It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future

by Saul Bellow

  Much of this is common knowledge, the Orwellian “obvious,” yet we can’t take it for granted that its meaning is entirely clear. The media (this unattractive American term can’t be avoided) are supposed to keep us informed about these new developments, and of course they don’t know what is happening. It is clear that, to use another American expression, they haven’t got a clue. The technology at their disposal is one of the world’s wonders—sublime, from an engineer’s viewpoint—but the minds in charge are far behind the computers and the satellites.

  A professor in California has estimated that on an average weekday the New York Times contains more information than any contemporary of Shakespeare would have acquired in a lifetime. I am ready to believe that this is more or less true, although I suspect that an educated Elizabethan was less confused by what he knew. He would certainly have been less agitated than we are. His knowledge cannot have lain so close to the threshold of chaos as ours.

  What good is such a plethora of information? We have no use for most of the information given by the New York Times. It simply poisons us. I can’t imagine that anybody would want to read every single page of a national paper like the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, or the Times (some eighty percent of a local paper like the Chicago Tribune is taken up by advertisements). I grant that an obsessive reader might, if he were in the hospital or in great despair, read the daily Times from end to end. With the Sunday edition, this would be impossible. I shun the Sunday papers; the very look of them deadens my mind. Newspapers must be read cautiously, cannily, defensively. You know very well that journalists cannot afford to tell you plainly what is going on. There are dependable observers who believe that the press cannot give Americans anything like a true picture of the world. The written word is untrustworthy and the spoken word (radio and TV) irresponsible. The political analyst Michael Ledeen maintains that “many of the current media stars fully believe that they should define the national agenda.” The power of the media, he says, is power seized from government. The Washington press corps has shown that it can destroy national leaders, and it is therefore greatly feared. The government does not seem able to understand or to explain its authority, the grounds for its decisions. Its antagonist, the press, interprets the government’s operations in such a way as to destabilize public judgment. The jargon used by both antagonists excites, it thrills, it bewilders, it frightens, it confuses, it annihilates coherence, it makes comprehension utterly impossible. Nightly the anchorpersons preen, and while they deliver the news of the day they also pressure the public to take a progressive line. They want their listeners to come to the right conclusions about South Africa or Lithuania or unwed mothers—or the drug crisis, education, or race relations. They discuss confidently matters of which they knew nothing at all last week. In a word, they are showmen or entertainers; they are expected by their networks to look intelligent and to advance enlightened views. In public life everybody uses the same formulas—presidents, former presidents, senior statesmen, secretaries of state, leaders of the legal and other professions, celebrity financiers, talk-show hosts, university presidents, disc jockeys, leaders of the various liberation movements, star athletes, rock musicians, artists, singers, Hollywood personalities, publishers, the clerics of all churches, environmentalists. All these are indistinguishable in vocabulary and syntax from junk-bond brokers, public relations men, and lobbyists. Sportscasters, rap musicians, university rightists, university leftists, all employ the same language, the same rhetorical devices. Here is a list of some of the words most commonly used: “consensus,” “sensitivity,” “creative,” “role model,” “entitlement,” “empowerment,” “impacted,” “quality time” (the time a working mother wishes to give her children in “day care”), “concerned,” “the excluded” or “the marginalized” (Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition might be described as a majority formed out of excluded or marginalized minorities). Some of these terms come from psychology, from the social sciences, or from schools of divinity (the theologians have contributed words like “compassion” or “situated”—as in “spiritually situated”). Others come from higher intellectual quarters. “Charisma” is borrowed from Max Weber. “Concern” is probably a translation of Heidegger’s Sorge.

  At a recent postmodernist convention of professors, held at the University of Utah last March, one of the speakers promoted a concept called “resistance postmodernism”: “We want to see whether these discourses [postmodernist ideas] can be used for political and social change. We want to know how we can deal with oppression, inequality and exploitation that exists not only in the United States but globally” (New York Times, April 8, 1990, as reported by Richard Bernstein), What the professor really meant is hard to say, but unless you talk this sort of nonsense, the educated public will not take you seriously. In today’s Chicago Tribune I learn that the American Catholic bishops have hired, at a fee of five million dollars, a public relations firm to direct their anti-abortion campaign: to “practice paid persuasion,” says the writer of this Tribune article. Evidently the Church itself is unable to preach against mortal sin and is forced to turn to experts who better understand mass culture and the mind of the public. The company hired by the American bishops successfully conducted one of Ronald Reagan’s campaigns for the presidency. So the doctrines on which the Church stands are apparently considered intransmissible. You must persuade or hypnotize the public, or influence it by symbolic manipulations, by magical substitutes for fact and thought. Obviously—to turn again to George Orwell and the duty of civilized men to restate the obvious—the Church, too, must bow to the power of television.

  People are understandably bored and irritated, tormented (distraction is a torment) by discussions of TV. I, too, dislike this sort of punditry, but if distraction is your theme, there is no way to avoid TV. I shan’t be asking this time what can be done about lust and violence on the tube. Nothing can be done. Television has proved that millions of people passionately love lust and violence. I am concerned here with the contribution TV makes to the mass of our distractions. It is the principal source of the noise peculiar to our time—an illuminated noise that claims our attention not in order to concentrate it but to disperse it. Watching the tube, we are induced to focus on nothing in particular. Can we find nothing good to say about TV? Well, yes, it brings scattered solitaries into a sort of communion. TV allows your isolated American to think that he participates in the life of the entire country. It does not actually place him in a community, but his heart is warmed with the suggestion (on the whole false) that there is a community somewhere in the vicinity and that his atomized consciousness will be drawn back toward the whole. But through the promise of unity it leads us into wild diversity. And perhaps what we really look to it for is distraction—distraction in the form of a phantom or an approximate reality. Pointless but intense excitement holds us in TV dramas. We hear threatening music. A killer with a gun steals into the room of a sleeping woman. More subliminal sounds of danger, pointlessly ominous. The woman wakes and runs to the kitchen for a knife. The cops are on the case. We watch as the criminal is pursued through night streets; shots, a death; a body falls from a roof. Then time is up, another drama begins. Now we are in a church. No, we are in a lecture hall; no again—a drawer opens in a morgue. A woman is looking for her kidnapped child. Then that ends, and we are on the veld with zebras and giraffes. Then with Lenin at a mass meeting. And suddenly we flash away to a cooking school; we are shown how to stuff a turkey. Next the Berlin Wall comes down. Or flags are burning. Or a panel is worrying about the drug crisis. More and more public themes, with less and less personal consciousness. Clearly, personal consciousness is shrinking.

  Remote-control devices permit us to jump back and forth, mixing up beginnings, middles, and ends, alternating Westerns with gamblers in Chinatown or talk shows. This hopping from channel to channel is, according to a survey conducted by the Nielsens, a popular game among adolescents. Mastery belongs to the
holder of the switch who diverts himself with inconsequence, and his willful switching is something like an assertion of independence, or a declaration of autonomy, of supreme immunity. Each separate intelligence at its separate command post declares itself free from all influence. The kid with the clicker is the Boss. He can cope with any amount of randomness or inconsequence—with anything you can throw at him. This is clowning, of course, but it is also a sort of triumph for personal consciousness. Here consciousness emptily asserts itself. The emptiness of the assertion makes it akin to autism, a word defined in my dictionary as a state of mind characterized by daydreaming, hallucinations, and disregard of external reality.

  Of course, the ceaseless world crisis, otherwise known as the chaos of the present age, is not the work of the communications industry and its Information Revolution; but for our peculiar pseudoknowledge of what is happening, for the density of our ignorance, and for the inner confusion and centerlessness of our understanding, for our agitation, the communicators are responsible. Intellectuals and universities, from the ideological side, also have much to answer for.

  “Teach us to care and not to care, / Teach us to sit still,” T. S. Eliot wrote, and when I was young I read these lines as a prayer for poise under threat of dissolution, but I have wondered in later years whether Eliot really believed that we might ever be able to sit still. He also said, perhaps half jokingly, that he couldn’t bear to read the newspapers: “They are too exciting.” Was he really able to kick the habit? I confess that like millions of others, I still need my news fix daily. Civilized people evidently find it necessary to maintain, inwardly, a high level of excitement and are apt to feel that their vital forces must be replenished by headlines.

  So it’s politics and murder, famine, planes exploding in flight, drug wars, hostage taking, the latest developments in the superpower drama. The average duration of a scandal or a disaster is not long, and since terrible events are presented by networks whose main focus is diversion, entertainment, quick change, we are always en route to the next shock. It is the agitation level that matters, not this or that enormity. And because we can’t beat distraction, we are inclined to join it. A state of dispersed attention seems to offer certain advantages. It may be compared to a sport like hang gliding. In distraction we are suspended, we hover, we reserve our options.

  Now, when a writer, a novelist, offers such a description, the democrat in him, the citizen, demands to know what he is going to do about all this, and as the heir to the literary moralism of the last century, he may be tempted to weigh, to measure, to analyze, to prescribe, to call for clarity, for justice, to edify. And of course he may also feel a contrary urge and refuse absolutely to weigh, to measure, to analyze, to prescribe. This sometimes amounts to the same thing; there are white edifiers and black ones, Many excellent contemporary writers feel that edification in any form is a mistake, that it is a great sin to write novels with long discursive or analytic passages, à la Thomas Mann or André Malraux. Is cognitive activity the cure for distraction? Will ideas cure this sickness?

  Increasingly, I find myself agreeing with Vladimir Nabokov. A work of art, Nabokov argued, detaches you from the world of common travail and leads you into another world altogether. It carries you into a realm of aesthetic bliss. Can there be anything more desirable than aesthetic bliss? Nothing can be more desirable, and it is especially so when the massed powers of cognition (among which vain cognitions and false cognitions are prominent) oppress and restrict the free imagination.

  If Freud was right in saying that happiness is nothing more than the remission of habitual suffering, then it may be legitimate to say that art, in bringing relief from the absurd strivings of consciousness, from the enslaving superego, frees us for aesthetic bliss. Endless cycles of crisis have made us superserious theorists of modernism and postmodernism, definers and redefiners of culture and tradition. It is demanded of us that we place ourselves historically. To illustrate this I shall quote (as briefly as possible) from a recent book on modern literary culture: “The term postmodernism had not been coined, but the atmosphere of The Loved One is aftermodernist. Something has died—that, above all, is clear. In the aftermath, the Muse of poetry has a new vocation prepared for her servants. … As The Loved One neared completion, Waiting for Godot, the emblematic work of postmodernism, was in preparation.…” It is implied here that important modern writers have to place themselves and place themselves appropriately in this joint project and make an appropriate statement about the burden of modern civilization. But why should we demand emblematic works of ourselves or our contemporaries? Isn’t aesthetic bliss nicer? Why should writers pump intellectual iron together with historians, philosophers, religious thinkers, and psychologists—the Nietzsches, the Spenglers, the Heideggers, or the Jungs? They will naturally take an interest in these muscular giants, but what do they add to literature by themselves accepting heavy theoretical labor? I really don’t care to think about the inevitable succession of modernism by after-and postmodernism. I will grant you the “night of the world” and accept the fullest listing of the charges: emptiness of life, the unity of mankind on the lowest level, the increasing vacuity of personal existence, the victory of urbanization and technology—in short, the prevalence of nihilism, the absence of the noble and the great.

  All the more reason, I think, to embrace aesthetic bliss when you can get it. For when it is available in modern form, as it is from time to time, we have reason to be profoundly grateful to its creators.

  As for the classy world-historical all-embracing work aforementioned, with its modernism, aftermodernism, postmodernism, dense with authoritative names like Vico or Foucault or Eliot or Quine or Bradley, with metaphilosophers and metacritics, such work makes its own contribution to distraction. The distraction of sophisticates is even harder to dispel than the distraction of proletarian mobs. When their attention is solicited, these metacritics give it grudgingly. To sway them you have to display prestigious credentials. “What is most distinctively modern in modern literature,” Professor Richard Rorty says, “depends for its effect upon straight-men, and especially upon philosophers.” Rorty also observes that many critics apparently wish to speak in philosophical tones and apparently think that “literature can take the place of philosophy by mimicking philosophy.” This does not simplify the tasks of the aesthetic-bliss people and the would-be delight-givers.

  Since no path in modern life can possibly lead to a rose-garden sanctuary, there are difficulties about aesthetic bliss too, about the means by which it is generated. In Lolita, Nabokov’s narrator, Humbert Humbert, is an enchanting Mariner. We willingly surrender and gladly give up a dozen weddings to go across the U.S.A. with Humbert and his nymphet. True love, ideal love, can have only one single object, but in an age as defective as our own, Eros, too, is inevitably kinky. We cannot refuse Humbert our fullest attention, but often he also grates us. He is not in all respects a pleasant patrician. Many of his judgments are madly arbitrary. His snobbery is particularly disagreeable. He can be very cutting about minor errors in conversational French, and he occasionally abuses the attention we so wholeheartedly give him. But these are petty objections, when you think what a great gift he makes us: Eros the comedian, a bit tatty here and there, but nonetheless a child of the gods—godlike. Still, the aesthetic bliss Humbert affords is uneven, and the cause of its fluctuation lies in the curious modern intricacy of Humbert’s character and also the character of his perverse enemy, Quilty. Nabokov does not want us to make character analyses in the modern style, but his hero’s character leads us toward the abysses created by the modern cognitive habit, for which Nabokov has a deadly loathing. These modern cognitive operations bring us back to the heart of distraction: the curious instability of disorderly consciousness.

  What I call distraction may also be described as the dispersion of themes. It is this dispersion of themes that agitates and confuses us. Naturally, my point of view in a discussion such as this is that of a writer,
so it is as a writer that I ask whether the difficulties caused by this dispersion or distraction can be surmounted. By a writer fit for the job, yes. Such a writer can obtain the attention of the tormented. He must be a fit person to entrust with the hoarded and guarded attention of someone who has actually been waiting to be asked.

  My task has been, for some time now, to take my bearings and stay on course. I am a performer and speak as a performer. But for about two centuries, performers have also felt it necessary to vindicate themselves while performing. Someone has written about William Blake that his work was “one prolonged vindication of the cause of all the artists in the world.” In these modern centuries, the writer becomes the embattled artist at war with society, with the power of money, with tyranny, etc. I need not and will not go into all that now. But when I think back on my life as a performer, I often recall a sentence from one of Samuel Butler’s essays: “Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on,” and then I add that there is a drunken riot in the concert hall, and nobody at all is minding the music.

  The simile is exaggerated, of course; it is a caricature. The grain of truth in it is that when you are at last ready to play, you cannot be sure of your listeners. They will predictably be tormented by a plethora of alternatives. Why should they be here, not elsewhere? And why should they listen to you, not to somebody else? A craving to make the best possible use of their time may turn them fretful, even feverish. “As well him as another,” Molly Bloom said to herself when Leopold wooed her. She might as easily have said, “As well another as him.”

  In short, the performer must have the power to impose himself. It helps if he is a Nabokov and speaks with the natural authority of an artist-patrician, a boyar, a hereditary autocrat. This, however, gives an ideological color to the problem, and people have indeed begun to protest and to denounce exploitation by tyrannical traditionalists, misogynists, racists, imperialists—those dead white males whose works, called classics, are imposed upon us. Not everybody can be seduced by the promise of bliss. For some, liberation (perhaps pseudoliberation) is the higher aim. Or the shattering of icons. Or restlessness without limits. As the writer Leonard Michaels has recently put it: “We have been abandoned to the allure of non-specific possibility, or the thrill of infinite novelty.” He also says, in the same paragraph, that “value has fled the human particular.”