ADDIS ABABA UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES
COLLEGE OF HUMANITIES, LANGUAGE STUDIES AND JOURNALISM and
communication DEPARTMENT OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND
LITERATURE
Some Aspects of Alienation Reflected in V.S. Naipaul’s Half a Life
By
Theodros Shewangizaw
June, 2015
Addis Ababa
Some Aspects of Alienation Reflected in VS Naipaul’s Half a Life
By
Theodros Shewangizaw
A Thesis submitted the Department of English Literature in partial
fulfillment of the requirement for MA degree in English Literature
June, 2015
Addis Ababa University
School of Graduate Studies
Faculty of Humanities, Language Studies and
Journalism and Communication
Department of Foreign Languages and Literature
Some Aspects of Alienation Reflected in V.S. Naipaul’s Half a Life
By
Theodros Shewangizaw
Approved By Board of Examiners:
Examiner_______________________ Signature_________________
Examiner_______________________ Signature_________________
Advisor_______________________Signature_________________
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my advisor Doctor MelaknehMengistu, for his intellectual comments and
guidance and Weyzerit Tenagne Gulilatfor her invaluable support, encouragement and belief in
me throughout my studies. I am grateful to my uncle, Ato Wendyefraw Gulilatfor his
inspirational and generous advice that opened the door for me at the start of this project. Special
thanks too to Weyzerit Weyneshet, who works as executive secretary in the university, for being
unfailingly supportive and for following attentively the progress of this thesis since the
commencement of the research in the second semester.In addition, my thanks go to my friends
for their cooperative friendship and for reading parts of this thesis and providing me with helpful
suggestions.
Finally, I owe an immeasurable debt to my mother for her endless support from a closest
distance. Thanks to the joy and encouragement of my brother, Fasil Samson, I was constantly
reminded that I could enjoy the work even at breaking points. Above all, my mother, Gennet
Gulilat, through her emotional and financial support, her patience and her love made this work
possible. I dedicate this thesis to her.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Acknowledgements...............................................................................................
Table of contents………………………………………………………………..
Acronyms………………………………………………………………………..
Abstract………………………………………………………………………….
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
1.1 Background of the study ………………………………………………………
1.2 Statement of the problem……………………………………………………..
1.3 Objective of the Study…………………………………………………………
1.4 Significance of the Study………………………………………………………
1.5 Methodology…………………………………………………………………..
1.6 Scope of the study………………………………………………………
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CHAPTER TWO
Theoretical Framework
2.1 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………
2.1.1 The concept of Alienation……………………………………………….
2.2 Some Aspects of Alienation……………………………………………………
2.2.1 Social Alienation………………………………………………………..
2.2.1.1 Ludwig Feuerbach‘s Influences on Marx…………………..
2.2.1.2 Marxist Dialectical Method………………………………….
2.2.1.3 The Nature of Man…………………………………………..
2.2.1.4 AlienationTheory ………………………………….………
2.2.2 Political Alienation………………………………………………………
2.2.2.1 The State……………………………………………………..
2.2.2.2 Civil Society…………………………………………………
2.2.3 Cultural Alienation……………………………………………………….
2.2.4 Linguistic Alienation…………………………………………………….
2.3 Marx‘s Conception of Man……………………………………………………….
2.3.1 The Biological Model: Man versus Animal………………………………
2.3.2 The Historical Model: The Behavior of Individual Changes…………….
CHAPTER THREE
Some aspects of Alienation depicted in V.S. Naipaul’s Half a Life
3.1 Introduction……………………………………………………………………….
3.2 Plot Summary of Half a Life…………………………………………………………..
3.3 Cultural Alienation ………………………………………………………………
3.4 Linguistic Alienation ……………………………………………………………
3.5. Political Alienation ……………………………………………………………….
3.6 Social Alienation …………………………………………………………………
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………
References
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Acronyms
E.P. MSS: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of Karl Marx
PR: Philosophy of Right developed by Hegel about the State and Civil Society
CW: Collected Works of Marx/Engels
MEW: Marx/Engels_ Werke ( German word to mean work/s)
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Abstract
Studies on different issues such as, the quest for one‘s identity, the sense of belongingness, the
idea of rootlessness and cultural isolation upon this novel are inadequate. Similarly, there are no
studies done on the topic of some aspects of alienation on this novel. Thus this study area desired
to fill that gap by explaining the relevant genres of alienation and their impacts upon the major
character in the story. The study revealed the agonies of alienation which have brought the loss
of native cultural heritage and sense of place that the protagonist faces both in his home and
foreign lands. Failure to face one‘s real established history and genuine ancestry lead to
administer a kind of imagination to shape a mimetic and pretended identity and tries to live
behind its mask is seen in the study. The research shows the major character‘s continual
travelling in search of completeness does not fetch anything relevant, but a suffering from a
greater sense of alienation. The exploration also depicts the loss of the protagonist‘s original
culture and indigenous identity are the results of cultural, social, political and linguistic
alienations. The study has tried to first identify crucial delineations and concepts of alienation
with some critical explanations regarding the genres on the basis of Marxist Theory of Alienation
in Chapter Two following an attempt to define it and incorporating a list of thoughts and ideas by
Marx and some intellectuals. In the next chapter, the study has moved on to the identification
and investigation of the stated aspects alienation in the selected novel. Here, the study has
presented the applications and analyses of each as they appear in the novel with quotations of
relevant examples from it. The conclusion section has analyzed the results of the four aspects of
alienation done in the previous chapter by attempting to give some important quotes out of the
novel. The finding of the study has established that the novel can be seen as a study of alienation
and estrangement. It is a story of in search of identity and completeness of its main character
Willie due to the sufferings of alienation he has encountered both in his home and foreign lands.
In addition, the central meaning of the novel as indicated by the title, Half a Life is the product of
being a mixed parentage in a mixed and confused world would beget feelings of inferiority, low
self-esteem and negative self-concepts as a result of sense of alienation in a mixed and confused
society
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CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
1.1 Background of the study
The history of the Caribbean is seen in many ways, as the ―slums‖ of Empire, an entire region
largely without economic, social, political and educational infrastructures. The economist and
historian Eric Williams, then Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, writes wearily that ―the
Caribbean area … is one of the most unstable areas in our unstable world‖ and notes an
―appalling degree of economic fragmentation‖ along with what he politely calls ―constitutional
diversity‖ Williams, (1970:498–99). He continues, no more happily: ―Dependence on the outside
world in the Caribbean in early ages is not only economic. It is also cultural, institutional,
intellectual and psychological. Political forms and social institutions, even in the politically
independent countries, were imitated rather than created, borrowed rather than relevant,
reflecting the forms existing in the particular metropolitan country from which they were
derived. There is still no serious indigenous intellectual life. The ideological formulations for the
most part still reflect the concepts and vocabulary of nineteenth-century Europe and, more
sinister, of the now almost defunct Cold War. Authentic and relevant indigenous formulations
are either ignored or equated with subversion.
Historically and conceptually the Caribbean is a precarious community of exiles grafted onto a
foreign landscape of islands and coastal rim lands, an ever-shifting community of migrants who
have continued to travel, to disperse, sometimes to return, but more often to imagine their
previous home from afar. Arnold, (2001:12) added:
While all nations are, in Benedict Anderson‘s words, ―imagined
communities,‖ this phrase has particular resonance for the Caribbean,
Anglophone and otherwise: the Caribbean is a world imagined and
inscribed from afar with cultural coherence where there is neither
economic stability nor political unity, invested with cultural authenticity
where there is no (longer) in digeneity.
1
Eric William‘s pronouncements on intellectual life in the entire Caribbean region, cited
above, open up a significant distance between importation and in digeneity. Clearly, it would
be pointless to deny what he calls the ―high import content‖ of twentieth-century Caribbean
societies whose culture industries continue to be largely controlled from the outside, from
Europe, Canada, and, especially, the United States.
From a historical perspective, any discussion of literary language in the Caribbean are the twin
concepts of creolization and creolity, which extend the issue of in digeneity vs. authenticity to
the complicated, not exactly linear relations between so-called Standard English and various
West Indian Creoles. We have to take quite seriously that what looks like ―British English,‖ or a
supposed version thereof, may actually be something rather different. George Lang usefully
points to the ―purely contingent way‖ in which Caribbean Creoles derive from European
languages Lang, (1997:31). If these ―major‖ languages are but incidental, it would be hard
indeed to make a case for their continued ―centrality,‖ as is implicit whenever we gloss
Anglophone Caribbean literatures as being ―written in English.‖ An additional classificatory
difficulty is that while most textual representations of West Indian Creoles — such as Jamaican
and Trinidadian Creoles —are fairly easy to spot and categorize other forms of literary
creolization are not. Those poetic and fictional manifestations of what Brathwaite has called
―nation language‖ Brathwaite, (1984) that do not depend on representing vernacular speech
within the conventions of literary realism are considerably less visible. Linguistic borders, be
they between different ―major‖ languages and related Creoles, or within a Creole continuum,
shift even more rapidly and more frequently that do national borders, and national borders have
been particularly fluid and permeable in the history of the Caribbean. It stands to reason that
linguistic border traffic would be especially intense in a region into which elements from so
many languages have been imported.
Regarding the problem of linguistic coherence, it would seem that the unruly Caribbean is not
easily disciplined into a traditional academic field, perhaps even into a non-traditional academic
field. Michael Dash suggests that ―the writing of the region is, perhaps, a matter of
demonstrating the opacity and inexhaustibility of a world that resists systematic construction or
transcendent meaning‖ Dash, (1992:26). The kind of partially shared Caribbean history both
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statements obliquely evoke is an exceedingly messy sort of history, not history at all by some
standards. It is a processual history characterized by the push and pull of conflicting cultural and
political allegiances which always exists in the interstices of historiographical linearity, the
conceptual home of orderly parades of imperial triumphs and achievements. As Caribbean
writers struggle, imaginatively, with the legacies of various colonialisms, their visions create a
gravitational field of sorts, whose uneven pull partially offsets that of the fabled imperial
―motherland‖ and, in doing so, holds the islands and rim lands in close, but shifting, cultural
proximity to each other.
Another indispensable point regarding the history of the Caribbean is the issue of identity. At the
end of the twentieth century, one of the fundamental questions in Caribbean studies, and
elsewhere, is no longer what the markers are of national identity — be they found in language,
landscape, race or ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, or any combination thereof — but whether
―nation‖ itself can still be a viable conceptual marker. The residual, but persistent, balkanization
in Caribbean studies shows clearly that, as Diana Brydon and Helen Tiffin note, ―National
identity is the last — and most resistant — fiction to be decolonized‖ Brydon and Tiffin,
(1993:64). In their introduction to the Routledge Caribbean Studies Reader, 1996, Alison
Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh make a related point when they warn that ―The critical
policing of the post-colonial perimeter fence for writers and texts which stray from assigned
identities remains a serious issue which readers of the literature need to address‖ Donnell and
Welsh, (1996:440).
1.2 Statement of the problem
It is obvious that alienation is one of the critical and central issues in most colonial and
postcolonial writers of the Caribbean region. However, alienation has not been satisfactorily
studied independently as a single burning subject. My deep browsing and exploration have
showed that it has often accompanied by to some extent with synonymous matters such as,
rootlessness, displacement, identity quest or the need for self-definition, isolation and exile.
Many Caribbean authors of the colonial and postcolonial periods like Jean Rhys, Wilson
Harris, Shani Mootoo, Andrea Levy, George Lamming, including Naipaul etc have done
their research upon the points mentioned above. V.S. Naipaul‘s Half A Life is a postcolonial
novel with central theme of exile and alienation. I have thoroughly investigated and tried
3
hard to find studies on this novel depicting such essential concerns with very significant
differences; but there is hardly any. Naipaul played a vital role in sketching the protagonist‘s
unremitting and perennial exiled life from India, England, Africa and Germany in order to
rediscover and assert his self-identity. My part is to find out how some issues of alienation
have affected Willie Chandran‘s need for self-definition. Willie‘s alienated life and attitude
have been shaped due to the expansive effects of colonialism. Colonialism had a major
impact upon the colonized ones. Everything of the colonizers‘ customs, cultural beliefs,
social forms, political ideology, etc had been transmitted to the people under the yoke of
colonization. Zarrinjooee, B. (2014) stated:
Colonization is the phenomenon that transforms different aspects of
the colonized nations‘ lives especially their culture and historical
specificities. Different cultural groups, based on their cultural
heritage have their ethnic, culture and historical specificities which
are not operative for the colonizers, and are replaced by the
colonizers‘ values, rules, principals and whatever help solidify the
colonizers‘ hegemony and superiority in the colonized cultures.
Half A Life is an odd story of Willie Chandran. The tale first set in post-independence India
proceeding to England then moving back to pre-independence Africa and very briefly
touched Germany. The placeless Willie Chandran passed through all such confusions of
cultures. Willie was disillusioned with education and his parents and uncertain of his future.
Therefore such an odd story telling relating to Willie‘s strange and confusing exilic life
inspired me to discover some sorts of alienation that influence the protagonist.
1.3Objective of the Study
This research paper has the following general and specific objectives:
General Objective
1. To fundamentally render the glimpse of colonial alienation that brings the feelings of
rootlessness undergone by expatriates.
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Specific Objectives
1. To clearly present the aspects of alienation evidently seen in the story and how they are
connected to the central meaning of the novel.
2. To state the agonies of alienation and the anguishes of the protagonist in search of
meaning and identity.
3. To convey cultural affiliation or estrangement among the characters in the novel.
1.4 Significance of the Study
Most theorists and critics of colonialism, including Marx and Fanon agree with the fact that
alienation is critical and central to any analysis of colonialism. This research will attempt to
contribute in a brief way toward a better understanding of alienation originated since the colonial
periods and still its residuum burns the expatriates residing all over the world. And such a
situation is seen through most of the characters in the novel.
Secondly, even though this is a small research that only studies a single novel, it might be used
as a springboard to other studies that might want to attempt a broader and comprehensive study
of Caribbean alienation, uncertainty, dislocation and isolation. This MA thesis could also be an
important tool for further in-depth analyses of alienation.
Thirdly, under alienation there are cultural, social, linguistic, political, etc. types of alienation.
This research presents some relevant features of such genres in a succinct way that enables
readers to grasp valuable information.
Fourthly, this thesis attempts to sketch some of the great aspects and ideologies of Karl Marx‘s
view of alienation that paves a splendid way of a good understanding for student researchers.
1.5 Methodology
An attempt to achieve the objectives of this study will be made by first trying to gather
as
much information about Alienation, its origin, concept, background, types/aspects, and impacts
as possible and presenting them in their positions. The first chapter will include background of
the study, the problems that are supposed to be investigated and the objectives of the study. The
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second chapter presentslexical and literary definitions of Alienation, its notion and exploration of
its history in general and some vital types of alienation and critical literary views and theories of
Karl Marx in particular. The third chapter gives special focus on the central thematic concerns of
alienation clearly noticed among the characters in the novel; special emphasis will be given for
the major character. And an effort will be made to show whether the connection of Marx‘s view
of alienation is reflected by Naipaul‘s characters in the novel. By applying textual analysis as a
method, important excerpts and extracts out of the novel are used for rigorous explanation. The
student researcher shall make a comprehensive demonstration.
Finally,
an attempt will
be
made to find out how the fictitious protagonist in the book is affected by alienation under the
conclusion of the study.
1.6 Scope of the study
This study will only focus on the aspects of Alienation noticed in Half a Life by V.S.
Naipaul. During the course of this research some indispensable literary theories of Marx and
others that possess special features of alienation will be raised in one way or the other. Other
literary genres which do not have any relationship to the referent book shall not be included in
here. For instance, other works of the writer: fictions, journals, bibliographic data, etc. will not
be discussed in detail in this MA. Thesis. The scope of this study will be limited to the aspects
of alienation depicted in the novel. The research of this study is limited to secondary data
published in books, journals and articles.
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CHAPTER TWO
Theoretical Framework
2.1 Introduction
In this part, the concept of alienation is reviewed from the perspectives of different intellectuals
regarding with the term‘s point of estrangement, psychological and cultural extent, and social
and economic issues with some critiquing involvement of the student researcher. In addition
relevant aspects of alienation are explained with respect to Marx‘s view of alienation at a great
length and Hegel‘s contribution toward the term at some point. A reasonable emphasis is also
given to the cultural and linguistic alienations in this section.
2.1.1 The concept of Alienation
To possess better understanding of colonial alienation, it is found relevant to see some
indispensable definitions and concepts of the term alienation.
Alienation is a concept first introduced by Marx and since used in a variety
of contexts. Loosely defined, it means the separation of the individual from
important aspects of the external world accompanied by a feeling of
powerlessness or lack of control. A person may feel alienated from
themselves or from society. It is a state in which a person feels detached
from the outside world and sometimes from his or her own feelings.
(Diagram Group, 2008)
According to Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged (2003), alienation is a
turning away; estrangement. It isthe state of being an outsider or the feeling of being isolated, as
from society. It can be a state in which a person's feelings are inhibited so that eventually both
the self and the external world seem unreal.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 2013 defines alienation as the act
of alienating or the condition of being alienated; estrangement, emotional isolation or
dissociation.
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Alienation is the feeling of being alienated from other people disaffection, estrangement. It is
separation resulting from hostility and isolation that is a state of separation between persons or
groups. Alienation is the action of alienating; the action of causing to become unfriendly.
(WordNet 3.0, Farlex clipart collection,2003-2012).
Collins Thesaurus of the English Language (2003), has brought the following synonyms and
expressions to the term alienation: estrangement, setting against, divorce, withdrawal, separation,
turning away, indifference, breaking off, diversion, rupture, disaffection, remoteness.
The Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary of the English Language (2015), defines the word
alienation as A state of depersonalization or loss of identity in which the selfseemsunreal,
thought to be caused by difficulties in relating to society and the resultingprolongedinhibition of
emotion. The state or experience of being isolated from a group or an activity to which one
should belong or in which one should be involved.
Etymologically, the term 'alienation' is derived from the Latin noun alienatio; its verbalienere (to
make something into another's, to remove, to take away). The Latin term alienatio has a threefold meaning which has come to be represented in English by 'alienation'. First, in the legal
sphere, it shows connection with legal property or rights by transfer or sale to another.
Seneca used the term in this legal sense (see Lobkowicz 1967, 299). Secondly, in the medicopsychological sphere it meant mental derangement or insanity (alienatio mentis), etc.,. Thirdly,
in the interpersonal sphere it meant a personal separation or estrangement from other men, or
from his country or God. Schacht, (1971:10-13).
Alienation has become one of the most prevalent and widespread thematic investigations
particularly in the area of literature. Fanon, liable to Karl Marx, takes ―the notion of alienation as
his principal means of understanding racial identity. This notion of alienation helps him to
describe what we might understand to be the ‗multiple psychological violence‘s‘ of the racist
encounter.‖ Hook, (2004: 93)
8
Alienation, however, is a broad and dynamic concept, one with a formidable conceptual history
(Zahar, 1969). The particular importance for us of this concept (and particularly Fanon‘s use of
it) is that it provides a means of relating experience to social conditions, of linking personalsubjective and sociohistorical domains, and of doing so in a way that produces critique (Bulhan,
1985; Zahar, 1969). Fanon uses the concept in just this way, as thinking the connections – or
articulations – between an individual‘s internal world, and the external world of the constraining
social, economic or political structures that surround and contain them.
Another basic aspect of the notion of alienation is the idea of estrangement. This idea features
centrally in what is perhaps the best known account of alienation, that of Karl Marx. For Marx,
alienation is the result, particularly characteristic of modern capitalism, of the separation of the
worker from the products of his or her labor. In his conceptualization: what the worker produces
they do not own, or ultimately have control over. Their labor hence takes on a life of its own,
which is alien and even threatening. The products produced by the worker are lost to them,
appropriated by the employer, which leads to a state of estrangement and alienation on the part
of the worker. This alienation of labor leads, to a loss of reality, to the situation where human
beings are estranged from their own bodies, from the natural world and from their potentially
universal essences. Importantly, in the original Marxist conception alienation is not an
‗experience‘; it is rather a real material process of separation. It is important that we make this
point, because otherwise we risk psychologising away an economic/material form of crisis. This,
of course, is not Fanon‘s aim. His objective is not to supersede an economic/material analysis
with a psychological analysis, but rather to emphasize also, in addition, the psychological
dimension to such events, to call attention to the full ramifications of the lived experience and
identity of the individual. Hook, (2004:94)
Alienation also emphasizes a sense of rupture – estrangement – in the relationship between the
individual and those things, objects and people around him or her. This estrangement is not only
that of the individual from the world, but also, in a very powerful way, that of the individual
person‘s ability properly to understand him- or herself and their social predicament. Here it is
important to pay attention to how Fanon adapts the concept of alienation to his purposes. For
Fanon, race, and the various social practices and meanings attached to it, proves to be the pivot
of alienation rather than productive labor.
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As Bulhan (1985) rightly notes, Fanon‘s application favours psychological and cultural
dimensions rather than economic and class dimensions. Clearly, as a psychiatrist, Fanon was
interested in an exposition of alienation from a psychological perspective. He further stated that
One can then be estranged, from one‘s ‗humanness‘, from one‘s own body and sense of self,
from a sense even of belonging to one‘s people, all on the basis of race. In many ways, this is
perhaps the most consistent theme throughout Black skin, white masks, that of dehumanization,
that of the inability, because of various forms of racism and cultural dispossession, to settle on
any kind of authentic identity.
According to Fanon as cited by Hook (2004), Fanon is here making recourse to psychological
terms of analysis to describe, and to critique, the dehumanizing features not only of racism but of
socio-cultural and political marginalization more generally. Fanon ascertained ―Indeed, it is
through the basic concept of alienation – understood as the processes by which individuals are
distanced from the values, products, meanings and self-understandings they produce, the means
through which they effectively become strangers to themselves‖
Despite Fanon‘s acceptance of Marx‘s theory of alienation on the basis of economics, his
concept of ―alienation from self also involves alienation from one‘s corporeality and personal
identity‖ Bulhan, (1985:188). Fanon distinguishes that ―under the German occupation, the
French remained men; under the French occupation, the Germans remained men‖ (The Wretched
of the Earth, 204), but under colonial domination, ―a feeling of non existence‖ emerged (Black
Skin, White Masks, 139). Hanson explains this concept in the relationship between the colonizer
and colonized as ―super ordination and subordination and superiority and inferiority (81). Such a
concept has become an integral part of the colonial system, and it has dictated the nature of
relationships between colonizers and colonized. ―Because it is a systematic negation of the other
person and a furious determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity,‖ declares
Fanon, ―colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: ‗In
reality, who am I ?‘ (The Wretched…. 203)
Marxist views of alienation are extensively elucidated in his economic and philosophic
manuscripts of 1844. In his views, the source of all human alienation is alienated or estranged
labor from which other forms of alienation, whether social, political or religious may be
understood. Marx explains what constitutes the alienation of labor:
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First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to
his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself
but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop
freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his
mind. The worker, therefore, only feels himself outside his work, and in his
work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when
he is working he is not at home. His labor is, therefore, not voluntary, but
coerced; it is forced labor. It is, therefore, not the satisfaction of a need; it is
merely a means to satisfy needs external to it…. Lastly, the external
character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but
someone else‘s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs not to
himself, but to another… it is the loss of his self.
It is important that we retain an awareness of the tremendous conceptual and historical resonance
of the notion of alienation, that we do not apply it too glibly. Whilst it is perhaps the theoretical
term most useful to the analysis of oppression, it has become, in Bulhan‘s (1985) terms, an
omnibus diagnosis for economic, social, psychological and existential malaise. For these reasons
it is vital to provide a brief sketch of this conceptual terrain in relation to Fanon‘s own
application of the term which Bulhan (1985) manages admirably:
Fanon … used alienation as a descriptive, diagnostic, and prescriptive guide.
His application had a Marxian influence, even though he chose to emphasise
some aspects (ie psychological and cultural) more than others (ie economic
and class). … There are four major aspects to alienation in the Marxian
formulation: a) man‘s [sic] alienation from nature, b) man‘s alienation from
himself, c) man‘s alienation from his species-being, and d) man‘s alienation
from man. We see here how Marx‘s concept is building in complexity, from
the world of objects, to the world of actions, the worker comes to experience
himself as almost ‗outside of life‘
Bulhan (1985) moves on to describe each of these four dimensions of the notion of alienation:
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The first aspect Marx referred to as ‗estrangement from the thing‘, which
means the alienation of the worker from the product of his labour – that is,
the alienation of that which mediates his relation to the ‗sensual external
world‘ and hence to the objects of nature. What the worker produces is not
his own, but rather someone else‘s; it meets not his but alien needs; it is a
commodity he sells to eke out a bare existence. The more he produces, the
more his product and hence the objects of nature stand opposed to him (186)
If this first dimension of alienation refers to the processes of exploitation where the external
world and its objects come to stand in opposition to the worker, the second dimension of the
concept refers to the worker‘s relation to his own work:
The second aspect Marx referred to as ‗self estrangement‘, which
emphasizes the worker‘s relation to the act of production itself. The process
by which he produces permits him no satisfaction. His ‗life activity‘, which
should be spontaneous, free, and creative, is coerced, controlled, and
regulated. He engages in work not for its own sake, as an expression of his
essential being or of his natural activity, but for a wage to permit him only
animal existence – eating, drinking, sleeping, etc. In consequence, the
worker is alienated from his own activity, which is also alienation from his
body, cognition and affect. He is alienated from himself Bulhan, (1985:186–
187).
We see here how Marx‘s concept is building in complexity, from the world of objects, to the
world of actions, the worker comes to experience himself as almost ‗outside of life‘
. The third aspect refers to the negation of human essence in asmuch as the
worker is denied actualisation of his inherent human potentials through
activity. That is, man expresses, objectifies, and duplicates his ‗speciesbeing‘, his human essence, through his labour, affirming not only his
personality, but also the humanity he shares with others. Without his lifeactivity,
everything about
him
remains
implicit,
unrealized,
and
unrecognized. When his labour is alienated, so too is his ‗humanness‘
12
objects around him, which in turn transform him. Because of alienated
labour, his being remains alien to him and to all others. Bulhan, (1985:187).
Whereas the third aspect emphasises alienation from mankind in general, the fourth aspect
concerns alienation from specific others, by virtue of class contradictions:
The fourth aspect refers to estrangement of man from other men … It should
be stressed that at the conceptual kernel of the Marxian formulation is a …
reciprocity between man, productive activity, and nature. A threefold
interaction permeates these constituent parts. Man is part of nature, but he
also humanises nature. With his activity, he creates and is created.
Capitalism divides society into private property and owner, on the one hand,
and wage labour and worker, on the other. It is to this antagonistic
opposition of man against man, with the violence and degradation it entails,
that the fourth aspect of alienation refers. (187)
Importantly, then, we can now see the density of this conceptual term, and all that Marx intends
when he puts it to use. To reiterate, all four dimensions of alienations reduce to characteristics of
‗alienated labour‘ . This for Marx, is
because the root causes of alienation reside in the
substructure of society, and most centrally the alienation of productive labour as engendered by a
capitalist mode of production. One should bear in mind, though, that the effects of this alienation
are profound and multiple (as described above) and reverberate throughout all domains of social
and psychological life.
In general, for Marx, alienation in the process of work, from the product of work and from
circumstances, is inseparably connected with alienation from oneself, from one's fellow man and
from nature. The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of the 1844 states:
"A direct consequence of the alienation of man from the product of his labor, from
his life activity and from his species life is that man is alienated from other men.
When man confronts himself, he also confronts other men. What is true of man's
relationship to his work, to the product of his work and to himself, is also true of his
relationship to other men, to their labor and to the objects of their labor. In general,
the statement that man is alienated from his species life means that each man is
13
alienated from others, and that each of the others is likewise alienated from human
life.
The alienated man is not only alienated from other men; he is alienated from the essence of
humanity, from his "species-being," both in his natural and spiritual qualities. This alienation
from the human essence leads to an existential egotism, described by Marx as man's human
essence becoming "a means for his individual existence. It [alienated labor] alienates from man
his own body, external nature, his mental life and his human life." E.P. MSS., p. 103.
2.2 Some Aspects of Alienation
2.2.1 Social Alienation
Hegel‘s work, especially his social philosophy, was one of the primary influences upon Karl
Marx and the development of his theory of class struggle driven capitalist society. Hegel‘s
rejection of atomistic Enlightenment, his understanding that man‘s essence is predetermined and
his notion of Spirit‘s social and historical being is continued in Marx‘s work. A youthful
fascination with Hegel, though giving ground to Marx‘s mature thought and growing scepticism
towards the young Hegelians of his period, cannot be overlooked nor underestimated as a central
theme within Marx‘ thought.
Indeed, despite his numerous attempts to shrug off a Hegelian influence, specifically the aspects
of Hegel‘s thought intended to embody the positive content of Christianity, Marx‘s efforts were
doomed to failure. Marx remained Hegelian to the last; his development was rather embedded in
the recognition that philosophy is not enough to bring change to light, that Hegel‘s theory was
only valuable if converted into practice.
Despite Marx‘s numerous attempts to put Hegel‘s theory into practice, his work still fails to shed
light upon the essence of original notions. Furthermore, obvious discrepancies appear as soon as
the two are juxtaposed – Hegel‘s attitude towards his contemporary society was positive,
believing change to be possible, whilst Marx identified the on-going oppression that capitalism
begets. Mere similarity in word usage unfortunately does not lead directly to an understanding of
Marx through Hegel or vice versa – Marx may rely on his predecessors‘ terminology, but he
14
adapts those with a number of new definitions. 21 Marx‘s debt to Hegel is most evident in two
particular features of his investigation, his focus upon the historical nature of man and his
method of investigation – i.e. the dialectical method, both borrowed from Hegel and, as Bertell
Ollman suggests Ollman, (1976: 66), both core concepts of Marx‘s thinking. But, with the aim to
adapt Hegel‘s abstract thinking to the real world, Marx‘s explanation places emphasis upon the
social relations of modernity and the relations within the society that he lived in.
2.2.1.1 Ludwig Feuerbach’s Influences on Marx
Although the largest influence upon Marx‘s thought is often considered to be Hegel, the Young
Hegelian movement of his contemporaries in Germany should not be overlooked. As an active
critic of his contemporaries it would be difficult to claim that Marx was entirely free of their
influence and as such some commentators have argued that rather than Hegel‘s vocabulary that
Marx adapts for his aims, it is from the neo-Hegelians, Feuerbach in particular, that he borrows:
Feuerbach was both witness to and actor in the crisis in the theoretical development
of the Young Hegelian movement. This reveals the extent to which Marx‘s early
works are impregnated with Feuerbach‘s thought. Not only is Marx‘s terminology
from 1842 and 1845 Feuerbachian (alienation, species being, total being,
‗invention‘ of subject and predicate, etc.) but, what is probably more important, so
is the basic philosophical problem. Naturally, Marx‘s themes go beyond
Feuerbach‘s immediate preoccupations, but the theoretical schemata and
problematic are the same. Althusser, (1999: 45)
In fact, it is not just the vocabulary that can be found to be remarkably similar, Althusser was
also convinced that a comparison of Feuerbach‘s Manifestos and Marx‘s early works would
show that within a two or three year period Marx not only espoused Feuerbach‘s problematic,
but profoundly identified himself with it. Althusser, (1999: 46) Regardless of Althusser‘s radical
critique that Marx impudently assimilated Feuerbach‘s concepts and the fact that both Marx and
Engels were highly critical of him, Feuerbach can certainly be seen as a bridge between Hegel
and Marx.
Feuerbach himself began as a Hegelian, before his development into Left Hegelianism, and
turning finally to be a materialist or more specifically a humanist. Thus, the Hegelian terms that
15
he picked up early in his career undergo tremendous development within his own 22 work. The
goal throughout this development was to secularize a Christian understanding through the realm
of history. ―He outlined his own intellectual history in the aphorism: ‗God was my first thought;
reason, my second; and man, my third and last.‘‖Vondey, (2004: xiv) Feuerbach‘s development,
as such, can be seen to offer a model for Marx‘s response to Hegel along two lines: first for his
atheism and second and most profoundly as a significant influence upon the development of
dialectical materialism.
2.2.1.2 Marxist Dialectical Method
Although Marx adopts the Hegelian method of inquiry, he is unsatisfied with the theory resulting
from his predecessor‘s application of that method, colourfully suggesting that Hegel was
―standing on his head‖ when he argued that the interconnections he sees in the material world are
mere copies of relations existing between ideas. Marx‘s claim was thus to correct the errors of
his predecessor through his own dialectic. And while the vocabulary of dialectic and its modes of
expression (e.g ―moment,‖ ―movement,‖ ―contradiction,‖ ―mediation,‖ ―determination,‖ etc.) are
a preference of his early writings, neither the notion of development nor the concern for existing
relations disappears from Marx‘s mature writing. Ollman, (1976: 52) Rather it develops into a
complex investigation of relationships between entity, itself and other entities. That is to say,
Marx‘s dialectic provides the possibility to follow man‘s development throughout time (pastpresent-future), whilst also showing his growth in, with, and through other things.
The dialectical method of inquiry is best described as research into the
manifold way in which entities are internally related. It is a voyage of
exploration that has the whole world for its objects, but a world which is
conceived of as relationally contained in each if its parts. Ollman, (1976:
61)
The aim of Marx‘s research was to bring to light the essential connections or relations of
capitalism and, whilst never able to completely escape abstraction, this was done to provide tools
for the bigger picture, i.e. the reconstruction of society. Fundamental to this aim, was thus
Marx‘s attempt to provide an explanation of modernity (capitalist society) through the
16
clarification of its relationships and the presentation of its mirror image. For Marx, reality is
created by relations - not by the objects themselves – as he states in The German Ideology:23
The fact is that definite individuals who are productively active in a
definite way enter into these definite social and political relations. The
social structures and the state are continually evolving out of the lifeprocess of definite individuals, of those individuals as they actually are, as
they act, produce materially, and hence as they work under definite
material limits. Marx & Engels, (1998: 41)
Hegel‘s three-part process of the dialectical method, therefore, supplied Marx with a powerful
tool, but only in relation to his primary aim: to explain real world relations. At the same time,
however, he is rigorously trying to avoid explanation through superfluous abstractions. He does
so by examining the development of relations in the society which have and will occur.
Whereas Hegel`s aim was to explain the development of truth as the product of Spirit-originated
history, Marx emphasizes that history is the product of class-struggle driven society – and that
history must therefore be seen as having materialistic origins. And, although Marx himself never
explains the method as such, it is this view which gives rise to the concept: ―dialectical
materialism.‖
Whilst the total of Marx‘s work could be characterized as an exercise of ―dialectical
materialism,‖ however, the aim of this chapter is not to give an exhaustive overview of Marx‘s
critique of capitalism, but rather to concentrate on the particular notion of alienation that Marx
explores within that broader context.
2.2.1.3 The Nature of Man
In addition to the influence upon his dialectical method, Marx‘s concept of man – according to
which he argues that the self is a social and historical creation – is also directly inherited from
Hegel. Furthermore, following Hegel and disagreeing with his contemporaries in physiology and
sociology, Marx was convinced that man has an essential nature – one does not come to life as a
tabula rasa – and stated that man qua man is a recognizable and ascertainable entity. That is to
17
say, man qua man can be distinguished biologically, anatomically, physiologically and most
importantly, psychologically. Fromm, (2004: 23)
According to Marx‘s concept, human nature in general is possessing of certain powers and
needs, with the former conceived as functions, but with the inherent possibility of becoming
more than it already is. By ―needs,‖ Marx refers to the desire one feels for something, usually
something that is not immediately available. Ollman, (1976: 75) In Marx‘s usage, need, which is
inherent and constant within man, is synonymous with drives and wants, ever-present but which
implications, and the intellectual efforts required to satisfy them most efficiently, are seldom
realised.
These powers and needs, naturally possessed by all, are distinguished by two further categories –
―natural‖ and ―species.‖ Natural powers and needs are on the one hand, shared by man with all
other living entities. Capacities and the want of species, on the other, are unique to man‘s nature.
Natural needs and powers are related to one‘s immediate physical needs, i.e. the actions that all
living creatures undertake in order to stay alive. These are one‘s animal functions that indicate
man‘s being a living part of nature. These basic needs are not historical phenomena, but are
universal and relatively unchanging features of the human condition resulting from our
biological conditions. These are universal and trans-historical, relatively unchanging
characteristics, in other words: a universal human nature. Sayers, (1998: 151)
Although Marx does not present an exhaustive list of man‘s natural powers, labour, eating,
drinking and procreation – as he often refers to them ―man‘s animal functions‖ Marx, (2004: 82)
– are examples commonly cited to emphasise the natural as the most basic state of human beings.
Such animal needs have two characteristic qualities: firstly, they exist in humans as tendencies
and abilities, i.e. as impulses; secondly, the fulfillment of these is found in objects outside one‘s
body. The act of eating, for example could be categorised as an impulse, whilst the feeling of
hunger fits to fulfillment of impulse through external objects.
As one cannot obtain all the objects of one‘s need, as animals and plants can, Marx finds man to
be a natural, embodied, sentient and objective being that is nonetheless limited and conditioned
and prone to suffering. Marx, (2004:140) Human beings, however, are not merely natural,
18
biological organisms, but – essentially in regards to development of alienation – they are also
social and historical beings, who change and transform themselves through their social activity.
Sayers, (1998: 152)
Species man holds in himself qualities uniquely his own. Man is a being for himself, a selfconscious being, who recognizes himself in others while understanding that the aims of one‘s
action are similar to those behind his peer‘s action:
[M]an makes his life activity itself as object of his will and consciousness.
He has a conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he is
completely identified. Conscious life activity distinguishes man from the
life activity of animals. Only for this reason is he a species-being. Or
rather, he is only a self-conscious being, i.e. his life is an object for him,
because he is a species being. Marx, (2004: 84)
Most importantly, man is aware of his own historical existence: he is conscious of having a past,
with its success and failures, as well as the possibilities that determine one‘s future. Moreover, if
the animal is one with its life activity, then man makes his life activity itself an object of his will
and consciousness. Hence Marx‘s statement: ―the whole of what is called world history in
nothing but the creation of man by human labor, and the emergence of nature of man.‖ Marx,
(2004:139) Furthermore, man confirms himself through his being in two ways. On the one hand,
he engages with the world in a unique way because of his physical body. On the other, man
manifests himself as a species being through activity of a kind, quality and pace that could only
be done by human beings. Ollman, (1976: 82)
This second aspect is important for two reasons. Firstly, man‘s unique production process and his
ability to produce universally are at the core of man‘s species life, distinguishing him from all
other animals. Marx himself explains: ―Productive life is, however, species life. It is life creating
life. In the type of life activity resides the whole character of species, it is species-character; and
free, conscious activity is the species-character of human being.‖ Marx, (2004: 84) Secondly,
man is only able to produce when free from physical need, whereas animals produce only in
accordance with that.
19
However, if powers are interchangeable parts of human nature and do not rely upon social
situations, and then it is with needs that the historical account of human nature appears. As
Ollman states: ―According to Marx, each stage in history creates its own distinctive needs in
man, and the passing to the next stage these needs disappear, along with their owners, to be
replaced by new people and new needs.‖ Ollman, (1976: 76)
Thus, the needs that appear in species life, unlike natural needs which are universal, are
determined by social situations and are subject to change throughout history. The necessities that
society insists upon are not natural to human beings, but are the creation of humans themselves;
capitalism is nothing else than a social order providing one more set of needs to man and the
obsession with private property is but an outstanding example of this.
Consumption creates the motive for production; it also creates the object
which is active in production as its determinant aim. If it is clear that
production offers consumption its external object, it is therefore equally
clear that consumption ideally posits the object of production as an
internal image, as a need, as drive and as purpose. It creates the objects of
production in a still subjective form. No production without a need. But
consumption reproduces the need. Marx, (1993: 91-92)
In general, we can see that Marx‘s understanding of human nature is a combination of natural
and species being: there are both, universal and particular, natural and social aspects to human
nature, but only through the productive process does man‘s true essence appear – man is alive
only as much as he is productive, as much as he grasps the world around him with his unique
powers. Marx, (2004:106)
Man without any relations to nature is a relation less void; without any
specifically human relation to nature, he is an animal; and without his
animal relations to nature, he is an animal; and without his animal
relations to nature, he is a dead human being – assuming of course that
these relations once existed, or else he would have never been alive to die.
Ollman, (1976:83)
20
Hegel‘s heritage is once again recognizable in Marx‘s understanding of human nature – both
thinkers picture human beings as capable of fully realizing themselves only in the freedom that
occurs once one has acknowledged one‘s true nature. Labour, being the central activity to
reaching freedom, is not just means to satisfaction of material needs, but is a fundamental part of
humanity‘s self-development process – that which provides the possibility to fully realize man‘s
species nature. As Marx states in Volume Three of Capital: ―The realm of freedom actually
begins only where labour, which is determined by necessity and mundane consideration, ceases;
thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual and material production.‖
Marx, (1978c: 441) The production process, which provides the possibility to create without that
creation being necessary for physical being, is true freedom that everyone aims at by nature –
true self- realization can be found in the relation between man and his product.
2.2.1.4 Alienation Theory
According to Marx, man that lives in a capitalist society has been separated from his natural
being and is subject to an economic system that does not provide him with the means for selfrealization. It is this malformation that is explained through the phenomenon of alienation –
characteristic of modernity and which no person living in modernity is free from. Ollman express
the core of the theory clearly: ―[it is] the intellectual construction in which Marx displays the
devastating effect of capitalist production on human beings, on their physical and mental states
and on the social processes which they are part.‖ Ollman, (1976: 131)
Marx‘s discussion of alienation can be divided into his implicit and explicit discussion of the
notion. In his explicit discussion, Marx introduces the key concepts of his understanding of
alienation, and when he introduces his grander framework, although alienation becomes an
implicit consideration, we can see that this understanding remains an inseparable part. Hence,
alienation is the foundational concept upon which Marx‘s further critiques towards his
contemporary economic system and its domination by surplus value develop. The notion of
alienation does not disappear from the later writings of Marx, therefore, but rather remains as an
inescapable aspect of the capitalist production process.
Marxist concept of alienation rises from capitalist society in which members have lost their
former status of division through their field of work and have been reduced to two classes:
21
property owners and property-less workers. In the historical development from craftsmen to
factory workers, owning capital has changed to becoming capital. Marx, (2004: 91) And thus, a
class-struggle driven society arises from the division of labour.
Workers are nothing more than a means to guarantee growth of property for an owner –
dehumanized means with no personal contact with the product of their own work. Whilst in precapitalist society everyone was able to trade with their work product, now they trade their work
for money – and with it any claim to own the product of their work. Furthermore, the production
process characteristically decreases the value of the worker: the more products one produces, the
more one put‘s oneself into one‘s creation, the less one is worth. In other words, the devaluation
of the human world increases in direct relation with the increase in value of the world of things.
The analysis of capitalist society begins with the investigation of economic fact: alienation of the
worker and his production. Marx‘s aim is to grasp the connection between the system of
alienation (production process) and the system of money. He expresses this through the
conceptual term – alienated labour – understanding of which should lead to further
understanding of both mere economic fact and also the reality in which it reveals itself. Marx,
(2004: 85)
This concept of alienated labour under capitalism Marx considers to have four characteristic
aspects:
Alienation from the object of labour results from the capitalist production process, in which
commodities have overtaken the production of necessities and labour is rewarded with wage.
Where in pre-capitalist society there was a clear connection between work and need, capitalism
primarily emphasizes the importance of production. Marx, (2004: 91) Hence, direct producers
have no control over their work product and the exchange process that it involves and are left
only their ability to work. Furthermore, just as with the product itself, personal attachment with
the production process is minimalized; none of tools, material or product belongs to the worker,
and they are rewarded only with the (abstract) wage in recompense.
At the same time, the object produced becomes independent from the labourer and in opposition
as an alien being, possessing a power of its own. Thus, the product is nothing else than an
22
objectification of labour, embodied in the object and turned into physical thing. The life that the
labourer puts into an object belongs no longer to him, but to the object itself:
The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor
becomes an object, assumes an external existence, but that it exists
independently, outside himself, and alien to him, and that it stands
opposed to him as an autonomous power. The life which he has given to
the object sets itself against him as an alien and hostile force. Marx, (2004:
80)
As the worker has lost the rights for the product of his labour, he gradually loses engagement
with the process by which he should give his life to a thing. And yet, the product becomes the
only guarantee of his existence.
The labourer is unable to create anything without the sensuous external world, which provides
the material by which his labour is realized. Nature thus provides means of existence in two
ways. Firstly, labour can only exist when there are objects upon which it can be exercised.
Secondly, it provides the means for the physical existence of the worker. So, the more the worker
appropriates the external world of sensuous nature for his labour, the more he deprives himself of
the means of existence. On the one hand, the sensuous external world becomes less an object
belonging to his labour. On the other, it becomes progressively less a means of the physical
substance of the worker.
This leads to the workers enslavement by the object – enabling the worker to exist both as
worker and as physical subject. ―The culmination of this enslavement is that he can only
maintain himself as physical subject so far as he is a worker, and that it is only a physical subject
that he is a worker.‖ Marx, (2004: 81)
Finally, the product of the worker‘s labour becomes an alien object that dominates him, and so
his relationship with the sensuous external world, and the natural world too, which provides
means to this production, becomes alien and hostile.
The second aspect of alienated labour – alienation from the activity of labour – rises from the
distorted character of man-product relations. If the first characteristic of alienated labour was
23
used to present a certain phenomenon characteristic to the capitalist production process, then this
second condition is brought into reality by the introduction of wage labour . Nonetheless,
alienation relates not only to the result of production, but is also a part of the process. The worker
alienates himself, not just through his standing in an alien relationship with the product of his
labour, but already through the act of production. Indeed, if the product is only an embodied state
of the whole working process, then alienation must appear already in the production.
Marx explains the inextricable relation between the alienating nature of the working process and
product as alien to producer in the following passage: ―Consequently, if the product of labor is
alienation, production itself must be active alienation – the alienation of activity and the activity
of alienation. The alienation of the object of labor merely summarizes the alienation in the
working activity.‖ Marx, (2004: 81-82)
The alienation of labour is determined chiefly by the externality of the labour that the worker is
engaged in – it does not become a part of his nature. There is no possibility to fulfil oneself
through the (alien) object‘s creation process, and the work becomes physically and mentally
exhaustive, leading to a sense of homelessness at work. Labour becomes forced, as one is not
satisfying one‘s own, but other‘s needs. ―External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is
a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Marx, (2004: 82)
The external character of the work concludes with the worker‘s recognition that one has no claim
to the work that one does – it belongs to some other person. ―If the product of labor does not
belong to the worker, but confronts him as an alien power, this can only be because it belongs to
a man other than the worker.‖ Marx, (2004: 86) Thus, in labour the worker is oppressed and
mistreated, which leads to his feeling unnatural in that process as he is unable to achieve selfrealization. Hence, only in his animal functions (eating, drinking and procreation) does man find
himself to be acting freely, whilst work is completely alien to him – i.e. man becomes animal
once again.
Through alienating labour, work becomes an activity of suffering; strength is reduced to
powerlessness, creation to emasculation. Man‘s natural ability to create, his active existence, is
now opposed to himself: it is the beginning of self-alienation.
24
Alienation from one‘s species-being – man‘s ability to see oneself as a part of community, while
also considering oneself to be present as a universal and consequently free being, is an
inescapable result of alienated labour which both alienates nature from man as well as alienates
man from his life activity. Man, therefore, becomes alienated from his species –communal(species) and individual life become separate and the latter becomes the purpose of the former.
Working life (labouring that does not lead to self-realization) now serves only to satisfy the
needs of individual life – i.e. the need to maintain physical existence. ―Consciousness, which
man has from his species, is transformed through alienation so that species life becomes only
means for him.‖ Marx, (2004: 85)
According to Marx, self-realization through creation is essential to human being, as it
distinguishes man from other species. Alienated labour, however, reverses this process and
makes man‘s creative activity only means for existence – a state giving rise to individualism, i.e.
individual based liberal capitalist society.
Alienated labor turns the species life of man, and also nature as his mental
species-property, into an alien being and into a means for his individual
existence. It alienated from man his own body, external nature, his mental
life and his human life. Marx, (2004: 85)
All the human characteristics have been removed: man‘s existence has become the purpose of his
work. As Ollman explains: ―Product and other men have gone the full distance, and man has
succeeded in becoming all that he is not.‖Ollman, (1976:152). Man becomes alienated from his
own body, external nature, mental life and human life in general. Marx, (2004: 85)
Alienation of ―man from man‖ is the direct consequence of the three prior aspects of alienated
labour – alienation from the product of one‘s labour, from his life activity (work) and from his
species life. That is to say, if one is alienated from oneself one is also alienated from other men.
Nevertheless, in an alienated state man manifests the same behaviour-pattern and standards to
others that are exhibited towards him, as Marx explains:
Every self-alienation of man, from himself and from nature, appears in the
relation which he postulates between other men and himself and nature.
In the real world of practice this self-alienation can only be expressed in
25
the real, practical relation of man to his fellow-men. The medium through
which alienation occurs itself is a practical one. Marx, (2004: 86)
Furthermore, the hostile relation between man and his product also directly relates to man‘s
alienation from other men. The product becomes owned by the capitalist, who supplies values
and qualities uncharacteristic to species being, and so the owner becomes a hostile force to the
worker. Therefore, as man, besides product creation, also produces and reproduces social
relationships then, step-by-step alienating himself yet more from other men, he constantly
recreates his alienated relation to other men.
2.2.2 Political Alienation
According to Marx, the political rests on the economic and is determined by it as a domain of
superstructure. Politics is the form that organizes the productive forces of economy, the real
material of society. Nevertheless politics also distorts the logic of economic development; it is a
frozen form of becoming. Political alienation constitutes the expression (itself alienated) of
economic alienation. Thus politics and the State appear as powers that are both alienated and
alienating.
2.2.2.1 The State
According to Hegel, the state is the highest realisation of human community on earth; the
highest form of human life if we take into account life-forms as a whole. The state in its fully
realised form reconciles the fully developed individual subjectivity and the universal. It is the
highest form of the objectification of Spirit which is essentially free. Since man as a rational
being has the capability of making the deliberate choice, he values freedom very highly which he
can realise only in the state. 'The state is the actuality of concrete freedom. But concrete freedom
consists in this, that personal individuality and its particular interests not only achieve their
complete development and gain explicit recognition for their right (as they do in the sphere of the
family and civil society) but, for one thing, they also pass over of their own accord into the
interest of the universal, and, for another thing, they know and will the universal; they ever
recognise it as their own substantive mind; they take it as their end and aim and are active in its
pursui (PR, 160, 260)
26
According to Hegel, it is only as members of a political and social order in a communitythat
men come to conceive and desire freedom. In the state, and its various institutions the individual
is universalized. The state accords protection and security to the individuals. Man 59 achieves his
social purposes and objectives within the state. This extension of the personal into universal does
not mean that individual loses his individual identity. It gives him freedom. Reyburn expounds it
well: 'Everything that builds up a man's self and provides a field for the powers thus constituted
is a means to freedom; and it is only in the state that man can find and fulfill his practical ends.
Necessity ... is hard and sad only when it is external; when that which contains the individual and
into which he passes is seen not to be another but his own substance, necessity becomes freedom
-- and this is the only freedom that counts. The restraints of public life are the articulations which
the state requires in order to attain its proper unity and organisation, and the citizen who is
conscious of his identity with the state is made free by them' (Reyburn 1921, 234-35).t' (PR, 160,
260).
Though Hegel speaks of the Spirit who to actualise and to perfect himself creates the world,
because 'without the world God is not God' (cited in Cohen 1982, 9); he also speaks of world as
existing only in and through finite minds, the human beings. Society seen in this light is thus the
product of human activity. Without human activity there could be no society and without society
there would not have been any realisation of human potentialities.
For Hegel the family and civil society are elements in a concrete and objective ethical system,
the partial variants of the whole order. Only the state is the full realisation of the idea of
Sittlichkeit; the last development in a series of rational social orders the state transcends the
partial and particular interests, and in it the common good of the community is realised. 'The
state is the actuality of the ethical Idea. It is ethical mind qua the substantial will manifest and
revealed to itself' (PR, 155, 257). The state is 'the actuality of the substantial will which it
possesses in the particular self-consciousness once that consciousness had been raised to the
consciousness of its universality' (PR, 155-56). Against the view that particular wills are real and
responsible for the state, this fundamental conception must be kept in mind that 'the objective
will is rationality implicit or in conception, whether it be recognised or not by individuals,
whether their whims are deliberately for it or not' (PR, 157, 258). The state is, as Taylor
elucidates, 'the manifestation of substantial will. It is the community in which the full rational
27
will is manifest in public life. The fully realised state reconciles the individual subjectivity and
the universal. It is concrete freedom' Taylor, (1987: 438).
Hegelian elaboration of the conception of freedom in the PR is related to man as a moral agent
who makes a rational and moral choice and who is not swayed only by his impulses and
appetites, which Hegel calls an arbitrary will (PR, 28, 17). The idea of freedom operates in the
ethical sphere of rational and moral will. Hegel says that 'if we hear it said that the definition of
freedom is the ability to do what we please, such an idea can only be taken to mean an utter
immaturity of thought, for it contains not an inkling of right, ethical life, and so forth' (PR, 27,
15) and that 'it is only as thinking intelligence that the will is genuinely a will and free' (PR, 30,
21). The ability to do what we choose to do rationally is possible only under an ethical order
which the state comes to embody. This rational will, as John Plamenatz mentions, does not
emerge in the privacy of an individual mind unconnected with other minds: 'It is the product of
life lived in society. There is therefore for Hegel (as there was for Plato and Rousseau) always a
close connection between the rationality of the individual will and the rationality of the social
and political order' Plamenatz, (1980: 219).
There is no doubt that Hegel's characterisation of the state as the supreme articulation of society
has a touch of the divine in Hegel's eyes. Taylor elaborates on this point thus: 'In order to realise
God's (Spirit's) fulfilment, man has to come to a vision of himself as part of a larger life. And
that requires that as a living being he be in fact integrated into a larger life. The state is the real
expression of that universal life which is the necessary embodiment ... for the vision of the
Absolute. In other words, it is essential to God's progress through the world that the state be'
Taylor, (1987: 366).
The Addition to 258 of PR has caused a misconception that Hegel by the deification of the state
advocated an authoritarian form of government. In the original German the sentence is as
follows: 'Esist der Gang Gottes in der Welt, dass der Staatist.' It has been variously translated and
interpreted into English as 'The existence of the state is the process of God upon earth' Kaufmann
(1970: 36), whereas Knox in his translation renders it thus: 'The march of God in the world, that
is what the state is' (PR, 279). To put the matter right, we can point out that the sentence
concerned was added by the posthumous editor, Eduard Gans, from the notebooks of Hegel's
students, in the 'Addition' of the PR; Hegel's own edition of the Rechtsphilosophie does not
28
mention it. As Walter Kaufmann shows, a correct translation of the sentence is: 'It is the way of
God with [literally: in] the world that there should be [literally: is] the state' Kaufmann, (1970:
4). What Hegel meant to convey was that the existence of the state is in no way a matter of
coincidence but, metaphorically speaking, rather a part of the divine plane, not a merely human
arbitrary artefact, and it is the philosopher's task to discover its reason, its raison d'être. John
Plamenatz mentions approvingly of an essay on the divinity of the state by M. Gregoire.
According to Gregoire, Hegel was apt to call anything divine which he regarded as the
manifestation of the high level of rational spirit. That Hegel's calling the state divine was in his
repudiation of the views of the social contract theorists who made the state a human device.
Hegel did not view the state as a contract, terminable at will. 'We are already citizens of the state
by birth. The rational end of man is life in the state, and if there is no state there, reason at once
demands that one be founded' (PR, 242, Addition to 75; see also Plamenatz, 1980: 243).
Whether Hegel can be accused of advocating an authoritarian, if not an outright totalitarian,
view of the state may be questionable but there is ample evidence of his minimizing the role of
the individual vis-a-vis the state. 'Though Hegel is not as illiberal as he is sometimes presented as
being, he is illiberal; he does play down the individual. He does sometimes come very close to
suggesting that, because society makes us rational and moral, we ought not to challenge
established laws and conventions. He also sometimes speaks as if the state stood to the citizen as
God the creator stands to His creature man. He insists so much that man owes everything to the
communities he belongs to, and above all to the state, that he seems to be suggesting, without
wishing to put it into crude words, that he also owes absolute obedience' Plamenatz, (1980: 243).
Meanwhile we must keep in view the fact that Hegel throughout this discussion is speaking of
the Idea of the state, the ideal essence of it and not any particular state. So far any historical state
is concerned Hegel does not hold it to be above criticism: 'The state is no work of art; it stands
on earth and so in the sphere of caprice, chance, and error, and bad behaviour may disfigure it in
many respects. But the ugliest of men, or a criminal, or an invalid, or a cripple, is still always a
living man. The affirmative, life, subsists despite his defects, and it is this affirmative factor
which is our theme here' (PR, 279, Addition to 258). It should also be kept in mind that Hegel's
theory of the state is not to be construed, as indicated above, as referring to any existing state.
Hegel's model or ideal construction of the state can best be located in his idea of the state and
29
any existing state cannot be anything but a mere approximation to the idea. But, as Walter
Kaufmann says, 'Hegel would distinguish between the Idea of the State, which he means when
he speaks of "the State", and the many states round us. But the idea, he claims, does not reside in
a Platonic heaven, but is present, more or less distorted, in these states. The philosopher should
neither immerse himself in the description and detailed analysis of various historical states, nor
turn his back on history to behold some inner vision: he should disentangle the rational core from
the web of history' Kaufmann, (1970:152-53).
The state in its fully realised form reconciles the fully developed individual subjectivity and the
universal. The state is the concrete freedom; 'not that freedom from all restraints which, at its
worst, culminates in anarchy, license, and bestiality, but, rather, man's freedom to develop his
humanity and to cultivate art, religion, and philosophy. He considers the state supreme among
human institutions because he would subordinate all such institutions to the highest spiritual
pursuits and because he believes that these are possible only in "the State" ' Kaufmann,
(1970:155).
Hegel's theory of the state, as Sabine observes, depends upon the peculiar nature of relationship,
as Hegel surmised between the state and civil society: 'The relation is at once one of contrast and
mutual dependence. The state as Hegel conceived it is no utilitarian institution, engaged in the
commonplace business of providing public services, administering the law, performing police
duties and adjusting industrial and economic interests. All these functions belong to civil society.
The state may indeed direct and regulate them as need arises, but it does not itself perform them'
Sabine, (1981:598). Whereas the civil society depends upon the state for supervision and moral
leadership, the state itself depends upon the civil society for accomplishing the moral purposes it
embodies.
2.2.2.2 Civil Society
Hegel's discussion of civil society in the PR and the distinction he made between civil society
and the state greatly influenced the theoretical activity of young Marx. In the subsequent history
of political thought, Hegel's contribution has proved to be a source of inspiration to many
theorists.
30
In 1962, Manfred Riedel argued that Hegel's separation of civil society from the state brought a
conceptual revolution. It had made an abrupt break with traditional political thought: 'What
Hegel, with the term civil society, raised to the consciousness of his time was nothing less than
the result of the modern revolution, the rise of a depoliticized society through the centralisation
of politics in the princely or the revolutionary state, and the shift of its point of gravity to the
economy, a change which this society experienced simultaneously in the industrial Revolution
and which found an expression in "political" or "national economy". It was in this process within
the European society that its "political" and "social" conditions were first separated, conditions
which before then, in the classical world of old politics, meant one and the same thing -"communit as civilissive politica", as Thomas Aquinas or "civil or political society", as John
Locke put it' (cited in Pelczynski, 1984:3-4).
Riedel points out that the phrase koinonia politike first used by Aristotle, was translated as
societascivilis which became along with its synonyms civitas and res publica, a general term for
an independent political entity or the state. It was in explicit contrast to the family or household
(societasdomestica). In classical political theory some sections of the population were excluded
from being members of the res publica or societascivilis. These have included at different times
slaves, serfs, artisans, domestic servants, women and children. Slaves, for instance, were
excluded from the membership of polis, but they could be members of the household (oikos).
Aristotle wrote: 'But a state is something more than investment; its purpose is not merely to
provide a living but to make a life that is worth living otherwise a state might be made up of
slaves or animals, and that is impossible, because slaves and animals are not free agents and do
not participate in the well-being' Aristotle, (1974:119).
The terms 'political' and 'civil' were used as being synonymous by late philosophers and writers
like Aquinas, Bodin, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke and Kant. But Hegel's division of ethical life in
family, civil society and the state put an end to the traditional dichotomy.
Hegel develops his theory of civil society when community is seen from the point of view of
classical political economy. He takes into account the historical developments within the sphere
of private interests in a complex modern world. The works of the British political economists
like Adam Smith and James Steuart and other eighteenth-century thinkers who had visualised
society as a universe of 'economic man', where everyone pursued his own self-interest, formed
31
the basis of Hegelian theory. The political economists' model of the free market is evident in
Hegel's definition of civil society: 'Civil society -- an association of members as self- subsistent
individuals in a universality which, because of their self-subsistence, is only abstract. Their
association is brought about by their needs, by the legal system -- the means to security of person
and property -- and by an external organisation for attaining their particular and common
interests' (PR, 110, 157).
Hegel was well aware of the economic structure of the industrial society and the role of labour in
the production. 'Alone among the German philosophers of his age,' writes Avineri, Hegel
realised the prime importance of the economic sphere in political, religious and cultural life and
tried to unravel the connection between what he later would call "civil society" and political life'
Avineri, (1972: 5).
Hegel had experienced three major political events in his life. First, in his early life, it was the
French Revolution. As a grown-up man, he saw the ascendancy of Napoleon and the extension
of his empire, and finally, there were the Prussian wars of liberation. These events, as Löwith
remarks, also determined the changes in his political thought: from a radical criticism of the
existing order, through recognition of Napoleon, to the justification of the Prussian bureaucratic
state (see Löwith, 1949:241). With the collapse of the Napoleonic empire, the youthful illusions
of Hegel had given way to a more sombre view of bourgeois society. Recalling the later period
of Hegel's life, Lukacs comments that 'it is characteristic of Hegel that his
philosophical
justification of the "estates" (i.e. of the class structure of civil society) becomes less ideological,
and much closer to a grasp of society's material foundations' (Lukacs 1975: 234).
In civil society relations between individuals, in pursuance of their economic interests are not as
members of family, nor as member of any ethical community but exclusively as men. It is a
sphere where men are related to each other as bearers of rights. Hegel says: 'A man counts as a
man in virtue of his humanity alone, not because he is a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, German,
Italian, etc.' (PR, 134: 209). Civil society appears to be an iniquitous system governed by the rule
of nature, the predominance of the strong, and the rule of force. 'Civil society is the battlefield
where everyone's individual private interest meets everyone else's' (PR, 189: 289). The dominant
concern in relationship with others is expressed thus: 'In civil society each member is his own
end, everything else is nothing to him. But except in contact with others he cannot attain the
32
whole compass of his ends, and therefore these others are the means to the end of the particular
member' (PR, 267, Addition to 182).
Within the economic sphere, civil society stands for universal egoism. Hegel calls it the positive
creation of individualism, the 'achievement of the modern world' (PR, 266, Addition to 182).
Drawing a distinction between the principle of civil society as a sphere of universal egoism
which exists in every society and its fully developed institutionalisation into a distinct and
differentiated social sphere, Avineri observes that 'it is the latter which is typical of modern
societies, where individual self-interest receives legitimization and is emancipated from the
religious and ethico-political considerations which until then had hampered the free play of
individual interests to their full extent' (Avineri 1972, 142).
But in the economic exchange which takes place in civil society to meet the needs of individuals
a system of interdependence is created. Individuals can meet their needs by co-operation with
others. They indirectly satisfy the needs and promote the interests of others. It leads to a system
of interdependence and the creation of a large framework of rules and institutions defining and
protecting the legal rights of person, property, contract and so on. 'In the course of actual
attainment of selfish ends ... there is formed a system of complete interdependence, wherein the
livelihood, happiness and legal status of one man is interwoven with the livelihood, happiness,
and rights of all. On this system, individual happiness, etc., depend, and only in this connected
system are they actualised and secured. This system may be prima facie regarded as external
state, the state based on need, the state as the Understanding envisages it' (PR, 123, 183). To
characterise civil society in the passage as 'the external state', 'the state based on need' and 'the
state as the Understanding envisages it', etc., Hegel in fact means that, while civil society is a
state, but it is one of inferior types when seen in relation to and contrasted with the state. Hegel's
description of civil society in this way, as Pelczynski observes, is that 'there is another, more
adequate mode of conceiving the state. The complex of activities, attitudes, rules and institutions
which make up "civil society" is only one aspect of the political and social life "abstracted" from
a wider, richer or more "concrete" system of a process of formal, abstract thinking which Hegel
calls the understanding' (Pelczynski 1971, 10). Thus it is apparent that even though civil society
precedes the state, it is in fact dependent upon the state for its existence and preservation (see
PR, 266, Addition to 182).
33
2.2.3 Cultural Alienation
Cultural alienation involves ―estrangement from one‘ language and history,‖ and it exemplifies
―the imposition of a European language on blacks in the Diaspora‖ (Bulhan, 188-89). According
to Fanon, ―to speak a language is to take on a world, a culture‖ (Black Skin…38). Bulhan
elaborates Fanon‘s theory by pointing out that ―the fact of having to speak nothing but the
other‘s language when this other was the conqueror, ruler, and oppressor was at once an
affirmation of him, his worldview, and his values; a concession to his framework; and an
estrangement from one‘s history, values, and outlook.‖ Bulhan further points out:
The imposition of European culture and language on blacks in the diaspora was
realized through massive violence, forcing the history, culture, and genealogy of
blacks into oblivion. Culture always has had an intimate, dialectical link with the
existence…. Cultural deracination of blacks was but the intellectual and emotional
counter part of economic enslavement. The middle passage uprooted bodies,
transporting them to alien lands. Cultural deracination dislocated psyche, imposing
an alien world view. (189)
2.2.4 Linguistic Alienation
Linguistic alienation is the result of colonial oppression in different forms, such as enslavement,
bondage and vanquishment. The most critical point in which linguistic alienation is delineated is
the structure of a place. According to Bill, Griffiths and Tiffin, (1989:9):
The most widely shared discursive practice within which this alienation can be
identified is the construction of ‗place‘. The gap which opens between the
experience of place and the language available to describe it forms a classic and all
pervasive feature of post-colonial texts. This gap occurs for those whose language
seems inadequate to describe a new place, for those whose language is
systematically destroyed by enslavement, and for those whose language has been
rendered unprivileged by the imposition of the language of a colonizing power.
Some admixture of one or other of these models can describe the situation of all
34
post-colonial societies. In each case a condition of alienation is inevitable until the
colonizing language has been replaced or appropriated as English.
Imperialism was a major impact in fetching a serious linguistic alienation toward a pre-colonial
culture that was put to an end by soldierly enslavement.
Although Rao and Achebe write from their own place and so have not suffered a
literal geographical displacement, they have to overcome an imposed gap resulting
from the linguistic displacement of the pre-colonial language by English. This
process occurs within a more comprehensive discourse of place and displacement in
the wider post-colonial context. Such alienation is shared by those whose
possession of English is indisputably ‗native‘ (in the sense of being possessed from
birth) yet who begin to feel alienated within its practice once its vocabulary,
categories, and codes are felt to be inadequate or inappropriate to describe the
fauna, the physical and geographical conditions, or the cultural practices they have
developed in a new land. The Canadian poet Joseph Howe, for instance, plucks his
picture of a moose from some repository of English nursery rhyme romanticism:
the gay moose in jocund gambol springs,
Cropping the foliage Nature round him flings.
(Howe 1874:100, as cited by Bill,
Griffiths and Tiffin, 1989:10)
2.3 Marx’s Conception of Man
Marx did not believe, as do many contemporary sociologists and psychologists, that there is no
such thing as the nature of man; that man at birth is like a blank sheet of paper, on which the
culture writes its text. Quite in contrast to this sociological relativism, Marx started out with the
idea that man qua man is a recognizable and ascertainable entity; that man can be defined as man
not only biologically, anatomically and physiologically, but also psychologically.
Of course, Marx was never tempted to assume that "human nature" was identical with that
particular expression of human nature prevalent in his own society. In arguing against Bentham,
Marx said:
35
"To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog nature. This nature
itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man,
he that would criticize all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the
principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with
human nature as modified in each historical epoch." Capital I, 1.c., p. 824.
It must be noted that this concept of human nature is not, for Marx -- as it was not either for
Hegel -an abstraction. It is the essence of man -- in contrast to the various forms of his historical
existence -- and, as Marx said, "the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each separate
individual." Capital I, 1.c., p. 668.
Marx‘s theory of estrangement is rooted directly in his theory of human nature.
Before
addressing the issue of what leads to estrangement, I will therefore examine the ways in
which Marx's theory depends on his definition of human nature.
When defining the characteristics that make man specifically human, Marx makes use of
two different starting points which yield quite different definitions of human nature. First, he
defines human nature using a biological model, and then a historical model. In the course of
the discussion here, it will become evident that Marx's theory of estrangement is based
primarily on the biological model. This is not to say that Marx was not interested in the
historical, for he used the historical model to counter the views of some of his most ardent
intellectual competitors, as is evident when one reads, for example, The German Ideology.
2.3.1 The Biological Model: Man versus Animal
The biological model of human nature is a continuous theme in Marx, appearing in both
his early and later works. The same is true with regard to Marx‘s historical model. He states
that what is unique to the human species from a biological point of view are the very
general ways in which human beings differ from animals. As is indicated by the currently
used definition homo sapiens (a term Marx does not tend to use but to which he would
probably have no objections), human beings are knowing beings with consciousness and the
ability to reflect upon themselves and their human and natural environment. As a result,
unlike the animals, human beings have a sense of history. And can anticipate the future. They
can consciously and willfully create and produce for a manifold of purposes, as individuals and
36
as a collective. Marx does not claim that his method (that is, isolating what is specifically
human by contrasting human beings with animals) is new. On the contrary, he maintains
that, since Aristotle and the Stoics, it has been common knowledge that human beings
have "intellect, emotion and will" (CW, 5, p. 511; MEW, 3, p. 500). Marx believes that his
premises with regard to the differences between human beings and animals are not arbitrary,
but rather are empirically verifiable: "The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary
ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the
imagination. With respect to the differences between man and the animals he states:
The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from
it. It is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of
his consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which
he directly merges. Conscious life-activity distinguishes man immediately from
animal life. Admittedly animals also produce.... But an animal only produces what it
immediately needs for itself or it‘s young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man
produces universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical
need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly
produces in freedom there from. An animal produces only itself, whilst man
reproduces the whole of nature. An animal‘s product belongs immediately to its
physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product. An animal forms objects
only in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it
belongs, whilst man knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the
object. Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty. Men
can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you
like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as
they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by
their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are
indirectly producing their material life. (CW, 3, pp. 276-2 77; MEW, EB, 1. T., p.
517), (CW, 5, p. 31; MEW, 3, p. 21).
37
2.3.2 The Historical Model: The Behavior of Individual Changes
Bentham ,using the principle of utility, arrived at a definition of human nature or ,''normal
man" (Normalmensch).Marx objects to this definition, arguing that Bentham‘s normal man is
a mere historical phenomenon. Therefore, in addition to his theory of general human nature,
Marx introduces a theory of specific human nature: Human nature as it is understood, in
addition to the criteria that distinguish human beings from animals, is accordingly seen to be
a function of history. Thus, what for Bentham is "normal man,'' that is, human nature as
such, is for Marx merely human nature as manifested in Bentham's historical period. With
Bentham, as with many other philosophers, especially the German idealists, Marx is quick
to point out that what is often seen to constitute immutable human nature is not
immutable, but represents human traits under certain historical circumstances only. While
Marx's biological model emphasizes the properties of human nature that are immutable (such
as intellect, consciousness, will, and emotion), his historical model points to the properties of
human nature that are subject to change. Marx illustrates this important distinction as follows:
But in any case, why should the Germans brag so loudly of their knowledge of
human essence, since their knowledge does not go beyond the three general
attributes,
intellect,
emotion
and
will, which have been fairly universally
recognised since the days of Aristotle and the Stoics. (CW, 5, pp. 511-512;
MEW, 3, p. 500).
He also criticizes Herr Karl Griin for his conception of human nature.
It is obvious too that this "whole man,'' "contained" in a single attribute of a
real individual and interpreted by the philosopher in terms of that attribute, is a
complete chimera. Anyway, what sort of man is this "man" who is not seen in
his real historical activity and existence, but can be deduced from the lobe of his
own ear, or from some other feature which distinguishes him from the animals?
38
Similarly, Marx criticizes Feuerbach:
Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man. But the essence of
man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the
ensemble of the social relations.
Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is hence obliged:
To abstract from the historical process and to define the religious sentiment
(Gemut) by itself, and to presuppose an abstract-isolated human individual (CW,
5, pp. 7-8; MEW, 3, p. 6).
We can see that Marx accepts a biological definition of human nature, but, as is clear from
his comment on Herr Grlin, this definition is not sufficient to understand other aspects of
human nature. Thus, he introduces the notion that all the aspects of human nature that
cannot be derived from a comparison of human beings with animals can be understood by
seeing them in a historical perspective.
39
CHAPTER THREE
Some aspects of Alienation depicted in Half a Life
3.1 Introduction
This section includes summary of the novel and some important aspects of alienation that are
reflected in Naipaul‘s Half a Life. The novel is a story of alienation and rootlessnes. It also
comprises themes of displacement, exile, the quest for identity and diaspora. Willie Chandran is
the protagonist in the story. A strife of alienation has engulfed him with other social and cultural
problems. During the course of his exile to the places he hasn‘t ever known, he encounters a
great deal of problems of placelessness, selflessness and identity crisis. The student researcher
has exerted all his effort to explain the troubles of alienation that suffer the protagonist in this
part.
3.2 Plot Summary of Half a Life
Half a Life is a story of alienation. The story is set in India, Africa and Europe, to be more
specifically, in London, Berlin and Portugal. Willie has a Brahmin father and a Dalit mother. His
father Sunderland was born in the highest caste of India: Brahmin. In response to Gandhi‘s call,
he married a woman at lower caste. Willie‘s father was meant to attend a professional school and
to marry the daughter of his college principal. However, he decided to rebel against his Brahman
family by taking up with a black, low-caste girl. Since he did not love or even like the woman he
had chosen, his home life was miserable. Realizing that their two mixed-race children, Willie
and Sarojini, had no future in India, the elder Chandran tried to obtain a college scholarship for
his son by contacting English visitors to India with whom he had become casually acquainted,
including the writer W. Somerset Maugham, for whom Willie was named. However, either his
pleas were ignored or, as in Maugham‘s case, received a perfunctory response.Throughout the
novel, Naipaul subtly uses names, which are after all the first clue to a stranger‘s background, to
convey cultural affiliation or estrangement among the characters. The novel in fact opens with
Willie asking his father why his middle name is Somerset, because his classmates make fun of it.
The mixed sources of his names foreshadow his fate in the story.
40
Through his English contacts, the father secures for Willie a scholarship at an obscure teachers‘
college in London. Upon arrival, Willie immediately discovers two devastating facts. First, his
father‘s English friends really want nothing to do with him. Second, although well schooled in
English language and literature, Willie is worse off than a child in English society. He must learn
the simplest things, such as how to make a request, and he constantly has to turn to
encyclopedias to understand common bits of history and custom. He finds himself anchorless.
His normal desires as a young man—his ambition and sexuality—have no reliable context for
expression. As one chapter title puts it, he needs ―translation.‖
3.3 Cultural Alienation
Half a Life is a record of Willie Chandran‘s quest for identity and the feeling of rootlessness.
Willie Chandran asked his father one day, ―Why is my middle name Somerset? The boys at
school have just found out, and they are mocking me.‖ (Half a Life p.1) .These are the opening
lines of the novel. Right at the very beginning there is an implication of perspective which
reflects the search for identity and roots as his middle name sounds alien. Willie Chandran feels
rootless as the students make fun of him at school. The name Somerset is borrowed one. It
indicates half of his name is not his own. It implies that people are half-lived and half realized.
Willie‘s story is set in post-independent India and it goes to London from there to Africa. As
Willie questions his father why his name was after a famous English writer, his father tells him a
story and it takes first thirty five pages and remaining pages are about his struggle for life in
London and Africa.
Willie Chandran and his sister Sarojini grow up despising parents especially their father. He was
bitterly unhappy to stay in India. He managed to get scholarship in a second grade college in
London and went there so that he could discover himself in London but ironically in his search
for completeness he comes aware of his inadequacies. He even loses half of his life that was
within his reach. Thousands of miles from home, he begins to sense the condescension and
indifference with which the British treated his father, and disdain gradually metamorphosis into
empathy.
41
Willie was lost in London for a while. The education that he was getting was absolutely devoid
of perspectives. He pursues everything half-heartedly. He feels like a fish out of water as he
could not break away from conventional barriers such as culture and tradition:
And just as he ate without pleasure, so, with a kind of blindness, he did
what the lecturers and tutors asked of him, read the books and articles and
did the essays. He was unanchored, with no idea of what lay ahead. (p.58)
This situation unfolds before him a complicated picture which relates to his roots. Culture
alienation seems to be in Willies blood. Then his restless soul yearns for an anchor. Half-ness of
his personality, the incompleteness of his life for all of which moves with despise for his father
and blames for the half-status that he has been accorded. Willie fails to see the dilemma of his
father as a youth and also does not realize that his father has become victim to the circumstances.
His father tried to create an image but lost his identity. Oscar Handling says that the history of
immigration is the history of alienation and its consequences….. For every freedom won,
tradition lost. For every second generation assimilated a first generation in a way or the other
spurned. For the gains of goods and services, an identity lost, and uncertainly found.
For a while Willie seems to have found his ground when all of a sudden he comes to realize that
he could not rebel that distance from his roots which gave him freedom without asking. For his
identity in a different world Willie projects a borrowed, make-believe identity and venture to
survive:
He spoke of his mother as belonging to ancient Christian community of
the sub-continent, a community almost as old as Christianity itself. He
kept his father as Brahmin. He made his father‘s father a courtier. So
playing with words he began to re-make himself. (p. 61)
Willie meets different kinds of people in the process settling down in London. All those people
are leading a half-life in their own way. One of such people is Percy Cato from Jamaica of a
mixed parentage and he was more brown than black. Percy also in the same bottomless sea of
multiculturalism and he is ashamed of his background. Instead of presenting facts he makes
fiction and says to Willie that his father went to Panama as a Clerk:
42
He was a Clerk. You know those people over there. They can‘t read and
write at all. Willie thought, He is lying. That is a foolish story. His father
went there as a Laborer. He would have been in one of the gangs holding
his pickaxe before him on the ground like others. (p. 62)
Percy Cato is a fashion-loving guy. He loves clothes. He always wears a suit and tie. His shirt
collar is always clean and starched and stiff, and his shoes always polished, with new looking
insteps and heels. They are very nice and solid. This excessive alertness about fashion seems to
take its origin from the need to hide his not so ambitious background. Their fictional recreation
of these lives as well the sense of dressing up provides these exiles a shelter from realties. Willie
Chandran is a man doomed to live under a shadow. His cultural background and his awareness of
his incompleteness has brought inhibition.
In his bid to survive Willie Chandran adopts Notting Hill Culture. The Bohemian Culture of
Notting Hill is alien to Willie even then he adopts it. The freedom he wants to enjoy in London is
unsatisfactory to him. The girls with whom he sleeps are not his friends but lovers of his friends.
Willie keeps planning to declare his love before Percy and the world, when June marries her
childhood friend leaving both Percy and Willie in the lurch, Perdate who happens to be Richard‘s
friend leaves Willies side after frustrated experience of one night.
3.4 Linguistic Alienation
Existence is meaningless unless it is experienced appropriately and language is the tool and the
power of expression. Displacement brings dispossession of this power which aggravates the
sense of alienation. The immigrant is always at a disadvantage in a foreign land and his escape
depends on the degree of his adaptability to that which is essentially alien. Immigration threatens
with the loss of heritage to preserve, which an emigrant tries desperately to stick to his heritage,
food and language.
Loss of proper language becomes even more ironical in view of the fact that Willie is an
emerging writer who is very existent and dependent on his language. With his remigration to
Africa Willie‘s voice itself becomes a prey to despotic forces. While travelling to Ana‘s African
country from Southampton Willies mind is occupied by confusion as such brings about:
43
He wondered whether he would be able to hold onto his own Language.
He wondered whether he would forget his English Willie was trying to
deal with knowledge that had come to him on the ship that his home
language had almost gone. (p.132).
Naipaul himself is a believer of the fact that identity is not given rather constructed. The name of
a person more or less constructs his identity. The middle of Willie Somerset Chandran‘s name
Somerset describes Homi Bhaba‘s concept of ―mimicry‖, (2005:90), the efforts of colonized
people to be like the colonizers as in case of Indian people, they try to imitate the Britishers.
Homi K. Bhaba in his The Location of Culture says ―In mimicry, the representation of identity
and meaning is rearticulatedalong the axis of metonymy‖, (2005:90). The process of rearticulation of representation of identity just refers to mere copying of the dominated ideologies.
While imitating the dominated ideologies, one can copy the other thing, but sometimes it
happens at the expense of loss of one‘s own originality. This is what happens in the process of
one‘s mere imitation of the Western frames. This very process of naming then leads to the
process of misnaming. This is an indication of linguistic alienation.
3.5. Political Alienation
One gains national identity by the State or country in which s/he lives. Sometimes‖ Social
organizations and social identities may be larger than the boundaries of states and may have
power over them‖ Hall & John, (1997:2). The state or its institutions may not be able to control
all the social groups in its territory with equal authority. State can be seen as a self-governing
political entity that is defined by particular geographical boundaries, shared history and a
common culture. Nevertheless, the idea of the ‗post-colonial‘ nation-state has become
problematic and controversial. Still it is a significant way of defining political identity in the
contemporary world. Bill Ashcroft in his article ―Beyond the Nation: Post-Colonial Hope‖
observes:
The nation-state has been critiqued in post-colonial analysis largely
because the post-independence, post colonized nation, that wonderful
utopian idea, proved to be a focus of exclusion and division rather than
44
unity; perpetuating the class divisions of the colonial state rather than
liberating national subjects. (Ashcroft, 2009)
V.S. Naipaul has delineated the effects of post colonialism and orientalist thought on the citizens
of the third world. His protagonist Willie Chandran in Half a Life faces the effects of migration
in this postcolonial world. ―To be Portuguese living in Africa, to be a Caribbean man in London,
to be an Indian woman married to a German man, to be a Brahmin married to a ―backward‖ – all
of these mixed-up conditions, Naipaul suggests, lead to ‗half a life‘‖ (Walkowitz 231).
The protagonist of Naipaul‘s Half a Life, Willie Somerset Chandran, is an Indian by birth, whose
father is a Brahmin and mother is a Dalit. Willie Chandran has become a mouthpiece for
innumerable migrants who are in the continuous process of loss. Willie and his father‘s
irresistible desire for modernity leading to Willie‘s migration bequeath pain of exile and the
anxiety of being a foreigner. The borrowed part of Willie‘s name ―Somerset‖ (1), shows the vain
efforts of the colonized people to fit themselves in the provided frames.
Half a Life can be seen as a study in estrangement and inner exile. It is a novel of displacement
and identity quest of its main character Willie. Like Naipaul‘s many other works, this novel also
has some autobiographical features. Willie is trying to find a particular identity, and certain place
in the world to which he can call his own. His up rootedness and displacement is responsible for
making him an exiled Indian.
Another thematic concern of the novel is the harsh effects of colonialism, especially on the
minds of Indian people. In the postcolonial world, people who are once oppressed are left to lead
half-lives ―Willie is the most fitting example of this halfness of life‖ Vishnu, (2005: 268).
Almost all the characters of Naipaul are striving for the fullness and meaning of their lives.
Ashwini Kumar Vishnu in his critique of Half a Life: A Reading in Sense, Sensibility and
Sensuality‖ relates:
Percy Cato, Marcus, Graca, Ana, Sarojini, Jacinto, Ricardo, Carla, the
Noronhas, the Correias, Aivaroet. al. are all searching for the fullness of
their lives. In this quest for fullness and self-realization they find
45
themselves clamped to unforeseen situations. Having no other choices
they continue to thrive on whatever comes on their way. (268)
Postcolonial discourses talk about the location of culture. ―In every country of the world there
are climbers, ―the ones who forget who they are,‖ and, in contrast to them, ―the ones who
remember where they came from‖ Fanon, (1963:24). Willie is not able to get solace, first inhis
own hometown. Then his efforts of befitting himself in foreign cultures proved useless. His
relations with borrowed girlfriends Serafina, June and Gracie, the wife of the new manager are
very much shorter lived. His relations with Graca create complexities in his life. Ana comes to
know about it. It sets another background for his homelessness. In this process he really forgets
what Fanon calls who he is. Willie says:
When Ana came to the hospital courage came to me, and I told her I
wanted to divorce her. When she came back later I said to her, ―I am forty
one. I am tired of living your life.‖ ―You wanted it, Willie. You asked. I
had to think about it‖ (Half a Life, 227).
When Willie asks Ana about the divorce, she realizes that she cannot decide it immediately. But
one thing is certain that both of them are not happy with each other. Willie, Percy Cato, Ana,
Willie‘s father, mother, Graca, all are leading half-lives. Even those who seem to be living their
own lives, such as Ana, declares that "perhaps it wasn't my life either" (Half a Life, 227).
Willie comes to the figure of the Postcolonial migrant intellectual signifying a universal
condition of hybridity. Homi K. Bhaba's view on the migrant experience in Postcolonial world
can be recalled in this context:
Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through
the repetition of discriminatory identity effects. It displays the necessary
deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and
domination.Homi, (2005:112)
Displacement itself heralds the discrimination. Willie's displacement and his mimicry of the
English culture are very much like his more and more up rootedness. The title of the novel Half a
Life is completely appropriate for describing the life of a person who moves from one place to
46
another in the search of a particular identity and meaning of life. But he finds himself confused
through the suffering of alienation.
Due to the crisis in Willie‘s life, Willie himself is not leading his own life rather the borrowed
one. Ana is also like an extension of Willie‘s own image. In the company of Willie, she also
leads a half-life or hopes to borrow a life, and never to live the life to the full. Firstly Willie‘s
father, his mother, then Willie in India and later on in London and in Africa, even Ana, being a
mixed caste person and Graca, all are leading dual lives or are caught between two identities.
The half-lives of all these characters of the novel fully substantiate the title of the novel.
The title Half a Life, is justified not only because Willie is close to fifty when he leaves Ana and
Africa, but also because, as he tells Ana, he spent all his mature years trying tograb a life he
could call his own, in the knowledge that the life that was given to him had become
unbelievable. Nayak, (2005:260)
3.6 Social Alienation
Naipaul‘s protagonist shares a common feeling of alienation with many protagonists of now
days. J. M. Coetzee‘s Youth also has the same protagonist as Naipaul‘s Willie is alienated from
the society he inherits, and the culture in which he tries to assimilate himself. ―One of the most
striking similarities between Naipaul‘s main character Willie Chandran in Half a Life and John,
the autobiographical figure in Coetzee‘s Youth, is that they are in a constant state of alienation
from their feelings‖ Dooley, (2003:74). Willie falls in love so many times, buthis feeling of
alienation leads his inability to feel that he belongs to anywhere and even with anyone else. In
Youth John faces the same problems. He also feels alienated from the society and is not able to
share amiable relations with his girlfriends. ―If John returns to South Africa he will be stifled, but
if Willie returns to India he will return to nothing: to a life of blankness and meaningless ritual‖
Dooley, (2003:79).
According to Tajfel (1981) and Turner‘s (1984) theory of social identity, individuals identify the
group they are members of as the ‗ingroup‘ and others and others as the ‗outgroup‘. Individuals
experience positive self-concepts and high self-esteem if they feel the group to which they
belong is superior in status; in contrast, they have negative self-concepts and low self-esteem if
they feel they are in the low-status group.
47
In Half a Life, Willie was born in a period of social transformation. During this period, he
witnessed a contest between the two cultures of his Indian homeland and British. Under British
rule, Indian social structures had been transformed from a hierarchical Hindu Society into one in
which freedoms and new opportunities were encouraged and imposed on Indians as new social
norms and values. The contrast of the two cultures resulted in Willie‘s negative perception of his
Indian culture and positive cognition to to the Western culture. He perceived his Indian
homeland as the negative ‗ingroup‘ resulting in his low self-esteem but the Western world as the
positive ‗outgroup‘.
Willie‘s negative self-conception was caused by the feeling of oppression at his inferior status in
the Hindu caste system. In Hinduism, the caste system played a crucial role in determining the
social and economic status of people. They were socially alienated, distinguished and ranked into
classes, and in each class, they were restricted to doing particular kinds of works. Moreover,
those who were born of mixed caste would suffer from social alienation; they would be branded
as backward and restricted in acquiring rights and opportunities. Willie, born of the mixed
parentage between a Brahmin standing at the top of society and a low-caste woman, had
experience the pain of social alienation; he was categorized as backward and outcast from
society. Situated in the lowest class of society, Willie underwent traumatic experiences from the
caste system; including studying at a mission school of Christian missionaries because no school
of any caste would accept him as a student.
Willie‘s sufferings from social alienation in the caste system humiliated his father, who he
blamed as the cause of his depressing life. He despsied his father and had no pride in his
Brahmin status. At mission school, when asked what his father did, he felt ashamed and reluctant
to answer that his father was a Brahmin: ―But now when the question was put to him, Willie
found he didn‘t know what to say about his father‘s business. He also found he was ashamed‖
(HL, 37)
He expressed his pain and anger toward his parents through his English composition: his caste
opression was expressed in the characters of the king and a begar-maid. These symbolized his
father, a higher status man, and his mother, a lower status woman, respectively. The story ended
in trajedy – the king was killed by his son to eliminate his shame and the insults of others. The
48
story demonstrated that he absolutely had no pride in his origins. In his view, caste opression was
the major cause of his suffering.
In contrast to the negative feeling he had toward Indian society, Willie had positive perceptions
of Western culture. Going back to Turner and Tajfel, a positive self-concept of individuals
derives from being a member of the superior-status group. New freedoms and opportunities
given to him at mission school contributed to Willie‘s positive picture of the Western world. In
this new world he felt relieved to live as it helped him feel like a new person with a new, higher
status: ―He understood more about the pupils in the school. He understood that to go to the
mission school was to be branded, and he began to look at his mother from more and more of a
distance. The more he bacame successful at school – and he was better than his fellows – the
greater that distance grew‖ (HL, 39) Willie‘s positive perception of the new society of the
Westerners was having a great impact on his mind. It was a new world of superior-status in
which he was fully accepted as a member. It had been kept in his awareness that the freedom in
the new world of the Westerners could help him leave his grievous feeling of inferior status in
the old world of Indian society. He had learnt that as long as he was the best among others, he
could gain acceptance as a new person with a new status.
Since his positive initial sensation of a new culture, Willie hoped it might help him escape the
agonizing experience of his backward status in the old culture. So Willie dreamed of becoming a
missionary like his Canadian teacher: ―He began to long to go to Canada, where his teachers
came from. He even began to think he might adopt their religion and become like them and
travel the world the world teaching‖ (HL, 39). The statement revealed that to go to Canada where
his teacher came from was a way to liberate himself from a caste oppression he had been
suffering. In his perception, it was a place that could give him opportunity to present himself as
one accepted by others as when he was at mission school. However, despite his dreams of going
abroad, Willie, later realized England as the home of Imperial rule that greatly affected his
homeland, India.
49
Conclusion
In general in the novel, Naipaul presents characters who are products of a racial and cultural mix
and shows how they struggle to find their identity in the multi-cultural society they live in. In
general, these characters tend to deny one or more racial characteristics in order to become
―more respectable,‖ in their estimation. However, they eventually discover that their identity
cannot be fixed because they are the fruits of multiple cultures. All through the novel, Willie is
drifting without a solid and fixed identity. His identity is multiple, unified, and changing. He
cannot try to achieve one fixed identity because of his multi-background. The novel has three
settings: first there is post-independence India, then London, and finally pre-independence
Africa. All three are places that Naipaul can identify with. However, these locations seem to
signify different meanings in the novel. India and Africa are unclear and confused; for the writer,
England is firm and stable, while others regions can be relegated to haziness. In the narrative
Willie‘spreconceived nation is proved false. Like Naipaul, Willie initially thinks of London as a
―solid‖ place; however, he senses that he is still in limbo as a marginalized wanderer in the big
city.Caught up inthis limbo, Willie the Indian immigrant loses not only his native cultural
heritage but also his sense of place. He identifies neither with his homeland, an old world, nor
with the new world he desires. In the 1950s, Willie moves to London and drifts into bohemian
circles. Feeling lost, he half-heartedly faces his education at school: ―the learning he was being
given was like the food he was eating, without savour‖ (HL 58).
Worst of all, Willie cannot face his real ancestral history, his true genealogy. He employs his
imagination to shape a make-believe identity and tries to live behind its mask ―he adopted certain
things he had read.. .it exited him and began to give him a feeling of power‖. (HL, 2001)
Likewise, Percy Cato, ―a Jamaican of mixed parentage who was more brown than black,‖ (HL
61) falsely fabricates his family history. He is in reality Willie‘s shadow. He misleads Willie to
believe that his father is a clerk in Panama; in fact, his father went there ―as a labourer‖ (HL 62).
Willie‘s and Percy‘s fictional recreations only seem to end up cheating themselves; they are an
escape from an unbearable reality. Their make-believe identities are their performances. The
creation of identity here has doubled meanings. Apparently, Willie seems to forsake his Indian
traditionand family history. It is his loss of cultural heritage. Even so, when he looks back on his
50
life, he will understand his loss of cultural heritage at the stage of being in London. On the other
hand, his performance of creatingidentity displays Homi Bhabha‘s so-called ―the third space.‖
He constructs his own subjectivity in London by learning to create his identity. The content of
the third space is what Bhabha called ―hybridity,‖ through which other, non-Western-centric
positions may emerge to articulate and set up ―new structures of authority, new political
initiatives.‖ The process of hybridity thus produces ―something different, something new, and
unrecognizable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representations‖ (Identity 207-221).
In England, Willie is continually drifting: ―he was unanchored, with no idea of what lay ahead.
He still has no idea of the scale of things, no idea of historical time or even of distance‖ (HL,
58). He intends to discover his own identity. Finally, he apprehends that the construction of
subjectivity can be created freely: ―Willie began to understand that he was free to present himself
as he wished. He could, as it were, write his own revolution. The possibilities were dizzying. He
could, within reason, remake himself and his past and his ancestry‖ (HL, 60). Willie‘s identity is
in between, subject to change. Indeed, to some degree it is true for Willie, in this increasingly
complex, culturally diverse and ambiguous world, that his identity has become a condition that is
not given but that he must continually negotiate a new, construct or create afresh.Thus, Willie
may construct the inevitably unfixed identities of place.
Failing to obtain a concrete place of his own in London, Willie does not know where he is going.
He can ―only go back to India, and he does not want that‖ (HL, 21). The cultural identities focus
on searching for a new route and creating new meaning in the flow.Willie must undergo the
journey of travelling towards his self identity. Willie decides to go to Africa with Ana, the first
woman who has admired his writing. Later, he marries Ana, who is of mixed Portuguese-African
descent. Willie follows her to her inherited estate in an attempt to make a new beginning. In his
wife‘s home country the colonial system is gradually breaking down. By this I can conclude
Willie remains a stranger and outsider in this country, just as in India and London; indeed, now
he suffers an even greater sense of alienation. He does not want to stay here long:
I don‘t know where I am. I don‘t think I can pick my way back. I don‘t
ever want this view to become familiar. I must not unpack. I must never
behave as though I am staying. (HL, 135)
51
In Africa, then, Willie does not have a sense of belongingness. He feels he is ―nowhere.‖
Ironically, he stays here for eighteen years. In London, at least, he was a writer known as Willie
Chandran, but in Africa he becomes merely ―Ana‘s London Man‖ (HL 145). His only
consolation is that he ironically discovers an affinity with ―half-and-half friends‖ (HL 169) in
this ―half-and-half world‖ (HL160). These friends regard themselves as ―the second rank‖ (HL
160). The exiled people share Willie‘s sense of loss, disorientation, and dereliction. Through
their images ofreflection, he gets epiphany to understand that, by employing the perspective of
the ―other,‖ he becomes even more trapped. Furthermore, immigrants develop a sense of notbelonging in a new and alien world on account of the loss of their native language. From the
perspectives of both linguistic and cultural alienation, losing one‘s original language entails
theloss of one‘s original culture and indigenous identity.From India through London toAfrica,
Willie is constantly drifting from one place to another, and losing his native language. Educated
in London, he handlesEnglish very well. He becomes a writer in London and achieves a certain
public status. Yet in Africa he is forced to communicate in another language. So, I can state that
He is confused about this linguistic shift during his journey from Southampton to Ana‘s African
country: ―. .that his home language had almost gone, that his English was going, that he had no
proper language left, no gift of expression‖ (HL, 132).
It is quite ironic that English, the language Willie loses, is his ―proper language‖ as a writer in
London, since he once was seen there as ―a subversive new voice from the subcontinent‖ (HL
122). When a writer loses the language he is used to writing in, he is truly silenced and deprived
of his power. Here we see the significance of English as a universal language since this means it
is also the language of the diaspora; this imperial language, as lingua franca, is we might say
necessary evil. Indentifying with the imperial language, as in a sense he is forced to do, means
man‘s assimilation to the empire. The preservation of one‘s original language, one‘s mother
tongue while learning the imperial language is the mostimportant task for immigrants, migrants,
colonial subjects. At his adolescence, Willie intends to master English fabricating his ancestral
and cultural history with the power of English usage, Willie can write back to the imperial power
and create his own position of place in the future, just like Bhabha‘s theory of mimicry. After
staying in Africa for one year, Willie witnesses his ―half-and-half friends‖ who intend to bleach
their identities ―that the world I had entered was only a half-and-half world, that many of the
52
people who were our friends considered themselves, deep down, people of the second rank.
They were not fully Portuguese, and that was where their own ambition lay (HL, 160-161).
Through his objective observation, he consciously understands that he shares the homogenous
cultural heritage and loss with them. Originally, he intended to bleach his family history and
cultural roots; however, Willie discovers his loss of his precious cultural background when he
looks back on his journey from India, England and then to Africa. Thus, he finds his cultural
heritage and desires to construct his subjectivity. Finally, he decides to end his wandering.
Having lived half a life in Africa for eighteen years, there, Willie consciously senses his ―loss‖ in
this new land, especially after slipping ―on the front steps of the estate house‖ (HL, 135). At this
moment he has an epiphany living with Ana in Africa only mirrors for him the intrinsic
limitations of his half life. This self-realization forces him to get back the time he has wasted.
Therefore, he decides to leave Ana in the hope of discovering his own true identity, . . ―.I cannot
live your life any more. I want to live my own. I must stop living your life here.‖(HL, 2001)
He makes a decision to courageouslyface any possible challenge in the future. After leaving
away from Africa, Willie goes to Germany where his sister lives. He sees Tamil boys who raise
funds for the great Tamil war on the street: ―they have proclaimed who they are and they
arerisking everything for it. I have been hidingfrom myself. I have risked nothing. And now the
best part of my life is over‖ (HL, 138).
In conclusion, Willie deeply realizes that he mustseize the time to construct his subjectivity
because he has spent too much time leading a life of escapism. Willie is looking forward to start
a new life with the future half of his life. The rest of his story is left open: Naipaul leaves an
imaginative space for his readers. Willie will continue to search for his identity and a place of his
own in the world. In the process of constructing subjectivity, Willie confronts the sense of
placelessness and discovers that he cannot create a fixed identity. He therefore comprehends that
identity is not stable but created in the process just like the assertion of the post-colonial
discourse. Willie will obtain broaden and more multiple perspectives to examine his life. His
identity making will continue in process. Finally, Willie will recreate a new sense of place, thus
of self, through a profound acceptance and ―working through‖ his own position as a permanent
exile.
53
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Declaration
I, the undersigned, declare that this thesis is my work and has not been presented before
to any University. Moreover, I declare that all the sources of materials used for this thesis have
been duly acknowledged.
Name Theodros Shewangizaw
University:
Signature ________________________
Addis Ababa University
College of Humanities, Language Studies and Journalism & Comm.
Department of Foreign Language and Literatures
Date of Submission: June, 2015
This thesis has been submitted for examination with my approval as a University
advisor.
Name:___________________________________________
Signature:________________________________________
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