Tag Archives: writing

David Mitchell on Cloud Atlas’ Provenance: Good Writers are Good Magpies

David Mitchell‘s bestselling 2004 novel Cloud Atlas sold millions of copies, and garnered ample critical praise (I have mixed feelings about it). What I found most interesting about the novel was Mitchell’s recounting of its genesis:

The germ of the opening (and closing) Adam Ewing narrative, about a notary crossing the Pacific in the 1850s, comes from a section in Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel…For mid-19th-century language I ransacked Herman Melville, in particular Moby-Dick and his superb sketches of the Galápagos Islands, The Encantadas….Robert Frobisher, the louche second narrator of Cloud Atlas, can trace his ancestry to a book called Delius As I Knew Him by the frail composer’s amanuensis, Eric Fenby….Frobisher’s language comes from Evelyn Waugh and Christopher Isherwood….Luisa Rey, an American investigative journalist, is a mix of the 1970s TV detectives I enjoyed as a kid, All the President’s Men and James Ellroy, whose plot-velocity always impresses me….The care home that Cavendish finds himself incarcerated in comes fromOne Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and a young man’s fear of senescence….Architectural features from pioneering SF classics such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We and The Machine Stops by EM Forster…are present, with rich dollops of Blade Runner. The university where Sonmi is housed is a carbon copy of the technical college where I worked in Japan…. The question/answer format for the story was inspired by…those interviews you get in Hello! magazine

Note that Mitchell does not say the ideas, characters and language for Cloud Atlas sprang fully formed from his mind, and in a sudden burst of primal creativity–that owed no debts to any cultural formations around him–transformed themselves into the written word on a blank page. He does not make himself out to be a writer that is a creative singularity or a fount of originality; he is, in short, not suggesting he is that creature so beloved of ‘intellectual property’ defenders the world over. Rather Mitchell is simply acknowledging what every honest writer knows is the case: to write is to borrow; the more you read works written by others, the more you draw upon them in your writing to enrich it; no one is truly ‘original’ or ‘creative’ in the primitive, fantastical, magical sense imagined by deluded artists and IP lawyers. Mitchell has lifted plots, or characters, or language with varying degrees of directness; his writing bears the impress of his reading, his cultural immersion. His skill as an author, acknowledged by many of his readers, and some of his critics, lies in his expert transformation of that material into something simultaneously distinctive and revelatory of its provenance.

What is remarkable about the excerpt above is that Mitchell is able to articulate some of the influences on his writing quite clearly; most artists cannot do so quite distinctly and thus are able to convince themselves of their ‘originality.’ It is a fair bet Mitchell would admit there are numerous other literary and cultural inferences–not so clearly noted–that have also found their way into his writing.

A good writer is a good magpie, building his nest from materials brought home from afar.

Robot Graders: A Professor’s Delight?

Over at Concurring Opinions, Deven Desai makes note of an interesting study–whose details I have not yet had the time to investigate–underwritten by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and conducted by a team of “experts in educational measurement and assessment, led by Dr. Mark Shermis, dean of the College of Education at The University of Akron.” The study claims to have found that,

A direct comparison between human graders and software designed to score student essays achieved virtually identical levels of accuracy, with the software in some cases proving to be more reliable [I am not quite sure what 'reliable' means here]

The reaction of at least one kind of college professor is, I suspect, likely to be: Hallelujah, no more grading! Another kind will mutter and grumble about the invasion of a domain of faculty privilege, the mechanization of a humanist skill, the loss to students of vital professorial feedback and so on. I’m not quite sure which camp I fall into.

The reason for that ambiguous response is that I find the business of grading papers (student writing assignments) genuinely perplexing. I’ve now been grading papers, on and off, for some fifteen years. (That is how long I have been teaching philosophy, first as a graduate teaching fellow, and then later, of course, as a full-time faculty member; before that my teaching was centered on computer science classes and there was little writing to grade.) In that time, I have never had a teaching assistant to help me with grading but neither have I had to teach a class with more thirty students in it. But twenty or so six-page or four-page papers–the standard length of my assignments, of which I assign three in a typical philosophy class–is still plenty of work.

And that is so because fifteen years on, I’m still not quite sure how to provide good feedback to my students. I find writing to be very hard work; I struggle with it constantly; I still remain terrified by the blank page. More to the point, when confronted by a piece of writing that doesn’t ‘read well,’ I don’t quite know how to instruct someone other than me in the business of how to make it better. There is an exaggeration here, of course; I can point out problems in relevance (‘You haven’t addressed the question I asked!’); I can note elementary mistakes in spelling and grammar; I can point to mangled sentences and constructions that don’t make sense. And so on. But at the end of this process it still seems like there is something that I haven’t managed to convey to my students. It is for this reason that I urge my student to consult with writing tutors, to have their papers read by their friends (or even their parents, if they have time!).

The long and short of it is that I continue to find writing a bit of a mystery, and given that I find it so intractable, I find the task of teaching someone else how to do it to be particularly insuperable.

Any help would be much appreciated. Bring on the robotic graders!

Schopenhauer on the Pernicious Influence of Copyright on Writing

Modern debates on the ‘intellectual property’ front involve several, overlapping, recurring themes. One persistent pair of inter-related concerns is: How are creators, authors, artists, ‘content producers’, and the like to be compensated for their ‘contributions’ to our commons? and, How indispensable are the protections of the various legal regimes that are termed ‘intellectual property’ (and its related economic arrangements) for the continued sustenance and facilitation of ‘artistic production’? The answering of these questions almost invariably involves a reckoning with fundamental issues of artistic motivation and innovation. The pedigree of those kinds of debates is, of course, older than modern Internet-related intellectual property disputes, and unsurprisingly enough, the pronouncements of those who have approached the puzzles of artistic provenance in the past are relevant for them. Sometimes those pronouncements can be especially, pointedly, on target and serve as useful reminders that skepticism about ‘intellectual property’ predates the Internet.

From Arthur Schopenauer’s “On Authorship and Style” (from Essays of Schopenhauer, University of Adelaide E-books repository):

There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject’s sake, and those who write for writing’s sake. The first kind have had thoughts or experiences which seem to them worth communicating, while the second kind need money and consequently write for money. They think in order to write, and they may be recognised by their spinning out their thoughts to the greatest possible length, and also by the way they work out their thoughts, which are half-true, perverse, forced, and vacillating; then also by their love of evasion, so that they may seem what they are not; and this is why their writing is lacking in definiteness and clearness.

Consequently, it is soon recognised that they write for the sake of filling up the paper, and this is the case sometimes with the best authors….As soon as this is perceived the book should be thrown away, for time is precious. As a matter of fact, the author is cheating the reader as soon as he writes for the sake of filling up paper; because his pretext for writing is that he has something to impart. Writing for money and preservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. It is only the man who writes absolutely for the sake of the subject that writes anything worth writing. What an inestimable advantage it would be, if, in every branch of literature, there existed only a few but excellent books! This can never come to pass so long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as if money lay under a curse, for every author deteriorates directly he writes in any way for the sake of money. The best works of great men all come from the time when they had to write either for nothing or for very little pay….The deplorable condition of the literature of to-day…is due to the fact that books are written for the sake of earning money. Every one who is in want of money sits down and writes a book, and the public is stupid enough to buy it.

Incidental aside: The indictment of writing-as-if-paid-by-the-word is pungent and on point; the wisdom of “I coulda written less but I didn’t have the time” lives on.

Why Write and All That – I: Bargains Struck

Two recent articles about writing, writers, and writing as a job–Tim Parks in the New York Review of Books blog and Seth Godin’s interview at Digital Book World–prompt me to take on the insufferably self-indulgent business of being self-referential. The issues covered in the pieces linked above should be familiar: Why write? Is writing a career? Should you get paid for it? Do you have a right to get paid for the work you make available to your readers? And of course, the modern favorite: In today’s ‘digital economy’ where readers supposedly ‘expect content for free’ how is a writer to be paid?

This set of issues, despite its familiarity, is extraordinarily rich, and I can only make some preliminary remarks here. (I expect to write follow-up posts.) In so doing, I hope I can offer some insight into why it is people write, and why, I think, writing will persist as an ‘occupation’ understood broadly, even if no one is getting ‘paid’ for it.

I write from a curious position in this discussion. I’m an academic and I don’t expect to make money from my writing. Or rather, I do not write for the direct income of royalties, but–initially at least–for the financial security of tenure and promotion, and now, to secure my academic reputation and to circulate my ideas. My two academic books thus far have secured for me a quasi-permanent job in the academy and I am now free to write for the rest of my career on those topics that interest me. As I do so, perhaps I will learn a bit myself and engage in the pursuit of ‘knowledge’ in a way that is of use to others.

My first book was non-academic, and while it neither secured my reputation in the academy nor helped me circulate any particularly significant intellectual ‘ideas,’ it did do a great deal for me. First, I performed an act of personal archaeology by writing about a war in which my father had fought; in so doing, I learned a great deal about him, the times he lived in, and the men who worked with him. Second, I did justice to an older self of mine, one that was obsessed about aircraft and the men who flew them. Third, I learned a bit of history. Thus, I was edified in the emotional, intellectual, and personal dimensions. Fourth, I also made several friends; many of the veterans I interviewed for one, and my co-author. (We did not meet in the flesh until after the book had been published!) Lastly, my writing improved: I learned how to organize chapters, construct a narrative, edit, revise, ruthlessly delete redundancy and irrelevance, all skills that would help me later in writing my academic books.

I made very little money from the sales of the book, but it seemed not to matter, for I hadn’t set out to. When I started work on the book, I was a post-doctoral fellow; when I completed it, I was in a tenure-track position. The two checks I have received thus far have paid for an airfare–for one person–to India, and some books.

So I wrote a book, and got in exchange: Learning, the making of friendships, the honing of a useful skill, the engagement with self-discovery, an airfare, some books. All this seems to add up to a very good bargain.

Surfaces scratched. More later.

Fiction, Non-Fiction, Essays, Posterity

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post disagreeing with Katha Pollitt’s claim that (roughly), Even the best non-fiction writers only get read by future generations if they are lucky enough to have written some quality best-selling fiction. Pollitt had referred to “columnists and essayists and book reviewers” in her original post, but in my response, I broadened the category to “non-fiction.”

That post triggered some interesting responses. Corey Robin wrote in to say that he disagreed with the small list of “essayists” I had generated (while agreeing with my disagreement with Pollitt):

Arnold, Barzun, Burke, and Bacon are not known and remembered primarily for their essays; they have other bodies of work that we mainly remember them for. You’re right about Montaigne, Johnson, and Sontag, and I’d also throw in Hazlitt, Chesterton, maybe Benjamin, and James Baldwin.

Another commenter, Lauren Hahn, wrote,

The examples you give of essayists who did not write fiction are problematic. Ben Jonson, of course, wrote brilliant plays (Volpone!) and poetry as well as essays. Matthew Arnold wrote brilliant poems. Hitchens did not write plays or poems.

Later, Corey and I also got into an interesting Twitter dialogue with Jeff Sharlet; Katha Pollitt herself showed up to clarify her initial claim (with some interesting examples; do read the comment); and later, Mukul Kesavan suggested, using Borges and the standard New York Review of Books piece as examples, that Pollitt’s claim was correct:

[W]e can be certain that the generic ‘literary’ essay that is the stock-in-trade of the NYRB and its imitators, has the shelf-life of fresh produce. Or fish.

These discussions threw up some interesting points of contention:

  1. The distinction between “essayists” and other “non-fiction writers”; I started too broadly but this was inevitable, given that many writers who wrote essays also wrote other material: philosophical and political tracts most notably. Consider Barzun, who has written many “general” essays but is a historian of ideas and culture and a philosopher of education. Or Burke, who I had down as an essayist, is perhaps most straightforwardly considered a political theorist and philosopher. (Incidentally, in response to Hahn above, I would say that my examples were intended to be not of writers who confined themselves to essays but rather those that we remember primarily for their essays; Sontag, as I noted, wrote fiction too, but I’d be surprised if anyone remembers her writing for that reasons).

    This disagreement in general suggests the category “essayists” is too narrow, and “non-fiction” is too broad when it comes to picking the appropriate target for comparison with “fiction” in reckoning how well one’s writing will endure. I think if a comparison between “non-fiction” and “fiction” is made, the case is hopelessly muddled. But even restricting the comparison to “essays” and “fiction” is hard. Because I don’t think we have great agreement on who an “essayist” is or what an “essay” is. Is this defined by subject matter, writing style, length of piece, forum of publication, or something else? “Essay” is a vague predicate when applied to works of prose, and our categorization of writers as “essayists” is an exercise in classification that will always reveal boundary cases that don’t quite fit in. 

    I suspect “essay” is often reserved now for a piece of prose that is intensely personal (i.e., there is an element of autobiography in it); even the quasi-philosophical piece can become an “essay” then if the writer makes explicit that his view is not from “nowhere” but from his personal standpoint. I’d be interested to hear from folks on what they would include in the category and what they would leave out, and how a line would be drawn between different kinds of writing so that we could more accurately classify writers as “essayists” or something else.

    I think if nothing else, this discussion made me realize the original comparison between different kinds of writers’ ability to earn posterity’s recognition is not a very interesting one if “essayists” is restricted too narrowly.

  2. The “popular” and “serious” distinction. In the discussion that Robin, Sharlet and I had on Twitter, the central disagreement was about my rather loosely-worded claim that “Well, fiction is always more likely to reach a broader market than the non-fiction a writer puts out.” Sharlet contested this point, and he was right. The implicit suggestion in this claim of mine was that “fiction” is somehow “popular”, while “non-fiction” is “serious” and the greater accessibility to markets comes about because of the “pop” nature of fiction. This conflation of “fiction” with “popular fiction” was careless on my part. Sharlet later suggested that by my examples, I was attempting to point out “exceptions to the rule” but he’d suggest rather, that “nonfiction is the new rule.” When I asked if this meant that in the modern context, “nonfiction writers and fiction writers stand equal chance of access to markets of readers”, Sharlet replied, “my understanding is except for a few stars, nonfiction far outsells fiction now.”

    The question then remains: What kind of non-fiction? Essays? Reportage? Political tracts? Literary criticism? Another interesting question this prompts is why this might be the case now. Have fiction markets become saturated? Is there an expressed preference for the consumption of “non-fiction” now? Have bloggers had something to do with this?

  3. Why might it be the case that fiction ensures greater enduring fame? Now, I think the original discussion, and the examples of Montaigne, Johnson and Sontag, show that even with “essayists” there are some counterexamples to Pollitt’s claim. But why might Pollitt and Kesavan think that fiction ensures greater fame? The facile answer to this is that fiction is not a creature of its time in the way that essays might be. Some fiction can speak to universal themes that span space, time and cultures. But other pieces of fiction are, of course, hopelessly parochial in those same dimensions. And when one considers the category “essays” to include political tracts or philosophical speculation, those can often cease to be confined by temporal boundaries as well. It isn’t a conceptual feature of fiction that it will always be less parochial.

    But where fiction does come off best is in comparison with those pieces that are necessarily creatures of their time: journalistic pieces (see my post on “Essays and Expiry Dates”); book reviews; some kinds of travel writing (not all; see for instance travel writing that has now become an important historical sources in its own right); topical political commentary (like the tedious modern pieces of election analysis).

    In general, I’m not sure that a general sort of claim can be made about how well some kinds of writing endure based on their fictionality as a parameter. Rather, when it comes to assessing enduring fame or a place in posterity, there is only one way to do it: keep checking over time. In Law and Literature, Richard Posner suggested that coming up with necessary and sufficient conditions for a work to be judged a “classic” was a doomed exercise and that the best way to exercise that judgment was to see how long it continued to be read. I agree.

Essays And Expiry Dates

My post yesterday on reportage and war porn, in which I quoted from a 1999 essay by Sebastian Junger, prompted a thought related to my December post on fiction and non-fiction and writing for posterity: How well do reportage-style essays hold up to the demands of time? (I ask this question as someone who, having made the claim that non-fiction will endure just as well as fiction in ensuring fame, is now a) dealing with the broadness of the category “non-fiction” and all the confusion it created in discussions surrounding that post and b) trying to get clearer on what kind of non-fiction will endure best over time and be granted posterity’s acknowledgement)

In the post linked to above, I had, in responding to Katha Pollitt, said,

“columnists” and “book reviewers” are more inclined to be creatures of their age who risk rapid obscurity unless they write more substantive and possibly popular work.

Junger’s essays, of course, are not columns or book reviews. But neither are they extended meditations on philosophical, literary or cultural subjects; rather, they are long-form journalistic pieces written for venues like Vanity Fair, Harpers, Men’s Journal, Outside, and National Geographic Adventure; other than the essays on wildfires and fire-fighting, they were written to cover topical hot-spots of human and political conflict: Kosovo, Kashmir, Sierra Leone, Cyprus. The wildfires and whale-hunting essays belong to the kind made popular by forums like Outside magazine; the standard theme in this kind of writing is “man-against-nature revealing the human spirit in all its wonderfully varied cussedness.” (Man-Against-Nature as a theme is, I think, more likely to endure and age better than Man-Against-Man-In-A-Particular-Time-And-Place.)

In reportage essays, the expectation is that the traveling reporter will send back news but also background; the reporter will inform, update, ruminate, and crucially, prognosticate. The last part carries the most potential to date the essay; if fate deals the writer a cruel hand, readers in the future are likely to be struck–and turned off–by the silliness of the prognostication. In any case, such essays by virtue of being extended reports or news, are very much captive to that particular time. They are meant to be read soon; they are meant to make contemporary understandings of a ‘trending’ subject more extensive and thoughtful; but they are extremely unlikely to make for useful or illuminating reading down the line. The backgrounders in the essays, by virtue of space limitations, tend to be superficial; indeed, they have to be, if the essays are to maintain their readability in the intended forum. If you want a detailed history that underwrites Kosovo, Kashmir or Cyprus, you’d be an idiot to look for it in the pages of a Vanity Fair or Harpers essay. (In Junger’s essays, I enjoyed the material on Cyprus the most, and I suspect part of that was because of the collaboration that that required Junger and Scott Anderson to be placed in, and reporting from, the Greek and Turkish portions of Cyprus so that a contrast between their respective narratives could be brought out).

When it comes to reportage style history, the longer form will work better; the extended, improved, and more likely-to-endure version of this style of writing is perhaps the book-length reportage project like David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest (which, interestingly enough, started as an essay for Harpers).

Much more to be said on this. But later.

Sebastian Junger, AK-47 Bullets, and War Porn

Reporters on war’s frontlines often produce great investigative journalism (this was truer in the days before embedded reporters). They also, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes not, produce “war porn,” writing that vividly, graphically, sometimes almost joyfully, details the carnage of war and weaponry, of organized violence, and the men who live and die by its rules. The newspaper correspondent, his prose awestruck by the power and glory of the mechanized apparatus of war, and sometimes by the uniformed men who operate it, is almost a cliche now. But even the presumably more sober long-form journalist, committed to writing more ruminative essays for longer-term consumption, can produce descriptions of war that succumb to the temptation to produce war porn.

The appeal of such writing, we are told, is that the writer takes us into places we are reluctant to visit; through his eyes we bear witness to that which we might find unbearable. And our praise for the writer is as much an acknowledgement of his epistolary skills as it is his of his courage in exposing himself to the gore and guts that he enables us to vicariously experience. But part of the writing’s appeal is precisely in catering to a particular kind of fantasy, entertained by a sensibility that finds in war moments of exultation and fierce joy. And nothing better stokes such passions than descriptions of the machinery of war. Such writing must revel in technical detail, all the while making clear the relevance of that detail to the damage inflicted on human beings.

Here is a classic example, taken from Sebastian Junger’s 1999 essay, The Forensics of War, (originally published in Vanity Fair, and reprinted in the collection, Fire, published by WW Norton in 2011), which discusses the war crimes investigations and trials that followed the Serbian massacres in Kosovo. Writing of mass killings by shooting, Junger informs us of the damage caused by an AK-47 bullet:

[A] round from an AK-47 assault rifle leaves the muzzle of the gun at twenty-three hundred feet per second, twice the speed of sound. When it hits a person, the density of the tissue forces the round to yaw to one side until it is traveling sideways or even backward. Shock waves ripple through the tissue and create a cavity that can be as much as eleven times the size of the bullet. The cavity lasts only a few thousandths of a second, but the shock waves that created it can shred organs that the bullter never even touches. In head wounds the temporary cavity is particularly devastating because the skull–being rigid–can respond to the sudden deformation only by bursting. If the gun barrel is actually touching the victim, rapidly expanding gases inside the barrel get trapped in the wound and blow blood and tissue back out. It is safe to assume that some of the killers in Studenica walked away covered in the people they killed.

I do not mean, by providing this excerpt from Junger’s writing, to suggest that he was consciously trying to titillate. Rather, I’m suggesting that the temptation to do so is always present when writing about war and weaponry, because, I think, the writer knows a thing or two about his readers, about his subject, and about the perennial fascination it exerts on our imagination.

Katha Pollitt, George Orwell, Essayists and Posterity

For a couple of days now, Katha Pollitt’s obit/remembrance of Christopher Hitchens has been making the rounds to near-universal adulation. For good reasons; the piece is well worth a read, especially as it highlights aspects of Hitchens’ writing and personality that few have seen fit to focus on (especially not by his drinking buddies, whose cliche-ridden remembrances will be chuckled over by many for years to come).

But toward the end of the article, Pollitt throws in the following:

Posterity isn’t kind to columnists and essayists and book reviewers, even the best ones. I doubt we’d be reading much of Orwell’s nonfiction now had he not written the indelible novels 1984 and Animal Farm.

Pollitt seems to be trying to establish the following thesis (roughly): Even the best non-fiction writers only get read by future generations if they are lucky enough to have written some quality best-selling fiction. I disagree. (Notice, incidentally, that Pollitt has thrown “essayists” into a group that includes “columnists” and “book reviewers”; I do agree that “columnists” and “book reviewers” are more inclined to be creatures of their age who risk rapid obscurity unless they write more substantive and possibly popular work. I’m also aware that “non-fiction” is too broad a category in my purported thesis above but I think it is clear what Pollitt and I are aiming at.)

The simplest way to refute Pollitt’s assertion is to dredge up examples of essayists whose place in posterity is secure without their being famous through the fiction they wrote: Michel Montaigne, Edmund Burke, Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, Samuel Johnson, Matthew Arnold, Susan Sontag, Jacques Barzun; the list goes on. (Standard caveat: to really settle this dispute check back in a couple of hundred years). We can disagree plentifully about how well posterity is treating every single member on the list we would generate, and about its definitive membership, but when the smoke would clear, we would still list many essayists to whom posterity has been “kind” without requiring that they have written a best-selling novel or two. Indeed, in some cases, it would be clear their literary fame has been achieved not because of the fiction they wrote but in spite of it (I think this is especially true of Sontag, whose fiction I simply could not stand).

But there is another problem in Pollitt’s assertion given its reliance on the case of Orwell. Would Orwell simply have slipped into obscurity had he not written those “indelible” novels? Well, fiction is always more likely to reach a broader market than the non-fiction a writer puts out. And popularity in that genre can have the salutary effect of attracting a broader readership to the rest of a writer’s corpus. And yes, Orwell’s writings became famous only after he wrote his best-selling novels (I’m inclined to think that 1984, incidentally, is a not-very-good novel whose fame was ensured by a particular set of historical contingencies). But is a large readership what Pollitt means by being treated kindly by posterity? Or would posterity still be kind to a writer if critical acclaim for the writer’s non-fiction corpus were to endure through the ages? If the latter, then since Pollitt is trading in hypotheticals, let me do so too. I think anyone that wrote Homage to Catalonia, The Road to Wigan Pier, Decline of the English Murder, How the Poor Die, Shooting An Elephant, Why I Write, or Politics and The English Language would have found enduring critical, even if not popular, fame.

Lastly, slipping a mention of Orwell into a remembrance of Hitchens shows that Pollitt has succumbed to the temptation to lump the two together. Please. Cease and Desist.

Saul Bellow on Artists and Philosophers

In his two-part essay in the New York Review of Books on being a Jewish writer in America, Saul Bellow is typically uneven. There are some rambling portions (Bellow seems to have a talent for such rambling, nowhere more evident than in this bizarre 1994 New York Times Op-Ed where he attempts to defend himself during the “Tolstoy of the Zulus” flap), accompanied by moments of lucidity:

[Q]uestions that can be closed by philosophic argument often remain open for art, and it is therefore a mistake for writers to accept the preeminence of the philosophers, and write poems, novels, and plays to illustrate, to confirm, to work out in their art and in human detail, the thoughts given to us abstractly by distinguished (and also by undistinguished) thinkers. (Cartesians, Kantians, Hegelians, Bergsonians, Marxians, Freudians, Existentialists, Heideggerians, etc.) Neither the philosopher nor the scientist can tell the artist conclusively, definitively, what it is to be human.

This does not need much commentary except to say that writers who “work out in their art and in human detail, the thoughts given to us abstractly by distinguished (and also by undistinguished) thinkers” often, precisely, by this very act, serve to remind us that an ostensibly “closed” question, remains, in fact, very much open. (I do think Bellow could have said something stronger in his first statement: Questions that appear closed by philosophic argument always remain open for art; it isn’t clear to me indeed, what it would mean for a question to remain “closed” for an artist; what form could such a question take?).

Update: My ever-alert cousin Priya (in comments) pointed out a typo, which I’ve now fixed. Thanks!