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PARTISAN REVIEW
tance of distinctions and standards- given that mass culture is an
outgrowth of modern political democracy and the commercial con–
siderations of a free market, and that history is not reversible? As
might be expected, some writers have adapted to the situation with
ingenious theories about "elitism" and the death of"high culture," ra–
tionalizing what they can't change. If, as Orwell once said, there is a
kind of nonsense one can learn only in college, then we might add
that there is a kind of apologetics only intellectuals can invent.
Another difficult question is the relation of art to power. Ed–
mund Wilson, in 1947, in
Europe without Baedeker,
linked American
growth with an advance in the arts. "My optimistic opinion ," he
wrote, "is that the United States is politically more advanced than
any other part of the world.... It has been accompanied by a re–
markable renascence of American arts and letters ." And just recently,
a leftist French critic has claimed that abstract expressionism flour–
ished because of the rise of American power and the flexing of Ameri–
can muscles in the cold war. Interestingly, this point also was made
by Hilton Kramer some time ago, when he said that the reproduc–
tion of a Pollock painting in
Time
magazine, upside down, reflected
American imperialist strength and fit in with Henry Luce's thesis
that this was the American century.
An even more complex question is that of alienation, which has
been a dominant theme in the literature of modernism. Though its
political and philosophical roots are in Hegel and Marx, for whom it
involved alienation from the products of one's own labor, it has been
converted into a feeling of alienation from contemporary capitalist
society. But the idea of alienation in art, which has been influenced
to some extent by political forces, is more complicated. In figures
like Joyce and Kafka, for example, or in such esthetically subversive
movements as surrealism and Dadaism, alienation amounted to a
discomfort with the quality of life in modern industrial and commer–
cial society. And it was often associated with a pathology of alone–
ness and suffering, or psychology turned into itself. But it was not
necessarily political, nor always on the Left . It was also an adjunct of
aristocracy and conservatism, as in such writers as Eliot, Wyndham
Lewis, Pound, T. E. Hulme, and Celine. And its emphasis was not
on the radical rejection of one's country or of an entire national cul–
ture, but on its own cultural tradition, rooted in certain moral and
esthetic values and in the history and the problems of a particular
medium.
