[My paper from the Conference on College Composition and Communication panel I put together, Composed in the Wake of Disaster: (Re)Writing the Realities of New Orleans]
Questioning the Histories of Katrina: Narrative Analysis in the Writing Classroom
In 1978, Kenneth Burke and Fredric Jameson had a brief but important exchange in the journal Critical Inquiry. Jameson first published his rereading, which he also calls a rewriting, of Burke’s dramatistic analytic as “The Symbolic Inference: or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis.” Jameson more or less applauds Burke for providing a tool we can use to conduct ideological analysis of texts, whether they be literary or other cultural artifacts or historical discourses purporting to report what “really” happened. What Jameson in this article calls ideological analysis he gives a slightly different name by the time he publishes The Political Unconscious: that is, narrative analysis. (And as an interesting side note, Jameson’s bio in this issue of Critical Inquiry describes his next project as The Political Unconscious, with the subtitle Studies in the Ideology of Form. But of course, when the work actually appears, the subtitle turns out to be Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.) In this paper, I want to offer a brief summary of the Jameson-Burke exchange by way of fleshing out a model for narrative analysis and then apply that model to two of the best and most popular histories of Hurricane Katrina.
Burke’s dramatism, of course, provides a way of analyzing the question he puts in the first line of A Grammar of Motives, “What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it?” (xv) by identifying how they name the five categories of Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, and Purpose. Of this analytic, Jameson says one modification is needed. The pentad has an “Achilles heel” (515), which is its “shrunken function left over for Purpose,” allowing this category sometimes to be restricted to the “inner mechanisms of the symbolic act.” But the term itself involves “fundamental ambiguities” insofar as it might also—and more usefully—indicate a symbolic act’s “meaning,” as over against the meanings of other possible acts that could have been taken at the same historical moment (516). Jameson takes as a tacit admission of the weakness (or restricted use) of the term Purpose the fact that Burke not only combines his treatment of Purpose with his discussion of the Agency category in his Grammar of Motives, but Purpose also—and this is the disappointing weakness of dramatistic analysis—is “rather summarily dispatched as a kind of providential survival, a mystical or metaphysical ‘telos’” (515).
We can think of the difference between two possible uses of the term Purpose as that between an Act described in a text and the Purpose of the symbolic act of describing as such. For instance, if I want to tell you what happened during Hurricane Katrina, I will offer you a narrative of the event (or Act) that features one or more of the pentadic categories. Unless I think, as a very few, rather dismissible people suggested, that Katrina contained God’s message to New Orleanians, I’m unlikely to feature the category of Purpose. Nevertheless, my symbolic act itself will have its own purpose, and (to use a favorite word of Burke) the strategies I use to reread the contextual act in my textual act will reveal my Purpose, even when I make no attempt to foreground it.
In any case, Burke did respond to Jameson in the fall of 1978 with an article called “Methodological Repression and/or Strategies of Containment,” and the important thing about this response is what it doesn’t do. That is, devoted almost entirely to an almost incidental comment by Jameson that Burke appears reluctant to “pronounce the word ideology” and demonstrating the various times he has indeed pronounced (or written) the word, Burke does not address Jameson’s critique of the term Purpose. His various uses of the term ideology (seven different definitions in the Rhetoric of Motives itself) suggest that Jameson himself doesn’t think in nuanced enough ways about how the term ideology gets put to use. Jameson then offers a Critical Response in the same issue of Critical Inquiry, which takes up the question of what he means by ideology and its utility for explaining the relation between a text and its context or subtext—a concern perhaps too theoretical for our consideration today. But the important point, it seems to me, is that despite a theoretical quibble about why a modification of Burke’s pentadic analysis is important, Jameson considers the argument conceded in his favor.
The modification, then, looks like this: First, we reread the symbolic act just as Burke has indicated, identifying which terms the author uses in each category of the pentad and seeing which categories or ratios are featured and which suppressed. Second, we notice in those terministic choices, particularly in how the author describes the Act, what the author identifies as a problem or apparent contradiction. We will observe that this provides us with a Purpose internal to this Act’s imagining of the problem, but not a solution applicable to what Jameson calls the “vaster social or historical or political horizon.” Nevertheless, we should note that the author sees her text as offering a solution, in other words, that the Purpose of her symbolic Act is to resolve the dilemma.
So for instance, Douglas Brinkley’s The Great Deluge, which remains one of the most popular books about Katrina (in fact, if you search Amazon for “Hurricane Katrina,” it is the first result returned), tells the story of the destruction of lives, property, and a city. Of course much of the last of these was done by the storm—or at least the subsequent flooding, much of which could have been prevented by adequate levee and ecological maintenance. And no doubt the same attention could have prevented the loss of much property and many lives. But of more interest to Brinkley is what happened after the storm, particularly the crime committed in the city. Brinkley focuses considerable attention on two categories of violence. The first was sniping that occurred as doctors and administrators tried to evacuate hospitals. Interviewing several of the medical professionals at Charity Hospital, Brinkley manages to legitimate some of the claims that sniping occurred. Similarly, while some of Brinkley’s interviewees offer compelling arguments that reports of rape were grossly exaggerated, especially in the Convention Center, Charmaine Neville, raped as she slept in the emergency home of Drew Elementary School, offers an individual instance that substantiates broader claims. What I would argue drives these investigations for Brinkley is the internal conflict over where to place his sympathy. Under the narrative that people left behind were victims of a negligent government, it’s easy to sympathize with them. But if they begin to be aggressors, do they cease to deserve our compassion—and instead deserve punishment, possibly even in the form of the very negligence the Bush administration offered? Finding some reports of such violence to be true, Brinkley has to find a way to distinguish those left behind who deserve sympathy from those who don’t. With rapists and snipers, the question of blame or sympathy seems pretty clear. But looters muddy the water considerably. Which means: Brinkley has to segregate the worthy from the unworthy. And nothing does this work of segregation better than Brinkley’s distinction between looting for sustenance and looting for luxury. Bernard McLaughlin, a Lt. Col. in the Louisiana National Guard, helps Brinkley make this point: “In my estimation, most looting was not for food and drink, which were readily available for free, it was simply opportunistic” (566). Another interviewee describes “two classes of looters.” In other words, we could forgive people for taking necessities—we wouldn’t even call this looting—but not for appropriating luxury goods.
Brinkley’s move here permits us to see two parties as the responsible agents for this disaster. The first of these is obviously a negligent government, at the local, state, and federal levels. Mayor Nagin delayed the mandatory evacuation order and was absent as a leader during the crisis. Governor Blanco may have had good intentions, but she was mostly ineffectual in gathering resources for helping people out of the city or for restoring order to the city. And the negligence of the Bush administration is well documented, from the president’s absenteeism to FEMA’s clownery. Added to this negligent agent, however, are the perpetrators of crimes who facilitated the break down of law and order. Identifying these agents goes a long way toward explaining Brinkley’s frustration with Eddie Compass and the New Orleans Police Department with its several hundred deserters and general lack of availability to citizens in need. It also explains his disgust with the slow response of federal officials who hesitated to send in law enforcement troops and delayed evacuation efforts by not providing the transportation requested—and which FEMA promised. By contrast to the incompetence shown by those charged with the responsibilities of protecting citizens, Brinkley shows, some citizens themselves stepped up to help their neighbors. One group who made several rescues called themselves the Cajun Navy and were nothing more than a few civilians from Lafayette who brought their own boats and other equipment and helped several hundred people trapped in their homes by rising water. But perhaps the best example is one of Brinkley’s favorite rescuers, Michael Knight. A construction laborer with no credit card and, like many working-class New Orleanians, three days away from a paycheck, Knight was in no position to leave town on August 28. Since he did own a boat, when his neighborhood flooded, he began rescuing folks, ultimately around 250 people in the Seventh Ward.
However, Knight serves a dual purpose for Brinkley; in fact, his ethos centers around his refusal to help those who stole property. Brinkley writes, “Whenever looters would shout at him for a ride, he shook his head no and said, ‘Fire’s burning, man. Pull your own weight’” (305). Not only then does Knight serve as a model for the kind of help that a non-negligent government could have provided, he also demonstrates what even a poor resident of New Orleans can be expected to do in terms of respecting the private property of those who have left. And here we get to the critique that Jameson’s modification of Burke makes possible. If in Brinkley’s reading of the Katrina disaster—that is, the destruction of life, property, and a habitat—involves a kind of purposelessness, or senseless destruction, insofar as a government less indifferent and less negligent could have maintained law and order or citizens more respectful of others’ property would not have exacerbated a chaotic and miserable situation, the purpose external to the “inner mechanisms of the symbolic act”—the purpose, that is, of Brinkley’s symbolic act is to restore our faith in a precisely neoliberal order. In other words, where commerce flows freely and drives the social well-being of a city, the solution to the kind of problem presented by Katrina is a government who can respond to any threats to the ownership and movement of goods, as well as lives.
Michael Eric Dyson’s Come Hell or High Water offers a different problem. Building on Michael Ignatieff’s work, he argues, “the poor blacks struggling to survive Katrina’s backlash saw more clearly than most others ‘what the contract of American citizenship entails.’ For Ignatieff, a contract of citizenship ‘defines the duties of care that public officials owe to the people of a democratic society [whose] basic term is protection: helping citizens to protect their families and possessions from forces beyond their control’” (13). Of course, the economic conditions of those left behind are crucial here. Most lived in a state of what Dyson calls “concentrated poverty.” That is, “they lived in poor neighborhoods, attended poor schools, and had poorly paying jobs that reflected and reinforced a distressing pattern of rigid segregation” (6). Concentrated poverty describes conditions where densely populated, isolated, and segregated are “cut…off from decent housing and educational and economic opportunities” (7). The consequences, not unexpectedly, reproduce the very conditions that create the poverty in the first place. The numbers are staggering: “Nearly 50,000 poor folk in New Orleans lived in areas where the poverty rate approached 40 percent” (6); New Orleans, which in 2000 was over 67 percent black, “has a 40 percent illiteracy rate; over 50 percent of black ninth graders won’t graduate in four years” (8). Over 36 percent of the Lower Ninth’s 20,000 black residents lived beneath the poverty line.
This all may appall us, but of course it didn’t alarm those people, who had been living with such conditions for years. Nevertheless, they did experience—and express—a good deal of surprise during Katrina, and Dyson says, “It is their surprise, not ours, that should most concern and inform us. Perhaps it is their anger, too, that is inspiring, since the outrage of the black survivors proved their tenacious loyalty to a country that hasn’t often earned it” (13). Their outrage and loyalty show us that as citizens, they expected loyalty and protection from their government. They may not have expected much, but they did expect the barest protection. Again, Dyson quotes Ignatieff to say that we miss the point if we think “the catastrophe laid bare the deep inequalities of American society. These inequalities may have been news to some, but they were not news to the displaced people in the convention center and elsewhere. What was bitter news to them was that their claims of citizenship mattered so little to the institutions charged with their protection” (14).
Immediately, then, it is the Bush administration who failed these citizens. What motive could the administration have had? Dyson suggests that black residents in a city and state that had not voted for Bush in 2004 contributed little to his political capital, so that it’s no surprise that Florida got a quick response in 2004 (an election year, of course) when Hurricanes Charley and Frances hit. And it’s also no surprise that Mississippi and its republican governor Haley Barbour got more presidential attention after Katrina than did New Orleans. But to really get at this question of why Bush and his administration failed its citizens, we can’t ignore Kanye West’s brave claim that George Bush doesn’t care about black people. We can’t ignore it because it gets to the heart of what matters for Dyson—and hence to how we see his symbolic act as an intervention in the problem of actually doing nothing when it comes to helping the poor black in the nation. Dyson says we have to analyze West’s claims in a number of ways, including who he meant by George Bush—the person or the president—what he assumed about responsibilities—as a person, yes, but also as an administrator of a particular institution—and perhaps most importantly what Kanye meant by care, which Dyson divides into personal care, moral care, and political care. What the analysis really boils down to is this: “In the political realm, care is measured, in part, by the satisfaction of legitimate claims with effective action that fulfills the duties and obligation of one’s office” (29). He says elsewhere it is not “intent” but “consequences” that matter, and both of these statements reveal a committment to Burke’s categories of the Act and Agency (or doing) over what an Agent intends or what Purpose he has. Nor is Dyson’s featuring of Act and Agency surprising when we recall that Burke analyzes the philosophy of pragmatism under the category of Agency.
But what is the purpose—for Dyson—in that Jamesonian sense? That is, what does it mean to describe the Act as—most narrowly—not caring about black people, and—most broadly—as a break of the social contract? It means you haven’t defined the social contract very broadly. And it means that the best we can expect out of a movement for social justice, even a radical movement, is what the liberal state already provides—a social safety net; we’d just be hoping they actually provide it. Even when Dyson suggests that Bush’s lack of care for poor blacks in New Orleans (and elsewhere) extends back to tax cuts for the rich and “slashing $35 billion from Medicaid, food stamps, and other social programs that help the poor” (7), Dyson is imagining a better functioning social welfare program—a better liberal state. But is this enough? Does it not merely reinforce—by re-inscribing—the very social system that gave us the Katrina disaster in the first place?
In any case, I hope to have shown what a sort of Burkean-Jamesonian narrative analysis can produce. At one level, I think of it as more useful than some of the applications of Burke’s dramatism we see, where the end of such analysis is imagined to be filling in the categories of the pentad. Unfortunately, if the Burke-Jameson exchange produced an amalgamation which was in turn a useful tool for analysis, very little scholarship has followed from it. Particularly within composition studies, almost no one who follows or uses Burke has built on Jameson’s modification. Two of the most effective textbooks for teaching Burkean rhetorical analysis, William Covino’s Elements of Persuasion and David Blakesly’s Elements of Dramatism, don’t mention Jameson, nor do they accept what seems to me a very wise suggestion by Jameson that we take care not to employ too restricted a conception of Purpose when we think of Burke’s motivational pentad. Doing so, to my mind, would enable us to teach a powerful method for rhetorically analyzing texts, one that would involve students in a critical and informative process of invention and one that would empower students to connect their own production of rhetoric to what Jameson calls the “vaster social or historical or political horizon” which is the precise place where the acts of symbolic action happen.
Works Cited
Douglas Brinkley. The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. New York: William Morrow, 2006.
Burke, Kenneth. "Methodological Repression and/or Strategies of Containment." Critical Inquiry. 5 (1978): 401-16.
Dyson, Michael Eric. Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color and Disaster. New York: Basic Books, 2006.
Jameson, Fredric R. "The Symbolic Inference; Or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis." Critical Inquiry. 4 (1978): 507-23.
