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PARTISAN REVIEW
their office typewriters had keys with whole words like "alienation"
on them. A short story by Delmore Schwartz about a New Year's
Eve party in 1938 depicts a character unmistakably based on one of
the editors of
Partisan Review
grumbling about too many strangers in–
vited to the party, "There's enough alienation in modern life without
installing it in the living room."
The
Partisan Review
intellectuals tended to use the concept
primarily to describe the antagonistic relation between the creative
artist or intellectual and the philistine majority. "Alienation" added a
sociological and political flavor to this familiar late romantic com–
plaint by identifying modern society with its
bourgeois
character, with
its dominant institution of private property and the resulting "alien–
ated labor" of proletarian wage-workers. The term indeed encap–
sulated neatly the two governing themes that gave
Partisan Review
its
distinctiveness: its dual commitment to Marxism in politics and to
modernism in the arts. Both commitments became redefined in the
years following the journal's initial rupture with the Communist
Party; "alienation" was increasingly used to connote primarily a
literary or aesthetic sensibility rather than a socio-economic condi–
tion (more akin to Hegel's "unhappy consciousness" than to Marx's
economic grounding of the concept), a tendency that became even
more pronounced after the war, when the general inhospitality to art
ascribed to "bourgeois society became more specifically identified
with the commercially produced and distributed "mass culture"
made possible by new communications media. By this time, the
term was used with a certain ironic jocularity by the leading
Partisan
Review
writers, faintly mocking both the cultural and politically
radical pretensions it suggested.
The importance of the concepts of alienation and mass culture
to the New York intellectuals owed little or nothing to Lukacs or the
Frankfurt School or to European existentialist thinkers (except
perhaps for Ortega), although obviously the convergences among
them resulted from their drawing on a partially shared political and
cultural heritage. The convergence with existentialism undoubtedly
accounts for the fact that the ideas of its leading exponents were first
introduced to an American public in the pages of
Partisan Review.
But
this was after the war, at a time when "alienation" had long been a
key concept typifying the journal's aesthetic-political outlook.
Anyone is free to define alienation as he or she pleases. But
there is one prevailing conception of it that, divested of much of the
