OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
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meaningfulness of the Whole, and what we get in the language of
a barbarous literary psychology is an account of the travail of spir–
itual growth in any culture--not only for the artist but for every
human being.
Marx's notion of self-alienation is historically circumscribed and
has much less sweep than Hegel'S. It applies primarily to the worker
who is compelled to labor at something which neither expresses nor
sustains his own needs and interests as a person. The unalienated
man for Marx is the creative man. It is anyone who, under an inner
compulsion, is doing significant work wrestling with a problem or
striving to articulate a vision. The artist for Marx is the unalienated
man par excellence to the extent that he does not produce
merely
a commodity. Remove the Utopianism of believing that all work in
an industrial society can make a call on man's creative capacities, and
of imagining that everybody, once a market economy disappears,
will be able to do creative work, and what Marx is really saying is
not obscure. The more truly human a society is, the more will it
arrange its institutions to afford opportunities for creative fulfillment
through uncoerced work. Man humanizes himself through work,
which in association with others, is the source of speech. Man is
dehumanized by
forced
work. There are some echoes of Rousseauis–
tic myth in this and by a strange un-Marxian lapse Marx refers to
a society in which there is no forced labor as a more natural society.
From this point of view, the workers attending a conveyor belt, feed–
ing a machine, endlessly filing orders or names are far more alienated
than those intellectuals who have chosen their vocations and enjoy
some freedom in setting their own goals or selecting their tasks.
There is a third conception of alienation popular with some
sociologists and Bohemians which is applied to the artist who breaks
with the conventions or norms of his family, society, or class. He is
pitied and sometimes pities himself because he has no market or pa–
tron or reputation on the assumption that this is a necessary conse–
quence of his non-conformity despite the fact that other non-conform–
ists created their own audience and following and feel unalienated in
the Marxian sense even when hostile critics ignore or rage against
them. This is the most popular conception of the alienated artist in
America .and the shallowest. Why it is so popular I do not know unless
it be that many individuals mistake the indifference of the world or
their private creative agonies--which may very well be due to lack of
