes reflexive, in the sense that as an aggressor you are really
only using your victim as a device for purging or transforming a prin–
ciple or "trait" within yourself. Thus, on Mr. Burke's own implicit
assumption that the extensions of linguistic method
are
reality, are
human events translated into a ghostly dumb show.
From any conceivable naturalistic point of view one would begin
with the fact of intended murder and its motives, and one would regard
the mythical and ritual components of the Abraham-Isaac story in
ascending order as "rationalization," as tragic artistic treatments of the
human fact of infanticide, and finally as attempts to grasp philosophically
the meaning of the act. But with Mr. Burke the play's the thing. Nobody
has ever taken so literally the idea that all the world's a stage. Behind
every human event there lurks man's natural desire to perform symbolic
acts. The most delightful of symbolic acts is sacrifice-that is, self–
sacrifice. And nothing is so striking in this book as the assumption that
man is a self-immolating creature and that the great dramatic act of
the individual is self-immolation in the name of a transcendent hierarchy.
We arrive at an "ultimate" rhetoric by discerning, first, that a
"positive" order of language is too reductive and can deal only with
tangible things, and, second, that a "dialectic" order, while more general,
winds up in the "parliamentary wrangle" and that instead of a confused
clash of conflicting principles, we need principles of principles. To those
who still refer to "parliaments" with emotions other than contempt or
pity, this might mean that we need to clarify our thinking and seek for
common grounds, or at worst, act from mere superior power while at the
same time trying not to annihilate the whole possibility of "parliaments."
But to Mr. Burke, it means taking a "leap" to the "universal ground of
