KENNETH BURKE
and
SIDNEY HOOK:
An Exchange
IS MR. HOOK A SOCIALIST?
You
HAVE
allowed me two thousand words in which to answer Hook's
review of my book
Attitudes Toward History
in the December issue of
PARTISAN REVIEW.
My problem, in its simplicity, is this: Hook has so
framed his report of the book's contents as to attack a work that doesn't
exist-and I am invited to waste my time and your readers' time by
answering this attack upon a work generated in Hook's not very in-
ventive fancy. To carry on a long, minute, point-by-point altercation
of the "I did not-you did so" sort would be a bore. I know, because
I have already written a 3,200-word reply of this sort.
There is a preponderant area of my book concerned with the
psychology of. art. Hook, as his published work gives ample evidence,
has never paid attention to such matters. Accordingly, in his review,
he passes over this material completely.
This material, as Hook aptly says, deals with "attitudes toward
life-anytime,
anywhere." But I also attempt extending or projecting
my analysis of art, to show its bearing upon the analysis of social rela-
tions in general. It is a couple of such extensions that Hook completely
misrepresents by the rudimentary expedient of refusing, in his report,
to realize for his readers the context from which they are drawn.
My general perspective is pro-socialist, anti-capitalist.
I believe
that moments of crisis, or transition, provide the best entry into an
understanding of cultural processes-and that a socialist perspective is
the handiest from which to approach such moments, both for diagnostic
and hortatory purposes.
Attitudes Toward History
attempts to motivate
this choice of perspective by giving, as far as I am able, evidence of
the perspective's scope and relevancy. Naturally, I cannot answer with
much profit an attack that doesn't even consider the book from this
standpoint.
The readiest way I can see, to convey the general tenor of my
concerns, is to quote at some length a passage that Hook quotes mis-
leadingly. I shall let him set his own rules for the contest. I shall, that
is, pass over without discussion the core of my book (an analysis of
symbolism, and of the relation of symbolism to reality, as revealed in
such art forms as tragedy, comedy, satire, propaganda, burlesque). I
shall simply take one of my "projections" from this field into the general
field of social relations:
"Gide has said somewhere that he distrusts the carrying-out of one
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