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

by Saul Bellow

  Now, writers are naturally attentive; they are trained in attentiveness, and they induce attentiveness in their readers (without a high degree of attentiveness, aesthetic bliss is an impossibility). “Try to be one of those people on whom nothing is lost,” was Henry James’s advice to apprentice novelists. And Tolstoy in his essay on Maupassant said that a writer should write clearly, take a moral view of his subject, and be capable of giving the most intense attention to his subject and his characters. In no uncertain terms, Nietzsche tells us that the modern age concerns itself primarily with Becoming and ignores Being. And so perpetual Becoming preys on us like a deadly sickness.

  Without being a licensed philosopher, I grant myself permission to associate distraction with Becoming and Becoming with progress and to observe that we have made rapid (so rapid that it appears magical) progress toward a technological world society. And whether a world society can be human is a question writers (performers) are obviously not capable of answering but evidently cannot avoid putting, since fictional characters, together with the rest of mankind, are involved in this transformation. Already observers like Mr. Michaels have warned that value is fleeing (or has already fled) the human particular.

  Well, the writer cannot make the seas of distraction stand still, but he can at times come between the madly distracted and their distractions. He does this by opening another world. “Another world,” I am fully aware, carries suggestions of never-never land, and people will be asking themselves how seriously any man can be taken who still believes that the moronic inferno can be put behind us, bypassed or quarantined by art. It isn’t as though the champions of art had won any great victories. Madame Bovary dies of arsenic, but Flaubert the artist-chronicler is dangerously wounded too. Tales of love and death can be mortal to the teller. Yet for many people (certain Russian artists of the Stalin period, for instance), the abandonment of art cannot happen. Dictatorships did not succeed in frightening artists to death, nor has democracy done them in altogether, although some observers consider democracy to be by far the greater threat. In the West, Stalinism is sometimes seen as a political disaster but, to artists, a blessing in disguise. It kept them serious. They died, leaving us great works. With us, the arts sink into the great, soft, permissive bosom of basically in-different and deadly free societies: and so goodbye. A gulag death is obviously superior to a Hollywood or Manhattan one. So it’s damn braces, bless relaxes. “Relaxes” denatures and dissolves. The acid byproducts of well-being and distraction eat us up. Wicked, murderous state stepmothers are better for the little princesses of art than the Lady Bountiful, quality-time vulgarians whose slovenly and ignorant toleration is death.

  Civilized opinion was divided in this century by the revolution of 1917, which promised mankind everything it had ever hoped for, and it was tenaciously supported by advanced thinkers long after it became apparent, even to the less advanced, that the Russia that brought an end to the imperialist war of 1914 was great only in the extent of its economic and political disasters. Marxist Leninism, which contributed so much to the unpleasant distraction of the world for seven decades, while it still has passionate followers in Africa and Asia, is largely discredited in the West (and a portion of the East). Though it gives us nothing to exult over or brag about, we may as well face the ambiguous complex of facts suggesting that not Russia but the U.S.A., a country ideologically drab and insignificant, has made the real revolution of this century. You need not take the word of a mere writer (performer) for it. Grave scholars, like the Hegelian Alexandre Kojève, have made this argument. “One can even say,” Kojève writes, “that from a certain point of view, the United States has already attained the final stage of Marxist ‘Communism,’ seeing that practically all the members of a ‘calssless society’ can from now on appropriate for themselves everything that seems good to them, without thereby working any more than their heart dictates.”

  He continues: “Now, several voyages of comparison made (between 1948 and 1958) to the United States and the USSR gave me the impression that if the Americans give the appearance of rich Sino-Soviets, it is because the Russians and the Chinese are only Americans who are still poor but are rapidly proceeding to get richer. I was led to conclude from this that the ‘American way of life’ was the type of life specific to the post-historical period, the actual presence of the United States in the world prefiguring the ‘eternal present’ future of all humanity. Thus Man’s return to animality appears no longer as a possibility that was yet to come, but as a certainty that was already present.”

  These sentences may surprise but they will not astonish us. The “return to animality” is a bit of a shock, but we will quickly see that no insult is intended. Modern life meets every creaturely need. History is in the main (if we accept Kojève’s view) the struggle to meet the creaturely needs of humankind. Everything we ever wanted is here—except, from the Hegelian standpoint, transcendence. Now, the final or systematic account of transcendence and Spirit is not my cup of tea. I have invoked M. Kojève primarily to support my flimsy novelist’s notion that the people I write about are the beneficiaries and, in part, the victims of a revolution more extensive and permanent than the revolution of 1917. The realization of these perennial desires of the species will naturally take some time. Such realization is not like the mental act of grasping an idea. It must all be lived through, and we cannot expect to live long enough to see the outcome.

  I have said enough to bring us fully to the heart of distraction—the subject of my seemingly endless sermon. Can our distraction (Wyndham Lewis called it “the moronic inferno”) be induced to yield to attention? I have suggested that distraction is a mental and emotional counterpart to revolution and world crisis, that it is probably a by-product of nihilism. I have observed also that it is inviting. It can be seductive. It is often flattering. Pascal, a great observer of such things, said that the happiness of highly placed persons was due to their having a crowd to amuse them. “A king,” he wrote, “is surrounded by men who take wonderful care never to let him be alone and think about himself.” So in a sense we are all highly placed persons—kings even—or treated as such by those who control (but is control really the word for it?) the electronic instruments that disseminate information-entertainment-opinion in hypnotic words and images.

  Writers, poets, painters, musicians, philosophers, political thinkers, to name only a few of the categories affected, must woo their readers, viewers, listeners, from distraction. To this we must add, for simple realism demands it, that these same writers, painters, etc., are themselves the children of distraction. As such, they are peculiarly qualified to approach the distracted multitudes. They will have experienced the seductions as well as the destructiveness of the forces we have been considering here. This is the destructive element in which we do not need to be summoned to immerse ourselves, for we were born in it.

  If the remission of pain is happiness, then the emergence from distraction is aesthetic bliss. I use these terms loosely, for I am not making an argument but rather attempting to describe the pleasure that comes from recognition or rediscovery of certain essences permanently associated with human life. These essences are restored to our consciousness by persons who are described as artists. I shall speak here of artists who write novels and stories, since I understand them better than poets or dramatists. When you open a novel—and I mean of course the real thing—you enter into a state of intimacy with its writer. You hear a voice or, more significantly, an individual tone under the words. This tone you, the reader, will identify not so much by a name, the name of the author, as by a distinct and unique human quality. It seems to issue from the bosom, from a place beneath the breastbone. It is more musical than verbal, and it is the characteristic signature of a person, of a soul. Such a writer has power over distraction and fragmentation, and out of distressing unrest, even from the edge of chaos, he can bring unity and carry us into a state of intransitive attention. People hunger for this. The source of their hunger is f
ound in the aforementioned essences. In our times, those essences are forced to endure strange torments and privations. There are moments when they appear to be lost beyond recovery. But then we hear or read something that exhumes them, even gives them a soiled, tattered resurrection. The proof of this is quite simple, and everyone will recognize it at once. A small cue will suffice to remind us that when we hear certain words—“all is but toys,” “absent thee from felicity,” “a wilderness of monkeys,” “green pastures,” “still waters,” or even the single word “relume”—they revive for us moments of emotional completeness and overflowing comprehension, they unearth buried essences. Our present experience of anarchy does not destroy this knowledge of essences, for somehow we find ways to maintain an equilibrium between these contradictories, and others as well.

  But this is why the artist competes with other claimants to attention. He cannot compete in the athletic sense of the word, as if his object were to drive his rivals from the field. He will never win a clear victory. Nothing will ever be clear; the elements are too mixed for that. The opposing powers are too great to overcome. They are the powers of an electrified world and of a transformation of human life the outcome of which cannot be foreseen.

  Tocqueville predicted that in democratic countries the public would demand larger and larger doses of excitement and increasingly stronger stimulants from its writers. He probably did not expect that public to dramatize itself so extensively, to make the world scene everybody’s theater, or, in the developed countries, to take to alcohol and drugs in order to get relief from the horrors of ceaseless intensity, the torment of thrills and distractions. A great many writers have done little more than meet the mounting demand for thrills. I think that this demand has, in the language of marketing, peaked. Can so much excitement, so much disorder, be brought under control? Such questions must be addressed to analysts and experts in a variety of fields. Prediction is their business. The concern of tale-tellers and novelists is with the human essences neglected and forgotten by a distracted world.

  There is Simply Too Much to Think About

  (1992)

  Forbes September 1992.

  Asked for an opinion on some perplexing question of the day, I sometimes say that I am for all the good things and against all the bad ones. Not everybody is amused by such a dinner-table joke. Many are apt to feel that I consider myself too good for this world, which is, of course, a world of public questions.

  Was President Kennedy right to tell us, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country”? In the ordinary way of life, what can one do for one’s country? One can be preoccupied with it. That is, one can hold enlightened opinions. Most people conclude that there isn’t much, practically speaking, they can do. A few become activists and fly around the country demonstrating or remonstrating. They are able to do this in a free and prosperous America. I speculate sometimes about the economics of militancy. There must be a considerable number of people with small private incomes whose lifework is to march in protest, to picket, to be vocal partisans. At this moment the Roe v. Wade issue has attracted demonstrators to Washington and to Buffalo. Atomic energy, environmentalism, women’s rights, homosexual rights, AIDS, capital punishment, various racial issues—such are the daily grist of newspapers and networks. The public is endlessly polled, the politicians and their advisers are guided in their strategies by poll statistics. And this, let’s face it, is “the action.” This is where masses of Americans find substance, importance, find definition through a combination of passion and ineffectuality. The level of public discussion is unsatisfactory. As we become aware of this, our hearts sink. The absence of articulate political leadership in the country makes us feel that we are floundering.

  What are we, today, in a position to do about the crises chronicled daily in the New York Times—about the new Russia and the new Germany; about Peru and China and drugs in the South Bronx and racial strife in Los Angeles, the rising volume of crimes and diseases, the disgrace of the so-called educational system; about ignorance, fanaticism, about the clownish tactics of candidates for the presidency?

  Is it possible to take arms against a sea of troubles so boundless?

  Wherever it is feasible, arms, of course, should be taken. But we must also consider what it requires to face the trouble-sea in its planetary vastness—what an amount of daily reading it demands of us, to say nothing of historical knowledge. It was brave of Karl Marx to assert that the time had come for thinkers to be doers. But to consider what his intellectual disciples did in the twentieth century will send us back to our seats. It is, after all, no small thing to correct our opinions frequently, and when you come right down to it, the passivity imposed upon us forces us to acknowledge how necessary it is to think hard, to reject what is mentally dishonorable.

  We feel heavy when we recognize the limits of our effectiveness in the public sphere, when we acknowledge the weight of the burden laid upon us and the complexities we have to take into account—when we become aware of the impoverished state of public discussion. Reading and hearing what most editorialists and TV commentators tell us about the Los Angeles crisis, for instance, forces us to recognize that few opinionmakers are able to think at all. To leave matters in their hands is an acute danger.

  “The Good are attracted by Men’s perceptions, / And think not for themselves.” William Blake, who wrote this about two hundred years ago, did not really believe in the goodness of the nonthinking good. He meant that the nonthinking good were inclined to surrender their mental freedom to the cunning—the sharpers and con artists—who would eventually show “their private ends.”

  It is apparent to experienced observers that well-meaning people emphatically prefer the “good” things. Their desire is to be identified with the “best.” The more prosperous and the “better educated” they are, the greater the effort to identify themselves with the most widely accepted and respected opinions. So they are naturally for justice, for caring and compassion, for the abused and oppressed, against racism, sexism, homophobia, against discrimination, against imperialism, colonialism, exploitation, against smoking, against harassment—for all the good things, against all the bad ones. Seeing people virtually covered with credentials, buttons, badges, I am reminded of the layers of medals and campaign ribbons worn by Soviet generals in official photographs.

  People who have the best of everything also desire the best opinions. Top of the line. The right sort of right thinking, moreover, makes social intercourse smoother. The wrong sort exposes you to accusations of insensitivity, misogyny, and, perhaps worst of all, racism. As the allure of agreement—or conformism—grows, the perils of independence deepen. To differ is dangerous. And yet, as we all must know, to run from the dangers of dissent is cowardly.

  So much for the first part of Blake’s proposition: “The good are attracted by Men’s perceptions.” Now for part two: “And think not for themselves.”

  To illustrate what this may mean, one need go no further than the daily papers. As I write, the Chicago Tribune reprints a piece on Michael Jackson, the pop music prodigy, by Charles Burress, a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Michael Jackson’s video “Black and White” attracted a worldwide audience of half a billion youngsters. Jackson, Mr. Burress says, has achieved “monumental prominence in the cultural landscape.” To what is this prominence due? Jackson frolics over the boundaries of race and sex, Burress writes. “We’ve told our children that race shouldn’t matter, that boys and girls are equal and that many sexual roles are arbitrary. Could youngsters be enthralled at seeing these ideas made flesh?

  “The refrain in the ‘Black and White’ video is ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white.’ Most riveting is a computer-enhanced segment where a person changes ethnicity and sex in rapid succession. Jackson seems to be saying we are first of all human, and secondarily male or female, one race or another. He urges us toward human unity and away from prejudice.”

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p; And finally: “In a world threatened by racial tensions and over-population, the survival instinct could summon a new human, one who has no single race and who, by being most asexually androgynous, is less subject to the procreative urge.”

  Readers may feel that I have gone far out of my way to find such a bizarre example. But no. Those of us who read widely in the popular press and watch the flakier channels of cable TV know that views like Burress’s are not at all uncommon. The language he uses identifies him as a college graduate—possibly, though not necessarily, a California product. Besides, his preoccupation is with what appears to have become a national project—namely, the fashioning of a new outlook, a new mind. The mind of this “new human” is synthetic, homogeneous, improved. It transcends the limits of heredity, nature, and tradition, goes beyond all limits and all obstacles. “How do we object to [Jackson’s] changing his appearance when we tolerate many body alterations, from shaving and bodybuilding to face-lifts and sex-change operations?” Burress asks.

  Now, a term widely understood to signify not thinking for oneself is ideology. Ideology for Marx was a class-induced deformation, a corruption of reality by capitalism. Ideology, to make it short, is a system of false thinking and nontruth that can lead to obedience and conformity. In putting Mr. Burress in the high company of Marx, my sole purpose is to throw light on the attempted invention of an altogether new human type. This new and “more desirable” American will be all the good things: a creature of no single race, an androgyne, free from the disturbing influence of Eros. The idea is to clobber everything that used to be accepted as given, fixed, irremediable. Can it be that we are tired of whatever it is that we in fact are—black, white, brown, yellow, male, female, large, small, Greek, German, English, Jew, Yankee, Southerner, Westerner, etc.—that what we now want is to rise above all tiresome differences? Perhaps gene fixing will eventually realize this utopia for us.