LITERATURE: The Next Chapter

National Review, Jan 24, 2000 by Saul Bellow

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 mass-man 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.