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Saul Bellow: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1)

Saul Bellow (by Fay Godwin)

Today I finish Vol. 1 of The Paris Review Interviews with Saul Bellow.  Bellow's words have stuck with me since I first read his assessment of "realism" back in November.  He discusses this construct several times over the course of the interview, and figuring out how to condense or summarize his ideas has left me scratching my chin in pleasure for months.  The interview's just that good.

I give you, therefore, just one set of quotes (that seem to have left the interviewer, Gordon Lloyd Harper, a tad befuddled too):

Interviewer: I take it that for the realist tradition the context in which the action occurs is of vital importance....

Bellow: Well, you present me with a problem to which I think no one has the answer.  People write realistically but at the same time they want to create environments that are somehow desirable, which are surrounded by atmospheres in which behavior becomes significant, which display the charm of life.  What is literature without these things?  Dickens's London is gloomy, but also cozy.  And yet realism has always offered to annihilate precisely such qualities.  That is to say, if you want to be ultimately realistic you bring artistic space itself in danger.  In Dickens, there is no void beyond the fog.  The environment is human, at all times.  Do you follow me?

Interviewer: I'm not sure I do.

Bellow: The realist tendency is to challenge the human significance of things.  The more realistic you are the more you threaten the grounds of your own art.  Realism has always both accepted and rejected the circumstances of ordinary life.  It accepted the task of writing about ordinary life and tried to meet it in some extraordinary fashion.  As Flaubert did.  The subject might be common, low, degrading; all this was to be redeemed by art.  I really do see those Chicago environments as I represent them.  They suggest their own style of representation.  I elaborate it.

The interview with Bellow (1915-2005) took place in 1966.  He is the author of The Victim (1947), Herzog (1964), and Humbolt's Gift (1975), among many other novels.  He was the recepient of the Pulizer Price, the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the National Medal of Arts.