FILLER: Burke's Mystery

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

original postings: Tue, 13 May 1997 11:17:50 EDT

just for a little zing in the thinking...

(p. 115) "...we might begin with the proposition that mystery arises at that point where different kinds of beings are in communication. In mystery there must be strangeness; but the estranged must also be thought of as in some way capable of communion. There is mystery in an animal's eyes at those moments when a man feels that he and the animal understand each other in some inexpressible fashion."

"While the mystery of sex relations, which leads to the rhetoric of courtship, is grounded in the communication of beings biologically estranged, it is greatly accentuated by the purely social differentiation which, under the division of human labor, can come to distinguish the 'typically masculine' from the "typically feminine."

"Similarly, the conditions for 'mystery' are set by any pronounced social distinctions..."

"And all such 'mystery' calls for a corresponding rhetoric, in form quite analogous to sexual expression: for the relations between classes are like the ways of courtship, rape, seduction, jilting, prostitution, promiscuity, with variants of sadistic torture or masochistic invitation to mistreatment. Similarly, there are strong homosexual analogies in 'courtly' relations between persons of the same sex but of contrasting social status...."

From A Rhetoric of Motives
Kenneth Burke
University of California Press 1969