June 30, 2006: Burke's Pentad: How Narrative Communicates

Having posited the assertion that narrative can help us make sense of the complexity of the world, it seems reasonable to ask just how it can do this. What are the structural elements that are examined in the study of narratology? There are a variety of approaches to answering this questions. What I would like to do is examine one approach and show how it relates to a couple of others.

The above diagram illustrates a construct proposed by Kenneth Burke as a framework for the study of motives. As he put it:

What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it?

He called his framework "the five key terms of dramatism;" and it would come to be known as "Burke's pentad." Burke defines his five terms as follows:

In a rounded statement about motives, you must have some word that names the act (names what took place, in thought or deed), and another that names the scene (the background of the act, the situation in which it occurred); also, you must indicate what person or kind of person (agent) performed the act, what means or instruments he used (agency), and the purpose. Men may violently disagree about the purposes behind a given act, or about the character of the person who did it, or how he did it, or in what kind of situation he acted; or they may even insist upon totally different words to name the act itself. But be that as it may, any complete statement about motives will offer some kind of answers to these five questions: what was done (act), when or where it was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency), and why (purpose).

Those familiar with journalism will probably see a "family resemblance" of this framework to the so-called "5W1H" for reporting (who, what, where, when, why, how). 5W1H, however, is actually an abbreviated (by one) version that can be traced by to the scholastics: quis (who), quid (what), ubi (where), quibus auxiliis (by what means), cur (why), quo modo (how), quando (when). The item that the journalism framework dropped was quibus auxiliis, perhaps because it was felt to be an elaboration of "how." This seems to be how Burke feels in comparing the scholastic formula to his pentad:

The "who" is obviously covered by agent. Scene covers the "where" and the "when." the "why" is purpose. "How" and "by what means" fall under agency. All that is left to take care of is act in our terms and "what" in the scholastic formula.

Burke uses this as a justification for examining act in terms of form.

Incidentally, you can find this formula in Aquinas' Summa Theologica, where he attributes it to Cicero (or Tully). I have burned a fair amount of energy in both the physical and digital worlds trying to find this formula in Cicero, and I have still not succeeded. It may very well be of Roman origin, but I have yet to find the source! On the other hand Burke also explores the connection between his five terms and Aristotle's six elements of tragedy (discussed in "Poetics"). Here are Aristotle's six elements with explanatory quotes from Bywater's translation the source text:

1. Plot (muthos): “the combination of the incidents, or things done in the story”
2. Character (êthé): “what makes us ascribe certain qualities to the agents”
3. Thought (dianoia)

   “all they say when proving a particular point or, it may be, enunciating a general truth”
   “we may assume what is said of it in our Art of Rhetoric, as it belongs more properly to that department of inquiry”

4. Diction (lexis)

   the externalization of the internal order of the fable
   “What indeed would be the good of the speaker if things appeared in the required light even apart from anything he says?”
   the word is a component of elocution, which, in turn, is an element of tragedy

5. Melody (mélopoia)
6. Spectacle (opsis)

Aristotle does not say very much about either melody or spectacle. He regards these as having more to do with how the tragedy is performed, as opposed to its actual content.

Here is how Burke brings his pentad elements into alignment with Aristotle:

Plot would correspond to act. Character would correspond to agent (it is "what makes us ascribe certain moral qualities to the agents" [Burke uses a different translation]). Whereas the action is the purpose of the play from the standpoint of the audience, within the play we should probably assign purpose to the third element, Thought (which is shown in all that the characters say "when proving a particular point or … enunciating a general truth"). Since Aristotle himself calls Melody and Diction "the means of imitation," they would obviously fall under agency. The sixth element, Spectacle, he assigns to "manner" (presumably the quo modo of the Latin hexameter quoted above), a kind of modality that we should want to class under scene, although Aristotle's view of it as accessory would seem to make it rather a kind of scenic agency. It was not until modern naturalism in drama that scene gained its full independence, with the "property man" giving the environmental placement that was regularly suggested in Elizabethan drama, for instance, by the use of verbal imagery. Perhaps "Spectacle" had something of the significance we associate with "sheer pageantry." Aristotle says that the Spectacle, though an attraction, "is the least artistic of all the parts, and has least to do with the art of poetry." We can be affected by a tragedy without a public performance at all; and "the getting -up of the Spectacle is more a matter for the costumer than the poet."

So here are three (four, if you count the journalist's formula) different views of how a story communicates; and they all align rather well with each other. Of course making a good story is more than just making sure that all the ingredients are there. The ways in which the storyteller and combine those ingredients and engage them with each other are what makes storytelling an art, rather than a traversal of propositional statements. That art counts for a lot, as Peter Brooks has demonstrated in the chapters of his Reading for the Plot; but that, as they say, is another story!