'Without Explaining': Saul Bellow, Hannah Arendt, and Mr Sammler's Planet

Abstract

NEAR THE BEGINNING of Saul Bellow’s novel Mr Sammler’s Planet (1970), the eponymous Mr Sammler, the novel’s protagonist, launches into an impatient tirade against Hannah Arendt and her notorious phrase the ‘banality of evil’, which Arendt had introduced in her 1963 ‘report’ on the trial of Adolf Eichmann. 1 Sammler is an elderly anglophile Polish Jew, a sprightly survivor of the Holocaust, now living in New York City among a small diaspora of family members. Tall and ‘minutely observant’, a sort of human periscope, he has nevertheless just ‘one good eye’. 2 His vision is sharp, but it isn’t perfect. His outburst against Arendt is a highly significant moment and also a representative one. Sammler speaks against his better wisdom, which counsels him to keep his mouth shut. But here as elsewhere the temptation to speak out proves irresistible. How best to understand what happens when we dare to speak and the borderline between the sheltered private self and the self that is willing to appear before others were matters of particular interest to Arendt. A few years before she wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, she had published her most ambitious philosophical book, The Human Condition (1958), a study of the existential character of politics, in which she explored the relationship between speech and action. It is also well known that Arendt was taught in her youth by Martin Heidegger, a philosopher who emphatically dismissed public life and any form of what he