Tuning Out of America: Humboldt’s Gift

Abstract

That last sentence has been an accurate description of Bellow’s field of operations. In his fiction we have been shuttled between the ‘here’ of an America that resists the cultured and the humane, and the ‘there’ of his characters’ efforts at transcendence. If Mr Sammler’s Planet had offered, at most, a ‘very chilly’ invitation to participate in ordinary life,2 Bellow’s next novel would seem to provide the rationale and the medium for withdrawal from that life. The transcendental postulates contained in Dr Lal’s heavenly Utopia are here removed from the margins to become, in the dress of theosophy, Bellow’s major subject. Charlie Citrine finds the spiritual accountancy of Baudelaire to be both prudent and necessary. This is a novel full of debtors and creditors, a story which illumines the hard countenance of an early 1970s America, a world chronically afflicted by avarice, a society of makers and takers. Mired in their ‘melancholy of affluence’,3 they express Bellow’s conviction that ‘real life’ can only be sustained by deploying strategies of withdrawal from la vie quotidienne. Spiritual secession is articulated through the ultramundane theories of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy.4 This is the ‘extraterrestrial subject’ of the novel and its spiritually redemptive properties are there writ large.