"Truths on the Side of Life": Saul Bellow, Nobel Prize 1976

Abstract

In bestowing the 1976 Nobel Prize for Literature upon Saul Bellow, the Nobel Committee cited Bellow for portraying man who keeps on trying to find a foothold during his wanderings in a tottering world, one who can never relinquish his faith that the value of life depends on its dignity, not its success, and that the truth must triumph at last. Alfred Kazin, long a critical admirer of Bellow, notes that most important in Bellow's work is his sense of comedy, human being's diffidence before the superior forces of life, a Chaplinesque sense of himself as the accidental and paltry vessel on which life has been conferred (Contemporaries, 1962). It is these seemingly paradoxical currents in Bellow's work, the dignity of life and the comic accident that we exist at all, that are so exhilarating. Like the true comedian, the one who shows the truths of life, Bellow discards the easy laugh in favor of the deeper, cosmic laughter which responds to the human condition. It is this cosmic sense of humor which provides Augie March (The Adventures of Augie March, 1953) with his last laugh: