The Rites of Identity: The Religious Naturalism and Cultural Criticism of Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison

Chapter 1
IDENTITY AND THE RITES OF SYMBOLIC ACTION
The skin is a line of demarcation, a periphery, the fence, the form, the shape, the first clue to identity in a society (for instance, color in a racist society), and, in purely physical terms, the formal precondition for being human. It is a thin veil of matter separating the outside from the inside.
--Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse

Closed societies are now the flimsiest of illusions, for all the outsiders are demanding in.
--Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory

Identification is compensatory to division. If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity. If men were wholly and truly of one substance, absolute communication would be of man's very essence. It would not be an ideal, as it now is, partly embodied in material conditions and partly frustrated by these same conditions.
--Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives
TOO OFTEN, discussions that deal with personal identity issues, whether about race, gender, religion, or nation, descend quickly into an "us" and "them" opposition that ceases to do productive work and poisons the hopes of any participant for a satisfying resolution of conflict. Probably all of us have experienced the relief that comes from being able to get away temporarily from the conflicts we have with differing others. Playing poker with the boys on Saturday night can alleviate the ongoing domestic conflicts of married life. An Afrocentric school can educate young African Americans in a space free from the constant encroachments on self-esteem made in white supremacist environments. Churches, synagogues, and voluntary associations make space for us to have conversations and participate in activities premised upon views that we do not all share. Gentlemen's clubs provide some with a comfortable retreat. Women sometimes find all-female classrooms to be places where conversations can finally get off the ground floor without being derailed at the level of definitions of terms. Although temporary separations like these are necessary to provide respite and sanity checks for the fatigued, permanent separations, even though they may be energized by a collective spirit, lead to cultural fragmentation. On the other hand, too often the only voices calling for an end to conflict have naive expectations or envision the assimilation of one party to another one without substantial change. Identities serve both as the insignia that clothe us in uniform to others' eyes, either as friend or enemy, and as the fortresses that protect our most crucial first premises about our hopes, fears, and needs.
This book highlights the centrality of identity in Kenneth Burke's and Ralph Ellison's cultural criticism. It emphasizes the religious language in which both men cast their descriptions of the ways societies sustain, fail to sustain, and transform human identities. I aim to show the tremendous influence of Burke's ideas on Ellison and to show that influence both in Ellison's embrace of and in his criticism of those ideas. Although there are similarities in the language of the two men there are also important differences in their social perspectives.
On one level, I want to think about rhetoric. The relevant religious concern I address here is "not about God, but rather, about the way we use our words about God on each other," to quote Burke.1 Burke finds rhetoric and identity to be inseparable subjects; in a section of his work titled "Identity and Consubstantiality," he shows how the study of rhetoric is the study of the
ways in which individuals are at odds with one another, or become identified with groups more or less at odds with one another.
Why "at odds," you may ask, when the titular term is "identification"? Because to begin with "identification" is, by the same token though roundabout, to confront the implications of division.2
Ralph Ellison also writes, almost exclusively, about identity. His work centers on "the great mystery of identity in this country, really on the level of a religious mystery."3 This concern runs through his novel Invisible Man and through his essays on the novel and other American cultural forms. The mystery is this: "the puzzle of the one-and-the-many; the mystery of how each of us, despite his origin in diverse regions, with our diverse racial, cultural, religious backgrounds, speaking his own diverse idiom of the American in his own accent, is, nevertheless, American."4
Kenneth Burke's identity concerns focus on symbolic action, that is, on the rites that change human identity and maintain the connections holding together the discontinuities of human existence. "Our basic principle," he states, "is our contention that all symbolism can be treated as the ritualistic naming and changing of identity."5