516
PARTISAN REVIEW
act upon in producing and experiencing literature. He does not criticize
these assumptions or relate them in any new way to the rest of experience.
He seems to be doing this, but actually he is only wording or re-wording
them with a great amount of ingenuity. (Does the statement that every
document, literary and non-literary, is "a strategy for encompassing a
situation" say anything really new? Does it furnish a new aid to our
understanding of literature? Haven't critics always treated works of art
as "strategies" more or less, whether they realized it or not?) Burke's
brilliance is in the originality with which he associates and combines new
terms with old concepts. It is all superstructural. He does not devise new
concepts for new aspects of experience nor arrive at new insights which
require new terms. We hear him out, are grateful for the illumination,
yet go on as before. The illumination has no heat.
However, I wish to make clear that I am not dismissing all of Burke's
critical writing in this fashion. I am complaining only that too much of
it does amount simply to terminological intrigue conducted within the
standing body of truths and errors. Yet we have reasons to expect better
things of Burke. He has moments of real insight, frequent enough to be
counted a gift; and every once in a while he produces little items of per–
ception for which we cannot be grateful enough. And if he does not con–
duct us along new paths of investigation, he at least sends us off on them.
But then there is his prose: he has a weakness for that awful pseudo·
scientific jargon that has become familiar to us from the activities of
progressive educators, psychologists and efficiency experts. Burke at times
seems to have a faith in control by labels that approaches a magician's.
e.G.
THE GROUND WE STAND ON. By John Dos Passos. Harcourt, Brace.
420
pp.
$3.50.
These biographical sketches of Sam Adams, Roger Williams, Frank·
lin, and other libertarian fi gures from our history may be considered (1)
as literature, (2) as propaganda.
(1) The blurb is accurate in claimin:; the book "reads like a fast·
paced chronicle of contemporary events a1:d characters." The pace is
often so fast as to be merely cheap, as: "The next day the people of Paris
rushed the Bastille. The
Kin~
took fright and decided he'd be a good
boy." Or: " ... when Pontius Pilate passed the buck to the High Priest."
Or melodramatic, as this on Robespierre: "He terrified and fascinated the
Convention and the Committee of Public Safety like a snake in a rabbit
hutch." I could also do without Dos Passos' literary trademark, the port·
manteau word: "selfreliance," "hangeron," "massmood," "riversystem,"
"Englishspeaking," "landhunger," "oneroom," "hopedfor,'' and, one it
took me some time to penetrate, "bishoprun." On the other hand, the
book is readable,
it
turns over much interesting detail on some interesting
periods, and it really does stimulate one's appetite to know more about
the field, which is perhaps the most important literary merit for a book of
this kind.
