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SUSAN SONTAG
3. How do you conceive of the involvement of the artist in the
modern world?
4. Does the march of civilization (automation, affluence) cause
the crisis of culture or merely the crisis of traditional forms of
culture?
5. Two thousand years ago a philosopher said that the fate of
the world depended on the marriage of the mind and the power.
Is this philosopher's thought still walid today?
6. Which thought or idea, whether expressed by yourself or
somebody else at Bled, did most appeal to you, and which one
you thought the most objectionable?
To be sure, the speeches were not quite on this ambitious Hyman Kaplan
level. But many did not lag behind, even if their high-minded rhetoric
was supplemented by a lot of mysterious cultural information. One
learned that Sartre has lost favor with Polish intellectual youth for what
they take to be his over-politicized reaction to the Nobel award, but that
Camus and Kafka remain idols, with Salinger bringing up the rear; that
Sartre remains extremely influential in Brazil; that Kafka is
demode
in
Hungary; that John Updike is coming up strong among young Russian
readers; and that in Holland there are many novels on "the Jewish
problem" but plays are taken more seriously than novels.
But what is really worth reporting about the congress is something
else that took place, something which had unexpectedly (for me, at least)
its extraordinary moments. Human beings from many countries came
together as men of
good
will, because as writers they are self-appointed
citizens of that hypothetical civilized world order that seems farther
than ever from being realized, despite all the predictions that were
fashionable twenty, even ten years ago about the imminent demise of the
era of nation-states. And the spirit of fraternity at the Bled congress,
however flimsily based on the pretext of a common vocation, was ex–
tremely moving. That spirit was, perhaps, a mixture of conscientious
tact, of curiosity-and wonder, wonder and relief that we were talking to
each other and that nothing awful or unpleasant was happening. For
most of us
hav.e
been sold a bill of goods-by our governments, by our
prejudices, or by our own sophistication. When one was able to repress
the easy smile that such verbal doings as I've described above induced in
those of us assembled at Bled who are too sophisticated to be so solemn,
one had a chance to discover one's own provincialism and complacency.
Can a regularly published American writer, busy with his own work,
really imagine what it's like to run the risk of exile, persecution, imprison–
ment for what he writes? Probably not, until he goes abroad, me'ets such
a writer in the flesh, and stays up with him talking until four in the
morning. In New York one could never anticipate the pleasure and
