The three decades from 1930 to 1960 were a time, in the wry words of Robert Lowell, “when criticism looked like winning.” Today, of course, criticism looks like losing everywhere but in the academy, where it no longer looks like criticism. But the Modernist revolution, an explosion of complex and difficult literature, called forth interpreters of remarkable intelligence and power. Critics like John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, William Empson, and Yvor Winters accomplished the most difficult of feats – they made their literary criticism a part of literature itself.

Kenneth Burke (1897-1993) was one of the most potent and eccentric figures of that critical golden age. A Midwestern autodidact who dropped out of college in 1918 to lead the writer’s life in Greenwich Village, Burke was a guru to several generations of American poets and novelists. He used his wide and deep reading to create a whole new critical language, centered around the idea of “literature as symbolic action” (the title of one of his many books). In this approach, works of literature are considered as mechanisms for producing a particular response in the reader – that is to say, as rhetoric in the classical sense.

For Burke, rhetoric was no sin but a traditional literary virtue that was being lost in the modern stampede toward realism and authenticity. In his best essays, Burke closely examined literary texts – “Julius Caesar” in “Antony on Behalf of the Play,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in “Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats” – to show how every element of their composition worked together to evoke a sequence of responses in the reader. Over the course of his long career, he broadened his focus from literature to language in general, developing something like a homegrown version of structuralism, trying to explain how and why language affects feeling and behavior.

Burke may have been too deeply enamored of his own invented critical terminology; like all critics who set up as aesthetic theorists, he falsified his genuine insights by forcing them into a system. Still, he brought together a poet’s taste and a professor’s learning, a Bohemian sense of adventure and a Scholastic sense of rigor. Stanley Edgar Hyman’s “The Armed Vision” – a survey of 20th-century critics that, in its fan’s passion for criticism, is itself a relic of a vanished age – describes “the tremendous shock of novelty in Burke’s studies … anyone reading him for the first time has the sudden sense of a newly discovered country in his own backyard.”

If Kenneth Burke’s critical books – “Counter-Statement” (1929), “Permanence and Change” (1935), “A Grammar of Motives” (1945) – are not widely read today, his fiction is just about completely unknown. But like other major critics – Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Yvor Winters – Burke also experimented with original creative writing. As a young man, he contributed stories to legendary little magazines like the Dial and Hound and Horn. His fiction appeared in two volumes, both published before he became eminent as a critic: “The White Oxen,” a book of stories, in 1924, and “Towards a Better Life,” an experimental novel, in 1932.

That work is now back in print, for the first time since the 1960s, in “Here and Elsewhere: The Collected Fiction of Kenneth Burke” (Black Sparrow/David R. Godine, 416 pages, $22). It comes breathing the very atmosphere of the 1920s, heady with the Jazz Age’s newfound liberties, sexual and literary. To get the full impact of these stories and sketches, one has to imagine reading them in a cheaply printed, hard-to-find little magazine with a confrontational title like Secession or Broom. In those avant-garde precincts, literature was being pushed beyond its Edwardian comfort zone, stripped of plot and character, social niceties, and happy endings. Burke’s fiction is full of the decade’s fashionable pessimism and fragmentation, soaked in the influence of T.S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley. But it also harnesses the period’s experimental exuberance, its sense that something genuinely new was possible in literature.

In his earliest stories, Burke turned his satirical guns on some pretty soft targets. “Mrs. Maecenas” draws a grotesque portrait of a small-town patroness of the arts and her aesthete protege, mocking their pseudo-intellectual conversations: “The entelechy, I always felt, was one of Aristotle’s most valuable conceptions,” and so forth. But the real energy of the story comes from Burke’s excavation of the sexual currents that drive the relationship. Beneath all pretensions to culture, Burke suggests, lies naked sexual instinct, a Freudian sublimation that makes art a vulgar farce. “The Muse is a woman,” Mrs. Maecenas declaims seductively, “and the formula is that the worse you treat a woman the more she loves you.”

Burke’s revolted fascination with sex – the stigmata of an outraged Puritan – provides most of the interest in the early stories: an interview between a married man and his former mistress in “The Death of Tragedy”; a man cuckolded by his best friend in “David Wassermann”; a virginal young man’s visit to a prostitute in “The White Oxen.” Often, Burke’s prose itself seems infected by neurosis, teeming with skin-crawling metaphors (“The various arteries of the city having been loosened by the phlebotomy of five o’clock, the streets dripped profusely”). There is something very much of the period about this willed ugliness, and today it has some of the same antiquarian charm as the stylish decadence of the 1890s.

Starting around 1923, however, Burke’s ambitions shifted from sexual to stylistic perversity. The turning point, he recorded, came when he made a $10 bet with his old friend Malcolm Cowley, a fellow Village eminence, that he “could turn up with something formally different from the average.” Burke moved away from satire and started to write surrealist sketches that read like extended prose poems. “In Quest of Olympus,” for instance, begins with a man crawling up out of a deep pit; introduces another character, Treep, who dies and becomes a god named Arjk; moves on to the combat of Arjk and the Blizzard God; then shifts back to the real world, where a man named Hobbes schemes against his friend Harowitz; and finally offers a comic vision of Christ’s return to New York.

The experiments Burke made in his short fiction bore fruit in his peculiar novel, “Towards a Better Life.” The title, of course, is ironic, for the narrator of the novel is no less misanthropic and sex-obsessed than the heroes of Burke’s stories. John Neal, as we eventually discover he is called, narrates the hardly credible story of his relations with two women, the erotic Florence and the sensitive Genevieve. The real point of the book is not the narrative, which is often difficult to follow, but Burke’s experiment with a baroque, florid voice. In the introduction to the novel, he explains that he was less interested in telling a story than in rhetorical excess – “lamentation, rejoicing, beseechment, admonition, sayings, and invective.” John Neal’s story is told through his letters to a friend and rival, letters whose style is antiquated and orotund to the point of absurdity: “By what demonological event was I torn, transformed, plunged into stridency,” he wrote, “with my mind henceforth an intestine wrangle not even stilled by the aggressions of external foes?”

As even that small sample shows, “Towards a Better Life” is written wholly against the grain of fiction, as unnatural in style as it is attenuated in plot. If the book still retains some life, it is because the dilemma of the central character, pained and mystified by love and sex, is so close to its creator’s heart. Burke always maintained that his fiction helped him to become a better critic, and it is possible to see how the rhetorical exploits of “Towards a Better Life” would have appealed to the great analyst of tropes. For readers today, it may serve a different purpose. “Here and Elsewhere” valuably demonstrates that, while most literary experiments are unsuccessful, that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth making.

akirsch@nysun.com