Kenneth Burke's Dramatistic mode of analysis will always face stiff resistance--even from those whom it might benefit--because, in the shadows of this way of thinking, lurks a (further) Shakespearean apprehension:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. Macbeth 5:5.
What the French playwright and humanist Albert Camus termed "lucidity," i.e., the ability to grasp, without flinching, the human condition as theater and, therefore, in all likelihood, as a "tale told by an idiot," is simply too much for most people to bear.
Burke was able to parry the breaking of this absurd dawn throughout his long life by means of intense intellectual work punctuated by equally intense bouts of binge drinking.
Tolstoy's well-known aversion to Shakespeare was a complicated affair, but one suspects that he sensed how full acceptance of the Bard into his consciousness would court the temptation to suicide--already fierce within him.
In the final analysis, however, Tolstoy's "solution" to the "problem" of finding meaning in meaninglessness was to harness the vocabulary of theism in a manner not unlike Camus's vocabulary of nature. There is a sobriety about the resolutions of both men that reflects a Dramatistic apprehension of the human predicament.
Ethically, speaking, both men reached the conclusion that, if this life is but a series of acts and scenes, let us learn to play our parts (conduct ourselves) with grace, decorum, courage and, above all, candor.
The "dark side" of Dramatism ensues when one is blinded by the light.
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