Burke's Encounter with Ransom: Rhetoric and Epistemology in "Four Master Tropes"

ABSTRACT.Between August of 1939 and February of 1942 Kenneth Burke maintained a vigorous correspondence with John Crowe Ransom, the editor of the Kenyon Review. The conversation between the two men delved repeatedly into the intersections of rhetoric and epistemology, and took as its point of departure an influential essay written by Burke and published by Ransom: "Four Master Tropes." In this article, I contextualize "Four Master Tropes" against the author-editor conversation in order to clarify the Burkean relationship between rhetoric and knowledge. I argue that Burke understands rhetoric as a core epistemological practice operative in every discovery of "truth."

In 1941 Kenneth Burke submitted an essay to John Crowc Ransom, editor of the Kenyon Review, one designed to serve as an "extension" of the thoughts he had published about metaphor in Permanence and Change (Burke to Ransom, Mareh 24, 1941).1 Within five days the essay was aeeeptcd for publication, and five months later Ransom wrote Burke with the news that his "fine essay" had gone to the printer "unabridged" (Ransom to Burke, August 8, 1941). That essay, "Four Master Tropes," explored the epistemie functions of four tropes-metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony2-and was the subject of immediate critical attention. The re-publication of the essay in the appendix to A Grammar of Motrues in 1945 popularized the essay and thereby insured that critical interest would continue.

It has. Herbert Simons has spoken for many by stating that "Four Master Tropes" is a "highly provocative essay" that demands the attention of rhetoricians. He describes the essay as an "eye-opener" capable of reanimating the inherited rhetorical tradition of the Greeks and Romans (6-7). As if following Simon's suggestion, scholars have repeatedly invoked Burkc's "Four Master Tropes" to explain Burkcan thought and/or to cast new light on issues of enduring rhetorical concern. Yet each invocation understands the essay differently. Some scholars, Robert Wess indicates, have assumed that the essay explains previous Burkcan thought while others read it as a precursor to a later Burke ("Pentadic" 155). Even scholars who agree on the former, however, still cannot reach consensus. Stephen Bygravc, for example, believes the essay underscores the Grammar (93) while Lynn Worsham argues that the essay subverts the Grammar (74). The diverse and continued invocations of the essay testify to its significance; "Four Master Tropes" is, in Worsham's words, "essential to Burke's system" (76).3

The diversity of invocations not only suggests the centrality of the essay, it also points to hermcneutic uncertainties. That one essay receives such diverse-and at times antithetical-treatments suggests that Simon's observation that "Four Master Tropes" "may be read in a variety of ways" is gross understatement (6). Moreover, that one essay might be used to support such purposes as social constructionism (Schiappa), argumentation (Fritch and Leeper), and rhetorical identification (Stuckcy and Antezak) suggests that the essay is not only essential for understanding the Burkean system, it is also has potential to clarify Burke's vast contribution to rhetorical studies.

The variety of invocations should not, however, obscure the fact that most readings-especially recent ones-have drawn on the essay to elucidate a Burkean epistemology. Wess has argued that "Four Master Tropes" offers the "best vantage point" from which to observe Burke's epistemological development (Rhetoric 117), and Schiappa uses the essay to enter the "unresolved debate over rhetoric's epistemic status" by demonstrating that "Burke's four miister tropes are . . . inescapable to the process of limiting sense of 'reality'" (401-402). All this should not be surprising, for Burke himself begins the essay by announcing that the tropes will be considered, not in their figurative usage, but in "their role in the discovery and description of 'the truth'" (Grammar 503).4

I approach "Four Master Tropes" from the perspective offered by the exchange of letters between Kenneth Burke and his original editor, John Crowc Ransom. In a vigorous correspondence between August of 1939 and February of 1942 the two men delved repeatedly into the intersections of epistemology, tropes in general, and "Four Master Tropes" in particular. Throughout the exchange of letters, Ransom distinguished between two incommensurable epistemologics: "scientific knowledge" and "poetic knowledge." Burke, for his part, refused to dichotomize knowing; he warned Ransom that the attempt to do so results only in a "big epistemological problem" (Burke to Ransom, December 3, 1941). When "Four Master Tropes" is contcxtualizcd against the author-editor conversation, Burke's solution to the problem emerges: he understands rhetoric as a core epistemological practice capable of subsuming Ransom's twin epistemologies. A Burkean epistemology, then, is a rhetorical epistemology-in other words, the "discovery . . . of the 'truth'" (Burke's term, which will be denned below) is possible only by way of rhetorical inducement. In short, rhetoric is an essential condition of knowledge.