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Document 1 of 1The next chapterAuthor: Bellow, SaulProQuest document linkAbstract: Bellow notes that the readers of his generation were more familiar with fictional characters than with their own family members. This provided a sense of comfort and a sense of intimacy that would have been otherwise unfelt.Full text:

WHEN I was young I was reluctant to discuss the future of the novel. I had already made plans to write fiction, and I was not about to undercut myself by discussing the death of the novel. But I am an octogenarian now and see no harm in going public with my views. It is possible that for a majority of readers the question of the survival of the novel is an empty one. It is the scholarly specialist who tells us that every form is born, ripens, ages, and finally has to be put down. The scholars and critics identify themselves with the great past of every form and speak with the authority of its best representatives. You can almost hear the voices of the Melvilles and the Henry Jameses laying down the law to a generation of upstarts.

In the earlier decades of the 20th century writers were less bossy. In putting my thoughts on these matters in order I went back to a straightforward little book by Ford Madox Ford called The English Novel. Ford, who fought in the trenches during the Great War (he was described by one of his contemporaries as a "lemony-pink, fleshy man") tells us at the outset that his remarks will "differ very widely from the conclusions arrived at by my predecessors in this field who have seldom themselves been imaginative writers, let alone novelists." He is prepared to take a more modest line with the novelists he examines as well as with their readers. Those readers represent the common consciousness of their respective countries. The French, German, English, Russian, etc., readers have a collective familiarity with the facts of life as viewed by their novelist countrymen. They know the going gossip. Like Auden, Ford believed that gossip keeps the minds of a country "aerated." So that even the highly respected "papers of record" find it necessary to report the sex gossip of prime ministers and presidents.

Ford tells us that the novel "supplies that cloud of human instances without which the soul feels unsafe in its adventures, and the normal mind fairly easily discerns what events or characters in its fugitive novels are meretricious in relation to life, however entertaining they may be as fiction." Another way of putting it is that through the reading of novels we come to know others with an intimacy otherwise unfelt. As bookish children we were on familiar terms with a very large number of fictional persons. We knew their hopes, their habits, and their thoughts. Readers of my generation were on closer terms with the characters of Conrad's Captain MacWhirr, Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Lewis's Babbitt, or Lawrence's Lady Chatterley than with their own cousins or classmates. We had a clear view of these characters, and we were able to observe and know how they felt and what they were thinking. We learned how these people understood life, and became familiar with their manners and behavior.

In the early decades of this century of triumphant technics, intellectuals spoke of the mass-man and his inability to distinguish between the natural and the man-made. The massman thought that the electricity that lit his rooms was something like a free commodity resembling sunlight or tap water. An educated minority thought of reservoirs or generators. But as technology advanced the educated class were to become as ignorant as the mass-man. In my college days, we were taught that metabolism consisted of two processes, anabolism and catabolism. The use of such terms proved you to be an educated person. You needed only to learn the passwords. My heart rhythm is now regulated by a pacemaker. Once a month it is checked over the phone by a technician several hundreds of miles away-somewhere in New Jersey. Computer chips seem to be running our lives.

On street corners one sometimes sees people apparently staring into space. I am told that the lower lenses of their eyeglasses are programmed to give them up-to-the,minute readings of their Dow Jones holdings. People driving their cars lose control of the wheel as they make assignations on the cellular telephone. The Russian spy recently caught in Washington who seemed to be idling on a sunny park bench controlled the switch of a listening device that transmitted classified conversation in a federal building nearby. Minds like our own have broken through into a new technological realm. We haven't made it. This is the work of our cousins, sons, and nieces. We trust our lives to the aircraft they design. That we ourselves cannot fly them goes without saying. It goes without saying also that it is possible to manufacture goggles that allow you to follow your investments, but it makes one oddly despondent to think how great our reliance on electronic devices has become. We never did understand the physiology that sustained us, but that was one of the mysteries of nature, an altogether natural ignorance. But now the mystery has become technical. Because men have created it who should be capable of understanding it as well.

A very long time ago, when I was a teenager, I liked to think of myself as a future historian of culture. I read The Magic Mountain and said to myself, "Now that is for you." I pored over John H. Randall's The Making of the Modern Mind and said, "This is your cup of tea." I had found the connection between the world of high culture and the slums of Chicago.

I sometimes wonder whether I might not have been better off at M.I.T.

Just after the end of the War, when I began to contribute stories and articles to The Partisan Review and learned that I was now thought to be an intellectual, I decided that I was no such thing. To be an intellectual at mid century meant that you must be capable of arguing points of Marxist doctrine, and since so many people below 14th Street were also in analysis you could not get by without long days of psychoanalytic study. There was a rift-a gap, a gulf between the intellectuals and their contemporaries, the writers.

'THAT CLOUD OF HUMAN INSTANCES'

A review essay by George Steiner on The Arcades Project of Walter Benjamin in the Times Literary Supplement for December 3, 1999, now claims my attention, because it is involved with the argument I am trying to develop. In Steiner's view the modern has given up its early claim to be systematic. Basic to modernism is that it is incomplete. Adorno has told us that "totality is the lie." Of course truth must come first. Modern literature, writes Steiner, adopts a "poetics of the fragmentary, of fragments shored against the ruins"-every significant modern argument derives its kashrUth, its rabbinic sanction, from T.S. Eliot. Next-Proust and Schoenberg, Ezra Pound and Musil are cited by Mr. Steiner as giants of Art who with their instinct for the genuine have embraced the convention of non-completion-"a deeper pressure against perfection," Mr. Steiner says. By this he seems to mean that "perfection" should be sabotaged.

He goes on to tell us: "The accelerando and violence of recent history, the large-scale disappearance of the privileges of privacy, of silence, of leisure that underwrote the classic practice of reading and aesthetic response, the economics of the ephemeral, of the disposable and recyclable which fuel the mass consumption market, be it in the media or in the factory, militate against enactments of completion and totality."

I know very little about Benjamin. The Arcades Project arrived just the other day, and I shall try to set aside the first of the many hours it will take to read Benjamin's 1,073 pages. The man had a bitterly

hard life, and reading Steiner's review makes you feel even more sympathetic towards him-"his deepening misere, what he clearly perceived as the failure of the Front Populaire." As Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Soviet Russia poured troops and war material into Spain, no one could possibly believe that the Front Populaire would survive. And what makes misere more effective than misery?

Are we required moreover to think of one vastly extended realm of art-criticism--intellectual activity-culture--a single sphere where all these things intermingle and touch and are shared somehow by the artists and by the intellectual collaborators of these artists as well? The latter are thought to be indispensable because they focus the light of the mind on every sort of problem. The intellectual appears as a gentle and sapient soul who is fully at home everywhere and indeed is indispensable. He is the artist's kissing-cousin. Or perhaps even a brother, as Aaron was to Moses. This is how Mr. Steiner seems to see the existence shared by intellectuals and artists. D. H. Lawrence maintained that "the business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the living moment." A physicist might dismiss this as double-talk or mumbo-jumbo, but a novelist would class it as an attempt to express the personal uniqueness of the artist's perspective. A kind of personal natural phenomenology underlies Lawrence's assumption. Because this is universal, a reader will receive and trust the report of the perceiver. This was what Ford Madox Ford meant when he said that "the novel supplies that cloud of human instances without which the soul feels unsafe in its adventures." But this is not the case of an intellectual like Professor Steiner, who misses no opportunity to show his skill with the Baudelairean conjurer's handkerchief. "The resuscitation of the ephemeral, of the unconsidered, of the scorned, makes of the ragpicker a figuration of the Messianic. Of comparable significance is the flaneur, again a motif crucial in Baudelaire.... the flaneur subverts the utilitarian, deterministic programme of the city ... Perennially the chiffonnier and the flaneur will cross paths with the prostitute. She too is essential to the cast. The pavements are her argosy. If the prostitute incarnates archetypal imaginations, of intimacies to be 'picked up,' she is also the emblematic player in the Marxist polemic on capitalist enslavement at its crassest, as well as in the Freudian narrative of middle-class libidinal angst and desire. . . ."

Nobody makes my case better than Professor Steiner himself when he cuts loose. He clutches Baudelaire and drags him around in a pas de deux over ground that he, Steiner, claims to have mastered in every historical detail. Can this jungle of allusions ever be reduced to order? I really can't say what the future of the novel is, but following Mr. Steiner's lead does not seem promising. A different dance is perhaps still possible.

AuthorAffiliation

Mr. Bellow won the Nobel prize for literature in 1976. His forthcoming novel is Ravelstein.

Subject: Novels; Generations; ReadingPublication title: National ReviewVolume: 52Issue: 1Pages: 34-37Number of pages: 3Publication year: 2000Publication date: Jan 24, 2000Year: 2000Publisher: National Review, Inc.Place of publication: New YorkCountry of publication: United StatesPublication subject: Literary And Political Reviews, Political ScienceISSN: 00280038CODEN: NARVBMSource type: MagazinesLanguage of publication: EnglishDocument type: CommentaryProQuest document ID: 229659958Document URL: http://search.proquest.com/docview/229659958?accountid=15533Copyright: Copyright National Review, Inc. Jan 24, 2000

Last updated: 2014-05-25Database: ProQuest Central

BibliographyCitation style: APA 6th - American Psychological Association, 6th Edition

Bellow, S. (2000, Jan 24). The next chapter. National Review, 52, 34-37. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/229659958?accountid=15533Contact ProQuestCopyright © 2014 ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. - Terms and Conditions