Graven Images by Saul Bellow (Text TOW#10)

   Immortality, power, and fame are what many people pursue in life and why, according to Saul Bellow, photograph is so powerful. Published in 1997 in the “News from Republic of Letters”, “Graven Images”, one of Bellow’s later essays, contemplates on the increasing role of digital photography in human society and its relationship with human ambition and privacy. As a winner of the literature Nobel Prize and numerous other literary awards, Saul Bellow continues to amaze the literary society with a brilliant essay

       Though the essay is open to everyone, the primary audience is mainly the literary citizens in advanced societies, such as in Europe and the United States. Bellow is clearly assuming that his audience knows the photograph phenomena he is describing, and will have the ability to reflect upon his own contemplation of digital photography and human nature, which, in Bellow’s eyes, is both fragile and grandiose.

       In discussing the nature of photography and human, Bellow most prominently used imageries and an intimate diction to both condense his reasoning into a concrete and seeable form and encompass the audience into his essay. As he described the fragility of human privacy and the power of exposure of photography, he used an image, saying “photographs will meaninglessly enlarge the pores of my skin and the huge paisley-shaped bruises under your eyes” (Oates 565). When Bellow portrayed the power of photographs to bring immortality, he detailed a photograph of his grandfather, “his beard is spread over his upper body; his elbow rests on the top of his walking stick and his hand supports his head”(Oates 568). The images Bellow describes are powerful as they show, not tell, the nature of photographs and human.

       The intimate tone Bellow uses consistently throughout the essay simply adds on to his brilliancy as a writer. As he discusses human desire for approval, he states “Amour prompre, with all its hypocritical tricks, is the product of your bourgeois outlook.” (Oates 565). When he turns the topic to photography and humanness, he wrote “photograph reduces us to two dimensions.”(Oates 567). The use of an intimate diction encourages the readers to connect with the text and impose their own reflections on the topic, not only from Bellow’s point of view but their own.

       Photography is new, but the humanity it portrayed, as Bellow successfully asserts, did not change.