57
BOOKS
THE TECHNIQUE OF MYSTIFICATION
ATTITUDES TOWARD HISTORY.
By Kenneth Burke. The New
Republic Series. $2.00.
The greatest difficulty that confronts the reader of Burke is finding
out what he means. His individual sentences seem to be clear, but when
put together they are obscure, sometimes opaque. To some of his writ-
ings Burke distributes guides, just as in the present work he appends a
dictionary of basic terms. But these guides, like the racing guides Groucho
Marx bought in
A Day at the Races,
themselves need a key. In reading
poetry the effort to discover what the poet is trying to say contributes
to the process of und{':rstanding the structure of the created whole. In
reading a critic, even when he writes as suggestively as Burke, the strug-
gle to get at the author's thought is a measure of his failure to com-
municate. And there is no denying that Burke writes suggestively. Sug-
gestively and, unfortunately, by suggestion. Now and again a neatly
turned phrase or an old idea restated as a paradox seems to open up a
path for intellectual exploration. But instead of thinking a problem
through, Burke follows up by dealing with what its form, its context,
even the very sound of the words remind him. It is as if someone were
trying to provide an illustration of Mill's defunct psychology of associ-
ation. The result is that there is neither beginning nor end to his argu-
ment. Its course meanders into all fields of knowledge where due to
Burke's wide but not very discriminating reading its force is weakened by
a lore more quaint than precise.
Nonetheless the reader who grapples with Burke's latest book, as well
as his previous one,
Permanence and Change,
will find that the author
has a position; or more accurately, a position which can be used as a
"justification" for taking any position. It is based on the lecognition that
the mind, or better still, the live creature, brings something to the
processesof experience and knowledge. Some perspective of need, interest
or organization is necessary not only for the discovery of qualities in a
situation but for their very existence. These perspectives are rooted in the
physical structure of the organism. The products of this multiform inter-
action are therefore both relative and objective. If all existence is rela-
tional, no description can be intelligent except from some point of view.
It is even more obvious that no activity or evaluation can be rational
unless guided by some perspective of selection. In any historical period,
these basic perspectives of selection function as frames of acceptance
and rejection around which the complexities of art, action and ex-
perience are organized. There are two generic classes of perspectives-
individual and social. Insofar as a culture exhibits an integrated pattern,
it imposes (by indoctrination or persuasion) a common frame upon all
its habit-bound members. The cultures, "collective poems" Burke calls
