INTELLECTUALS AND WRITEI"l...S
SINCE THE TH IRTIES
543
Saul Bellow:
Well, I think we're in the grip of a technology which is
using us. We are in its grip, it is not in ours. It dominates us in mysteri–
ous ways. We don't understand even the scientific principles underlying
the technology. All we know is that these material miracles surround us
and that they increasingly take over our lives. Weare more or less in the
position of savages who admire and worship these powers but don't
understand them. They're too mysterious to be understood, and yet
they're man-nude. This is a sort of paradox no other generation in his–
tory has had to face. It seems to me that this is what drives us, this is
what we are serving. Whether we like it or not these are our gods,
whom we wi llin gly worship. So I am trying to indicate to you not
what the answers are, but how we ought to be thinking about these
matters.
Qllestioll:
One last comment. If we are able to manage our lives more
through computers and so on, will this create a greater potential for
writers to influence people?
Saul Bellow:
The sphere of the writer seems to me to be shrinking. For
one thing, there's the illiteracy in the country. Where it's not outright
illiteracy, it's functional illiteracy. When you go beyond that, there is a
kind of aesthetic illiteracy, corresponding to the latter two types of illit–
eracy. And in genera l there is a flagging of interest in these things to
which we have devoted our lives to serving. I don't know what is going
to result from this. It seems to me that among entertainment, current af–
fairs, sports, and so on, our mental life is being overtaken by all these
forces. I don't know what the future holds for us, whether literature will
become a sort of elitist activity or not. As for the response of literature
to wielders of power, to the magnates who run our corporations, to the
bureaucracies, to the educators, and so on, it seems to me that we have
to depend upon the power of a sort of deeper humanity to survive all of
these new forces.
Ralph Ellison:
Shouldn't we also keep in mind that democracy is
based on the assumption that the individual is responsible for sorting out
the true and the false, the negative from the positive? We are told in the
vernacular mode to "be with it," to "dig" what li es beneath all the
blarney. No writers, no intellectuals, here or in Europe, are going to re–
lieve the individual citi zen of that responsibility. Ultimately, as you judge
the element of truth in a work of fiction or in an essay, you are judging
reality. The other thing to remember is that democracy provides the
individual with the right to reinvent the self, to become that which he
