“Eternal Things”

Abstract

Saul Bellow’s explicit engagement with logical positivism in the short story “Zetland: By a Character Witness” – Bellow’s unfinished tribute to his childhood friend, intellectual companion, and literary rival Isaac Rosenfeld – encapsulates his response to the fact/value problem in his major novels, particularly Henderson the Rain King, the first work he published after Rosenfeld’s death. Rosenfeld began his intellectual career as a student of logical positivism but ultimately abandoned philosophy for literature. Bellow’s fiction takes up Rosenfeld’s attempt to acknowledge the mystifications of ideology and religion while nevertheless refusing to reject metaphysical values as “nonsense.” Bellow excels at describing the facts of the physical world but yearns for the insights of metaphysical truth; he sees facts, seeks values. The dialectic of facts and values in Bellow’s fiction results in a structural tension wherein narrative closure struggles to reconcile, and often belies, the terms of the narrative conflict that give rise to it.