India Uncut

I’m just going to stop this part now by quoting you a story, which I think defined for me very well what it is to be a writer. Not just a writer, but what it is to be an artist in a world such as this. There’s a paragraph in Saul Bellow’s novel, The Dean’s December, which is actually a very minor moment in the book, but it just struck me. The Dean’s December is about an American dean in a university, who has a Rumanian wife. They go to Rumania for family reasons. And this is Ceausescu’s Rumania, so it’s very bleak. And it’s winter as well, which makes it even more bleak. And nobody has much money and there’s an atmosphere of fear and it’s that moment before 1989 — long before, actually — and there’s a moment in the novel where the dean is standing at the window of the apartment in Bucharest, looking out at a park. And in the park there are no leaves on the trees, there’s frost on the ground — it’s bleak — and he hears in the distance a dog beginning to bark. The dog barks and barks and barks and barks...it will not stop barking, nothing can stop it barking, and it barks for ages and ages. And he at first is irritated by the dog’s barking. And then, because this is a dog in a Saul Bellow novel, it becomes necessary to understand why the dog is barking, and the dean imagines that what the dog is doing is uttering a protest against the limitations of dog-experience. And what the dog is saying in its barking is, “For god’s sake open the universe a little more.”