"Ozymandias," Burke and Derrida

I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. - Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone, Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws The only shadow that the Desert knows:— "I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone, "The King of Kings; this mighty City shows "The wonders of my hand."— The City's gone,— Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose The site of this forgotten Babylon. We wonder,—and some Hunter may express Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace, He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess What powerful but unrecorded race Once dwelt in that annihilated place. - Horace Smith, 1818

The above poems are both entitled "Ozymandias." They explore the same theme. They focus on the same subject. Ultimately they are about the exact same thing, however they are two completely different poems. Now, as much as I would love to, I don’t intend to do an analysis of the poems... this is the wrong class for that sort of thing. However, I offer them as a means of thinking about this week’s readings from Kenneth Burke and Jacques Derrida.

Kenneth Burke provides an answer to why both poems can be the same but different with his term terministic screens. Humans are a “symbol-using animal” that “must use terministic screens, since we can’t say anything without the use of terms; whatever terms we use, they necessarily constitute a corresponding kind of screen; and any such screen necessarily directs the attention to one field rather than another” (Burke 48, 50). In other words, humans need to use terms, or sets of symbols, to communicate anything to anyone. These terms/symbols are the smaller parts of a larger screen, or a system of symbols, that give meaning to some abstraction. And these terministic screens are unique to each individual for each situation yet similar enough for a shared conception of reality. 

This is how these similar poems are different. Terministic screens are a selective understanding and either reflects or deflects reality to direct the attention of their recipients. In Shelley’s poem, attention is directed primarily on the dilapidated statue itself, its bold statement, and its location. Smith’s poem directs attention towards a vision of a future London juxtaposed to the same statue. In the end at their most basic level, both speak about the mutability and temporality of human creation, but looking and speaking through different screens.

Burke suggests humans “conceive reality somewhat roundabout, through various media of symbolism. Any such medium will be . . . either a way of ‘dividing’ us from the ‘immediate’ . . . or it can be viewed as a paradoxical way of ‘uniting’ us with things on a ‘higher level of awareness’” (Burke 52). This thought leads into Jacques Derrida’s discussion of written language, the medium of absence. He states writing “must continue to ‘act’ and to be legible even if what is called the author of the writing no longer answers for what is written . . . whether he is provisionally absent, or if he is dead, or if in general he does not support, with his absolutely current and present intention or attention, the plenitude of his meaning” (Derrida 316). It is a means of communicating to those who are absent when the communicator is also absent.

This sense of absence is represented by the poems at multiple levels. Looking only at Shelley’s, written communication first occurs with the poet himself. He is the one who wrote the poem, he is the one addressing an absent reader in his own absence. Second, Shelley’s Ramesses II/Ozymandias through the statue’s inscription. The pharaoh speaks to an anticipated spectator after his death. Finally, the sculptor through the remnants of the statue’s composition. Although not writing per se, this anonymous communicator speaks of the pharaoh’s observed disposition to an absent spectator.

Once these three “writers” communicate their representations, we return to Burke and his terministic screens: how their “readers” will make sense of what they see. Of course, Shelley and Smith are not excused... after all, they portrayed the same subject and theme differently. The creator may be in control of the context of what is created, but it is in the nature of writing and other media of symbolism for others to break from it, “recognize other such possibilities in it by inscribing or grafting it into other chains” (Derrida 317).

I think Burke and Derrida promote ideas that would make Plato’s Socrates turn in his grave. They deal with language and its use with particulars, an application of communication fit for the classic rendition of rhetoric we have looked at in this class so far.