Idiomatic Language in Two Novels by Saul Bellow

Abstract

In The Adventures of Augie March and Henderson the Rain King Bellow is, of course, using a fictional convention invented by Mark Twain. The language of Huckleberry Finn embodies every naïve, shrewd, awkward, or painfully honest attitude of a South-Western boy. Without forgetting this mimetic performance, however, we see that the words act directly on the sensibility of the reader in terms of his literary expectations. He is kept alert by fresh and vital rhythms and by idiomatic phrases which attract by their very incorrectness. His excitement is not primarily a response to the authenticity of the language he hears, although this is an important part of the effect. It is a response to a tension of style, involving the counter-pointing of the rhythms and incorrectnesses of a South-Western small town idiom against Victorian literary and subliterary language. Huck's relief on emerging from the Grangerford–Shepherdson feud is communicated by language which excludes, yet is aware of, fireside scenes in Dickens and the melting cadences of ‘Home, Sweet Home’: ‘I was powerful glad to get away from the feuds and so was Jim to get away from the swamp. We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.’