There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction

by Saul Bellow

The writer should either love or hate his subject. Tolstoy condemned neutrality or objectivity therefore as inartistic. He was contradicted by the “art for art’s sake” novelists who explicitly rejected moral purpose. Probably Flaubert is the most significant of these. He, and Joyce following him, felt that anything that might be described by us as a moral commitment would be a serious error. The artist, said Joyce, should have no apparent connection with his work. His place is in the wings, apart, paring his nails, indifferent to the passions of his creatures. Such aesthetic objectivity was an imperative with Joyce and in A Portrait of the Artist he explicitly rejected anything in art that excited desire or a need for action. The feeling a work of art should arouse is in his view static, beyond desire, too pure to be involved in judgments, contemplative. This is a rather lofty attitude in a novelist. It would seem more appropriate to a poet or a musician, for the novel meets life at a commoner level where confusion is inordinate. The art for art’s sake novelist believed in pure form, classical order. Order of this sort is seldom available and in chaotic conditions such beliefs must inevitably lead to disappointment.