Igenlode Wordsmith

I'm amused to see that the final section of Dorothy L.Sayers' "The Mind of the Maker" has apparently been described by reviewers both as condemning capitalism and as an exposé of socialism, thus indicating that the reader is apt to see in it precisely what he puts there himself...

The religious aspect, I'm afraid, leaves me stone cold( Read more... )

Shorn of its religious trappings, however, the argument of the final chapters is essentially that of William Morris, Tom Rolt, et al. -- that the human being is by nature an artist who needs to express himself in his work, whatever that may be, and that by turning a world of craftsmen into a world of mindless machine-servants we have created widespread alienation and dissatisfaction.( Read more... )

Sayers' argument is that the activity of creation in some form or another is a primary human need; that a worker should take pride in what he produces and do it with integrity, whether that be a well-run household or a political negotiation or a setting for a gemstone or a piece of computer software. "Yet the integrity of the work—the stipulation that it shall be both worth doing and well done— rarely figures in any scheme for an ordered society".

Which is of course neither a leftwing nor a rightwing attitude, but an artistic one.

Rereading Dorothy L. Sayers' "The Mind of the Maker" -- I can feel my brain-cells straining. (And since she states that it is written from the point of view of a working novelist about Christian doctrine without in any way making a statement about the author's own belief in that doctrine, I am reading it in the same light.)

Idea, Energy, Power: ( Idea is the concept, Energy is the work of communicating it, Power is the reader's reaction )