Bellow ii
Robert Sward: What does the media do and how do you distinguish between the work of a novelist and the work of a journalist? I might add that for me the central theme of “The Dean’s December” is what a human being really is.
Saul Bellow: You’re quite right. And what it is possible for a human being to be in a time like this. I don’t think the media deals with questions of this sort. I think the media gives you the news of the day, not news of being. That is what a good novel, story or narrative poem should bring, news of being. The media gives you information or perhaps mis-information. We suffer from a glut of this kind of dramatized, selectively dramatized pieces of fact, hand-picked items of news. In this age of mass communication people are given the impression that they know what is going on. Well, the genuine word in the expression “mass communication” is mass. The second term, communication, is mis-leading. And we don’t know what is really going on. What we get from the mass media are the shadows of what is happening.
[x]#662 fan zondag 11 juli 2004 @ 21:29:19
