by Saul Bellow
On an occasion like this I have no appetite for polemics. We all know what it is to be tired of “characters.” Human types have become false and boring. D. H. Lawrence put it early in the century that we human beings, our instincts damaged by puritanism, no longer care for—worse, have become physically repulsive to—one another. “The sympathetic heart is broken,” he said. “We stink in each other’s nostrils.” Besides, in Europe the power of the classics has for centuries been so great that every country has its “identifiable personalities” derived from Molière, Racine, Dickens, or Balzac. An awful phenomenon. Perhaps this is connected with the wonderful French saying: “S’il y a un caractère, il est mauvais.” It makes one think that the unoriginal human race tends to borrow what it needs from sources already at hand, much as new cities have often been made from the rubble of old ones. The viewpoint is perhaps confirmed by the psychoanalytic conception of character—that it is an ugly, rigid formation, something to be resigned to, nothing to be embraced with joy. Totalitarian ideologies, too, have attacked individualism, sometimes identifying character with property. There is a hint of this in M. Robbe-Grillet’s argument. Rejection of personality, bad masks, boring forms of being, have had political results.
But this is not my subject; what I am interested in here is the question of the artist’s priorities. Is it necessary or even desirable that he begin with historical analyses, with ideas or systems? Proust speaks in Time Regained of a growing preference among young and intelligent readers for works of an elevated, analytical, moral, or sociological tendency—for writers who seem to them more profound. “But,” says Proust, “from the moment that works of art are judged by reasoning, nothing is stable or certain, one can prove anything one likes.”
The message of Robbe-Grillet is not new. It tells us that we must purge ourselves of bourgeois anthropocentrism and do the classy things that our advanced culture requires. Character? “Fifty years of disease, the death notice signed many times over by the serious essayists,” says Robbe-Grillet, “yet nothing has managed to knock it off the pedestal on which the nineteenth century had placed it. It is a mummy now, but one still enthroned with the same—phony—majesty, among the values revered by traditional criticism.”
Like most of us, I share Robbe-Grillet’s objection to the mummies of all kinds we carry about with us, but I never tire of reading the master novelists. Can anything as vivid as the characters in their books be dead? Can it be that human beings are at an end? Is individuality really so dependent on historical and cultural conditions? Is the account of those conditions we are so “authoritatively” given by writers and psychologists to be accepted? I suggest that it is not in the intrinsic interest of human beings but in these ideas and accounts that the problem lies. It is the staleness and inadequacy of the ideas that repel us. To find the source of trouble, we must look into our own heads.
The fact that the death notice of character has been signed by the serious essayists means only that another group of mummies—certain respectable leaders of the intellectual community—has laid down the law. It amuses me that these serious essayists should be empowered to sign the death notice of a literary form. Should art follow “culture”? Something has gone wrong.
A novelist should be free to drop “character” if such a strategy stimulates him. But it is nonsense to make such a decision on the theoretical ground that the period which marked the apogee of the individual, etc., is ended. We must not permit intellectuals to become our bosses. And we do them no good by letting them run the arts. Should they, when they read novels, find in them only the endorsement of their own opinions? Are we here to play such games?
Characters, Elizabeth Bowen once said, are not created by writers. They preexist, and they have to be found. If we do not find them, if we fail to represent them, the fault is ours. It must be admitted, however, that finding them is not easy. The condition of human beings has perhaps never been more difficult to define. Those who tell us that we are in an early stage of universal history must be right. We are being lavishly poured together and seem to be experiencing the anguish of new states of consciousness. In America, millions of people have in the last forty years received a “higher education”—often a dubious blessing. In the upheavals of the sixties we felt for the first time the effects of up-to-date teachings, concepts, sensitivities, the pervasiveness of psychological, pedagogical, political ideas.
Every year we see scores of books and articles by writers who tell Americans what a state they are in. All reflect the current crises; all tell us what we must do about them—these analysts are produced by the very disorder and confusion they prescribe for. It is as a novelist that I am considering the extreme moral sensitivity of our contemporaries, their desire for perfection, their intolerance of the defects of society, the touching, the comical boundlessness of their demands, their anxiety, their irritability, their sensitivity, their tender-mindedness, their goodness, their convulsiveness, the recklessness with which they experiment with drugs and touch therapies and bombs. The ex-Jesuit Malachi Martin in his book on the Church compares the modern American to Michelangelo’s sculpture The Captive. He sees “an unfinished struggle to emerge whole” from a block of matter. The American “captive” is beset in his struggle by “interpretations, admonitions, forewarnings and descriptions of himself by the self-appointed prophets, priests, judges and prefabricators of his travail,” says Martin.
If we take a little time to look more closely at this travail, what do we see? In private life, disorder or near panic. In families—for husbands, wives, parents, children—confusion; in civic behavior, in personal loyalties, in sexual practices (I will not recite the whole list; we are tired of hearing it)—further confusion. It is with this private disorder and public bewilderment that we try to live. We stand open to all anxieties. The decline and fall of everything is our daily dread; we are agitated in private life and tormented by public questions.
And art and literature—what of them? Well, there is a violent uproar, but we are not absolutely dominated by it. We are still able to think, to discriminate, and to feel. The purer, subtler, higher activities have not succumbed to fury or to nonsense. Not yet. Books continue to be written and read. It may be more difficult to cut through the whirling mind of a modern reader, but it is still possible to reach the quiet zone. In the quiet zone, we novelists may find that he is devoutly waiting for us. When complications increase, the desire for essentials increases too. The unending cycle of crises that began with the First World War has formed a kind of person, one who has lived through strange and terrible things and in whom there is an observable shrinkage of prejudices, a casting off of disappointing ideologies, an ability to live with many kinds of madness, and an immense desire for certain durable human goods—truth, for instance; freedom; wisdom. I don’t think I am exaggerating; there is plenty of evidence for this. Disintegration? Well, yes. Much is disintegrating, but we are experiencing also an odd kind of refining process. And this has been going on for a long time. Looking into Proust’s Time Regained, I find that he was clearly aware of it. His novel, describing French society during the Great War, tests the strength of his art. Without an art that shirks no personal or collective horrors, he insists, we do not know ourselves or anyone else. Only art penetrates what pride, passion, intelligence, and habit erect on all sides—the seeming realities of this world. There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which, without art, we can’t receive. Proust calls these hints our “true impressions.” The true impressions, our persistent intuitions, will, without art, be hidden from us, and we will be left with nothing but a “terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life.”
Proust was still able to keep a balance between art and destruction, insisting that art was a necessity of life, a great independent reality, a magical power. For a long time, art has not been connected, as it was in the past, with the main human enterprise. Hegel long ago observe
d that art no longer engaged the central energies of man. These energies were now engaged by science—a “relentless spirit of rational inquiry.” Art had moved to the margins. There it formed “a wide and splendidly varied horizon.” In an age of science, people still painted and wrote poetry, but, said Hegel, however splendid the gods looked in modern works of art and whatever dignity and perfection we might find “in the images of God the Father and the Virgin Mary,” it was of no use: we no longer bent our knees. It is a long time since the knees were bent in piety. Ingenuity, daring exploration, freshness of invention, replaced the art of “direct relevance.” The most significant achievement of this pure art, in Hegel’s view, was that, freed from its former responsibilities, it was no longer “serious.” Instead it raised the soul through the “serenity of form above painful involvement in the limitations of reality.” I don’t know who would make such a claim today for an art that raises the soul above painful involvement with reality. Nor am I sure that at this moment, it is the spirit of rational inquiry in pure science that engages the central energies of man. The center seems (even though temporarily) to be filled with the crises I have been describing.
There were European writers in the nineteenth century who would not give up the connection of literature with the main human enterprise. The very suggestion would have shocked Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. But in the West, a separation between great artists and the general public took place. Artists developed a marked contempt for the average reader and the bourgeois mass. The best of them saw clearly enough what sort of civilization Europe had produced, brilliant but unstable, vulnerable, fated to be overtaken by catastrophe.
Despite a show of radicalism and innovation, our contemporaries are really very conservative. They follow their nineteenth-century leaders and hold to the old standards, interpreting history and society much as they were interpreted in the last century. What would writers do today if it occurred to them that literature might once again engage those “central energies,” if they were to recognize that an immense desire had arisen for a return from the periphery, for what is simple and true?
Of course, we can’t come back to the center simply because we wish to, though the realization that we are wanted might electrify us. The force of the crisis is so great that it might summon us back. But prescriptions are futile. One can’t tell writers what to do. The imagination must find its own path. But one can fervently wish that they—that we—would come back from the periphery. We writers do not represent mankind adequately. What account do Americans give of themselves, what accounts of them are given by psychologists, sociologists, historians, journalists, and writers? In a kind of contractual daylight, they see themselves in the ways with which we are desperately familiar. These images of contractual daylight, so boring to Robbe-Grillet and to me, originate in the contemporary worldview: We put into our books the consumer, civil servant, football fan, lover, television viewer. And in the contractual daylight version, their life is a kind of death. There is another life, coming from an insistent sense of what we are, which denies these daylight formulations and the false life—the death-in-life—they make for us. For it is false, and we know it, and our secret and incoherent resistance to it cannot stop—that resistance arises from persistent intuitions. Perhaps humankind cannot bear too much reality, but neither can it bear too much unreality, too much abuse of the truth.
We do not think well of ourselves; we do not think amply about what we are. Our collective achievements have so greatly “exceeded” us that we “justify” ourselves by pointing to them. It is the jet plane in which we commonplace human beings have crossed the Atlantic in four hours that embodies such value as we can claim. Then we hear that this is closing time in the gardens of the West, that the end of our capitalist civilization is at hand. This means that we are not yet sufficiently shrunken; we must prepare to be smaller still. I am not sure whether this should be called intellectual analysis or analysis by intellectuals. The disasters are disasters. It is worse than stupid to call them victories, as some statesmen have done. But I am drawing attention to the fact that there is in the intellectual community a sizable inventory of attitudes that have become respectable—notions about society, human nature, class, politics, sex, about mind, about the physical universe, the evolution of life. Few writers, even among the best, have taken the trouble to reexamine these attitudes or orthodoxies. Such attitudes are everywhere, and no one challenges them seriously. They only glow more powerfully in Joyce or D. H. Lawrence than in the books of lesser men. Since the twenties, how many novelists have taken a second look at Lawrence or argued a different view of sexual potency or the effects of industrial civilization on the instincts? Literature has for nearly a century used the same stock of ideas, myths, strategies. The serious essayists of the last fifty years, says Robbe-Grillet. Yes, indeed. Essay after essay, book after book, confirms the most serious thoughts—Baudelairean, Nietzschean, Marxian, Psychoanalytic, etc., etc.—of these most serious essayists. What Robbe-Grillet says about character can be said also about these ideas, maintaining all the usual things about mass society, dehumanization, and the rest. How poorly they represent us. The pictures they offer no more resemble us than we resemble the reconstructed reptiles and other monsters in a museum of paleontology. We are much more limber, versatile, better articulated, there is much more to us—we all feel it.
What is at the center now? At the moment, neither art nor science but mankind determining, in confusion and obscurity, whether it will endure or go under. The whole species—everybody—has gotten into the act. At such a time it is essential to lighten ourselves, to dump encumbrances, including the encumbrances of education and all organized platitudes, to make judgments of our own, to perform acts of our own. Conrad was right to appeal to that part of our being which is a gift. We must look for that gift under the wreckage of many systems. The collapse of those systems may bring a blessed and necessary release from formulations, from misleading conceptions of being and consciousness. With increasing frequency I dismiss as “merely respectable” opinions I have long held—or thought I held—and try to discern what I have really lived by and what others really live by. As for Hegel’s art freed from “seriousness” and glowing on the margins, raising the soul above painful involvement in the limitations of reality through the serenity of form, that can exist nowhere now, during this struggle for survival. However, it is not as though the people who engaged in this struggle had only a rudimentary humanity, without culture, and knew nothing of art. Our very vices, our mutilations, show how rich we are in thought and culture. How much we know. How much we can feel. The struggles that convulse us make us want to simplify, to reconsider, to eliminate the tragic weakness that has prevented writers—and readers—from being at once simple and true.
Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for. At the center, humankind struggles with collective powers for its freedom, the individual struggles with dehumanization for the possession of his soul. If writers do not come again into the center, it will not be because the center is pre-empted. It is not. They are free to enter. If they so wish.
The essence of our real condition, the complexity, the confusion, the pain of it, is shown to us in glimpses, in what Proust and Tolstoy thought of as “true impressions.” This essence reveals and then conceals itself. When it goes away it leaves us again in doubt. But our connection remains with the depths from which these glimpses come. The sense of our real powers, powers we seem to derive from the universe itself, also comes and goes. We are reluctant to talk about this because there is nothing we can prove, be
cause our language is inadequate, and because few people are willing to risk the embarrassment. They would have to say, “There is a spirit,” and that is taboo. So almost everyone keeps quiet about it, although almost everyone is aware of it.
The value of literature lies in these intermittent “true impressions.” A novel moves back and forth between the world of objects, of actions, of appearances, and that other world, from which these “true impressions” come and which moves us to believe that the good we hang on to so tenaciously—in the face of evil, so obstinately—is no illusion.
No one who has spent years in the writing of novels can be unaware of this. The novel can’t be compared to the epic, or to the monuments of poetic drama. But it is the best we can do just now. It is a sort of latter-day lean-to, a hovel in which the spirit takes shelter. A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony, and even justice. What Conrad said was true: Art attempts to find in the universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what is fundamental, enduring, essential.