LITERATURE: The Next Chapter

National Review, Jan 24, 2000 by Saul Bellow

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."