Augie March Research Articles

Bob, so far. A scientific biography of Robert A. Harris

“I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.” Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March Robert A. Harris**

The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post-World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work (review)

Reviewed by: The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post-World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work Jennifer M. Harrison The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post-World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work. By Andrew Hoberek . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 158 pp. $19.95 hardback. Discussions about the decline of the middle class proliferate, regularly renewed in response to issues ranging from trade agreements to overseas outsourcing to tax cuts. Andrew Hoberek challenges conventional wisdom in The Twilight of the Middle Class, by boldly suggesting that middle class decline actually began during the 1950s, even though the middle class was growing demographically and economically as a result of the postwar boom. Hoberek argues against ideas that post-World War II fiction shifted thematic concentration from economic to psychological, asserting that "economics and class remained central to postwar writing." Reviewing scholars who see the middle class as reaching economic transcendence in the fifties, Hoberek counters that the middle class, through loss of economic property, joined the proletariat as exploited workers. With the consolidation of property brought on by industrialization, the middle class became defined by white-collar work: professionals, managers, or workers in "routinized mental labor." This change created a new "middle-class consciousness" rooted in a sense of "dispossession" and individuality compromized by conformity. Loss of control and a sense of replaceability redefined the middle class. They became the workers, despite unwillingness to identify with the proletariat and the postwar economy's obfuscation of its rising binary bent. While wealth was redistributed during this period, capital was not; thus middle class workers, engaged in work with people and ideas rather than things, became [End Page 107] "organization men" with "their employment symbolizing the ultimate degradation of creative mental labor within the white-collar workplace." The result, Hoberek explains, is the creation of narratives "of individual dispossession that enforce ... [middle class] cultural dominance" instead of seeking alliance with workers. Because of this failure to identify with workers, capital is able to exploit "the ongoing resonance of traditional American middle-class values even while it proves increasingly able to dispense with an actual middle class." Hoberek applies his theory to several authors and novels. For example, with Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, he dismisses its romanticized understanding of intellectual property issues that promises the reversal of middle class decline. He sees Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man as a "critical reworking" of the organization-man narrative through its refusal to romanticize the exclusion of blacks from the white-collar middle class. Hoberek claims that this suggests "a deep-seated fear of racial downward mobility as the telos of organization life." In contrast, Hoberek's inquiry into the Jewish novel of the fifties, centered on Saul Bellow's Augie March, presents Jewish difference as "a way of entering the white-middle class without completely sacrificing one's individuality." Similarly, he regards Flannery O'Connor's southern difference as having the potential to undermine the organization man. In 130 pages, Hoberek shifts extensively among writers, at times confusing his points and creating a desire for additional insights. While his extensive knowledge builds contextual interest and offers provocative contrasts, the text at times seems to stray from his focus. His goal, however, is lofty: he urges reexamination of the middle class imprisonment in "the real world of capitalist unfreedom" and a change in the way it "dream[s] of a world in which people are human beings, rather than parts of the system's machinery." Jennifer M. Harrison National Labor College Copyright © 2006 the West Virginia University Press, for the United Association for Labor Studies

Looking at Saul Bellow (1915–2005)

The backbone of twentieth-century American literature has been provided by two novelists-William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the twentieth century. For me as a writer The Adventures of Augie March remains the most inspiring American I've ever read. Nobody has topped Bellow at writing a about a city-bred American and probably nobody will.-Philip Roth, 5 April 2005, on the death of Saul BellowUnlike those of us who came howling into the world, blind and bare, Mr. Roth appears with nails, hair and teeth, speaking coherently. At twenty-six he is skillful, witty, and energetic and performs like a virtuoso. [. . .] My advice to Mr. Roth is to ignore all objections and to continue on his present course.-Saul Bellow, July 1959, review of Goodbye, ColumbusEditor's Note: On the evening of 5 April 2005, I was putting the final touches on a paper that I was to deliver at the 19th annual MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.) Conference in Chicago. It was then, checking an online news source to discover the weather in the Windy City, that I learned of the passing of Saul Bellow. He had died earlier that day, and it struck me as a somber coincidence that in less than forty-eight hours, I would be in the city of Augie March. Bellow had not lived in Chicago for many years, but I was hoping to find a bit of him present at the conference. I did not. There were no papers on Bellow-he has never been the most popular figure among MELUS members, and besides, he had said many times that he disliked being called a Jewish, or ethnic, writer-but nonetheless, many there privately expressed their grief over the death of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist. Among friends, we talked between panels and over meals, sharing our various histories and experiences reading his works. It was not a scholarly eulogy, surely no organized retrospective, but it helped us to place the significance of Bellow in our reading lives.For this issue of Philip Roth Studies, I have asked a number of friends and colleagues to do just this: share their thoughts on Bellow, what he meant to us personally and what he meant to the literary world, including his influence on Philip Roth. As for me, it was through the novels and stories of Bellow that I first came to know Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoys Complaint. He was my to Roth. His name always seemed to be linked to Roth's (and to Bernard Malamud's-Bellow served as a gateway there as well), so perhaps my work with this journal is a logical outgrowth of my fascination with The Adventures of Augie March, Seize the Day, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler's Planet. His fingerprints are here and all over the literary world, in places we cannot even detect. Roth apparently sensed them throughout his writing career, for he felt the need to issue an official statement, through his agent, the day after Bellow's death. Those of us associated with Philip Roth Studies feel the same. Consider the paragraphs that follow a testimony to Saul Bellow's legacy.-Derek Parker RoyalI was in graduate school when The Adventures of Augie March appeared. I remember my pleased astonishment when this Jewish novel received a rave front-page review in the New York Times Book Review and glowing acknowledgments in all the other literary publications. In those years following World War II, the New Criticism reigned supreme, and serious students of literature were expected to concentrate on English, not American, literature and certainly not on any contemporary work. Time was needed, our professors assured us, for a poem, play, or to gain major literary status. Indeed, my professors at both UCLA and USC (Ivy League and Johns Hopkins PhDs, for the most part) were then only grudgingly adding post-Victorian or Edwardian works to their reading lists. American literature itself was viewed as an area of study suitable only for the weaker or more frivolous students-or, as one of my undergraduate professors warned me-for lazy ones. …

Looking at Saul Bellow (1915-2005)

115 Looking at Saul Bellow (1915–2005) The backbone of twentieth-century American literature has been provided by two novelists—William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the twentieth century. For me as a writer The Adventures of Augie March remains the most inspiring American novel I’ve ever read. Nobody has topped Bellow at writing a novel about a city-bred American and probably nobody will. —Philip Roth, 5 April 2005, on the death of Saul Bellow Unlike those of us who came howling into the world, blind and bare, Mr. Roth appears with nails, hair and teeth, speaking coherently. At twenty-six he is skillful, witty, and energetic and performs like a virtuoso. [. . .] My advice to Mr. Roth is to ignore all objections and to continue on his present course. —Saul Bellow, July 1959, review of Goodbye, Columbus Editor’s Note: On the evening of 5 April 2005, I was putting the final touches on a paper that I was to deliver at the 19th annual MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.) Conference in Chicago. It was then, checking an online news source to discover the weather in the Windy City, that I learned of the passing of Saul Bellow. He had died earlier that day, and it struck me as a somber coincidence that in less than forty-eight hours, I would be in the city of Augie March. Bellow had not lived in Chicago for many years, but I was hoping to find a bit of him present at the conference. I did not. There were no papers on Bellow—he has never been the most popular figure among MELUS members, and besides, he had said many times that he disliked being called a Jewish, or “ethnic,” writer—but nonetheless, many there privately expressed their grief over the death of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist. Among friends, we talked between panels and over meals, sharing our various histories and experiences reading his works. It was not a scholarly eulogy, surely no organized retrospective , but it helped us to place the significance of Bellow in our reading lives. For this issue of Philip Roth Studies, I have asked a number of friends and colleagues to do just this: share their thoughts on Bellow, what he meant to us personally and what he meant to the literary world, including his influence on Philip Roth. As for me, it was through the novels and stories of Bellow that I first came to know Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint. He was my “gateway” to Roth. His name always seemed to be linked to Roth’s (and to Bernard Malamud’s—Bellow served as a gateway there as well), so perhaps my work with this journal is a logical outgrowth of my fascination with The Adventures of Augie March, Seize the Day, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler’s Planet. His fingerprints are here and all over the literary world, in places we cannot 116 Philip Roth Studies Fall 2005 Author Saul Bellow, from the July 1958 issue of the Northwestern University Alumni News. Photograph courtesy of the Northwestern University Archives. Bellow Philip Roth Studies 117 even detect. Roth apparently sensed them throughout his writing career, for he felt the need to issue an official statement, through his agent, the day after Bellow’s death. Those of us associated with Philip Roth Studies feel the same. Consider the paragraphs that follow a testimony to Saul Bellow’s legacy. —Derek Parker Royal * * * I was in graduate school when The Adventures of Augie March appeared. I remember my pleased astonishment when this “Jewish novel” received a rave front-page review in the New York Times Book Review and glowing acknowledgments in all the other literary publications. In those years following World War II, the New Criticism reigned supreme, and “serious students” of literature were expected to concentrate on English, not American, literature and certainly not on any contemporary work. Time was needed, our professors assured us, for a poem, play, or novel to gain major literary status. Indeed, my professors at both UCLA and USC (Ivy League and Johns Hopkins PhDs, for the most part...

The Human Stain (review)

Reviewed by: The Human Stain Jay L. Halio The Human Stain, by Philip Roth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. 361 pp. $26.00. If Saul Bellow’s early novel, The Adventures of Augie March, inspired Roth at the beginning of his career to write about a generation of Jews younger than the immigrant Jews of Malamud’s fiction, a generation characterized less by victimization than by one “steeped in America, its freedom and talk, its energies and superabundance,” as David Remnick reports in his recent New Yorker profile (May 8, 2000), then Bellow’s later novels—his novels of contemplation—may have encouraged Roth to emulate him again, at least to some extent. In Ravelstein, for example, Bellow is concerned not so much, if at all, with relating the strong narrative line his critics desiderate as with a meditation on contemporary civilization, or what passes for civilization. Similarly, in Roth’s last three novels, what he has called his “thematic trilogy” on America in the 1950s, 60s, and later, Roth has given us both a retrospective view of where post-World War II America was and where we have emerged in the Clinton era. Unlike Bellow, his narrative line is clear enough but, like Bellow, it is subordinated, if not as obviously, to Roth’s more important concerns with American attitudes and behavior which, astute observer that he is, have preoccupied the writer—as it should preoccupy us—for some time. [End Page 173] The Human Stain, supposedly based upon the life of the New York Times literary critic, Anatole Broyard, is about Coleman Silk, a Newark-born African American whose fair complexion allows him in his adult life to pass as a white man. In ways that for some critics recall Alexander Portnoy’s struggle to free himself from the shackles of his middle-class Jewish upbringing, Silk tries to escape his heritage and his family ties—and for most of his life, he succeeds. After one or two failed relationships with white women in New York, where he is studying classics after serving in the navy in World War II, he determines to renounce his race and everything and everyone connected with it. His father having died, he severs all other family ties, proclaims himself a secular white Jew, and marries Iris Gittelman, a woman born of atheist Russian immigrant Jews. Neither she nor their four children ever learn of his true origins; in fact, no one does until after his death, except perhaps for Faunia Farley, the lover half his age whom he has taken near the end of his life. Coleman Silk’s well-kept secret stays safe, although by the second chapter Roth casually reveals it to the reader as a means of developing some of the many ironies in the novel. The most pronounced one involves the incident resulting in Coleman Silk’s resignation from the faculty of Athena College, the small liberal arts college in New England where he has taught and for many years served as its dean. Wondering where and who two students are who have failed to attend any of his class meetings since the beginning of the term, Silk asks his other students whether they exist or if they are “spooks.” Although his meaning is clear, the absent students, who are black, seize upon the term’s ambiguity: its secondary meaning as a derogatory term for Negroes. They therefore file a complaint against him with his department chair and dean. Enraged, not only because it is so transparently a misrepresentation by students whom he has never laid eyes on, but even more because none of his colleagues springs to his defense (these include an African American sociology professor whom as dean he had hired as the first black faculty member at Athena College), Silk resigns. In the ensuing controversy, his wife Iris dies of a stroke brought on, Silk believes, by the turmoil the students have caused him and his family to experience. Not since David Mamet’s Oleanna has there appeared so powerful an indictment of political correctness and a travesty of student rights and faculty vulnerability in higher education. Enter two years later Nathan Zuckerman, Silk’s neighbor...

Reading the picaresque: Mark twain'sthe adventures of huckleberry Finn, Saul bellow'sthe adventures of Augie march, and more recent adventures

(1996). Reading the picaresque: Mark twain's the adventures of huckleberry Finn, Saul bellow's the adventures of Augie march, and more recent adventures. English Studies: Vol. 77, No. 1, pp. 59-70.

Saul Bellow's "The Adventures of Augie March" and Its Picaresque Antecedents

This paper is grounded in the belief that there is such a thing as a picaresque genre, definable in terms broad enough to include such diverse works as Quevedo's Buscdn, Defoe's Moll Flanders, and Kafka's Amerika while excluding works of other narrative modes, even though they may contain picaresque elements (such as Don Quijote). I contend that the genre has identifiable manifestations in recent American narrative fiction, whether in a work as consciously picaresque as Fanny, by Erica Jong, or in Augie March, whose affinity with the picaresque may be less immediately obvious. Clearly, I am flying in the face of scholars such as Daniel Eisenberg, who has suggested that an attempt to study simultaneously the works of the Spanish Golden Age customarily called picaresque and the more recent novels sometimes labeled with this term is to invite further confusion (204). I hope not.

Jewish-American Literature's Lost-and-Found Department: How Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick Reimagine Their Significant Dead

Jewish-American Literature's Lost-and-Found Department:How Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick Reimagine Their Significant Dead Sanford Pinsker (bio) He realized he was writing to the dead. To bring the shades of great philosophers up to date. But then why shouldn't he write to the dead? He lived with them as much as with the living—perhaps more, . . . (Moses Herzog 181) Herzog's compulsive letter-writing is, of course, an index of his psychic agitation and of his tragicomic effort to "have it out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify, to make amends" (2). After all, he is a man whose previously sustaining roles—as husband, as father, as intellectual—have failed; he is a formerly brilliant scholar with more scribbled notes than manuscript pages. His compulsive letters are, in effect, a desperate effort to shore up fragments against his ruin. But that said, Herzog's letters—unmailed and often mental, filled with the alternating currents of high comedy and Big Ideas—are also the very stuff of experimental fiction. If, as Bellow once suggested, Ulysses is a "comedy of information,"1 a novel in which popular science, snatches [End Page 223] of song, folk wisdom, advertisement jingles, and the residue of cultural lore swirl through the confused but lovable Leopold Bloom, Herzog is a novel in which an infinitely more sophisticated body of information and a retinue of the Significant Dead press on Moses Herzog's exhausted brain. By juxtaposing a narrative line with the arc of his protagonist's stream of association, by breaking into, and out of, Herzog's letters, Bellow keeps his own penchant for preachiness under tight control. Herzog was, in short, an epistolary novel with important, and dazzling, differences. Humboldt's Gift is also a prolonged, often painful, meditation on the responsibilities of the living to the dead, but in this case, what Charlie Citrine, the novel's historian-protagonist, calls his "Significant Dead" seems largely restricted to Von Humboldt Fleisher, a character modeled on the poet Delmore Schwartz. Indeed, Humboldt haunts the novel both as an abiding presence and a fearful reminder. Had I. B. Singer told Humboldt's tale, he would surely have been an invading dybbuk; by contrast, Bellow seems willing to settle for the dead poet as one of Citrine's more troublesome ghosts of the heart. Citrine, of course, bears more than a little resemblance to Moses Herzog. Both are professional historians who spend as much time with the Significant Dead as they do with the Irritatingly Alive; both have grand books more in mind than on paper; and most important of all, both are "suffering jokers," eggheads with lives "in great disorder." Bellow had already made it clear, in a novel like The Adventures of Augie March, that he was a stylist, perhaps the stylist, to reckon with; his deliberate fracturing of syntax, his Yiddishisms yoked as they were with the heavy quilting of Ideas, added a whole new, and sometime unwelcome, chapter to American letters. But with Herzog and Humboldt's Gift, Bellow added experimental touches both in the how and the what of his narrative technique that allow the Significant Dead to function aesthetically as they had not previously done in fiction. Not surprisingly, those critics who make it their business to be au courant about matters experimental were unimpressed. As they would have it, Bellow is too much a captive of the Russian novel, too much the social realist, too much the novelist of Ideas—in a word, too old-fashioned—to be mentioned in the same breath with John Barth or Robert Coover, much less with Ronald Sukenick, Gilbert Sorrentino, Joseph McElroy, or Steve Katz. John Barth, balancing his rhetoric between respectfulness and insistence, joined the issue this way: I sympathize with a remark attributed to Saul Bellow, that to be technically up to date is the least important attribute of a writer, though I would have to add that this least important attribute may be nevertheless essential. In any case, to be technically out of date is likely to be a genuine defect: Beethoven's Sixth Symphony or the Chartres Cathedral if executed today would be merely embarrassing...

"Shuffling out of My Vulgar Origins": The Masculinist-Elitist Language of Saul Bellow's Fiction

I think that when I wrote those early books I was timid. I still felt the incredible effrontery of announcing myself to the world (in part I mean the WASP world) as a writer and an artist. I had to...demonstrate my abilities, pay my respects to formal requirements.... I was afraid to let myself go.... When I began to write Augie March, I took off many of these restraints.... My first two books are well made.... Those books...did not give me a form in which I felt comfortable. A writer should be able to express himself easily, naturally. ...Why should I force myself to write like an Englishman or a contributor to The New Yorker? ...I should add that for a young man in my position there were social inhibitions, too. I had good reason to fear that I would be put down as a foreigner, an interloper. It was made clear to me when I studied literature in the university that as a Jew and the son of Russian Jews I would probably never have the right feeling for Anglo-Saxon, for English words. (Harper 9)

Euroamerican Ethnic Literature in the 1980s

The novel is generally the tale of the stranger and his clash with America, the tale of a subculture, the tale of transplants who maintain their characteristics, or the exploration of the old and the new countries; it is the attempt to effect a balance between two ways of life with the writer's psyche. It follows, then, that a writer who is does not necessarily write an ethnic book. For example, some novels by Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March), by Kosinski (The Painted Bird and Steps), by Nabokov (Pnin) could be considered ethnic, while other books they wrote are not.

Strange Things, Savage Things: Saul Bellow's Hidden Theme

from among the words that might sum up Saul Bellow in the way that South does William Faulkner or courage*' does Ernest Hemingway, I would choose sensuality''?surprisingly, I admit, since we seldom think of Bellow in this light. Bellow treats sex with neither the explicitness of John Updike nor the mysticism of Norman Mailer. His protagonist struggles not to get the girl but to get over her or away from her. Because sex is something Bellow's women impose on the men?I think of Stella tempting Augie in The Adventures of Augie March or Ramona in Herzog entertaining a distracted and resentful Moses?the Bellow protagonist is really something of a prude. If the mere existence of this theme is striking, however, Bellow's use of it and the degree to which it has shaped his work are even more so. By I mean that area of life that encompasses both intense sensation and sexuality, the first somehow becoming the second. And in these terms the sensual in Bellow's work is not a matter of human relations (a subject explored by Victoria Sullivan) nor of sexual hygiene (see Robert Boyer's Attitudes toward Sex in American 'High Culture' ), but a matter of setting and metaphysics. Sex is everywhere and nowhere; it permeates Bellow's imaginative world with an overwhelming presence and yet is seldom remarked by the protagonist. In a very real sense Bellow's protagonists are all the same character and suffer the same predicament: they are victims of the forces that lie behind sexuality, so that the anger of their women is nothing compared to the threat that lies just beyond the vision?the threat of an immense and angry force to which sexuality belongs. Bellow uses sex, in short, to define our place in the universe. To his imagination, most interestingly, the sensual exists on a continuum with the energies that drive the universe and so is related to them: the sensual may hint at what we are, may dramatize at times our creaturely existence, which we must accept to be healthy?a central fact Bellow makes concrete in his master ly evocation of faces and bodies?and may at other times remind us of our perishable physical being, which the mind or the spirit sees as a cosmic putdowrr, the dying animal to which our consciousness is tied. Is man really an accident of nature? Bellow doesn't think so for a minute, and the special potential in sex for tenderness and force, love and exploitation makes it a litmus test of reality. And what kind of evidence exists for such a reading? The best evidence lies in the structuralist approach, as we seek the central tale to which Bellow returns, dressing old bones in new clothes. Sensuality provides a remarkably coherent explanation of the evolution of Bellow's fiction. But Bellow's imag

Brueghel and Augie March

Brueghel and Augie March

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

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:

Sex: Saul Bellow's Hedonistic Joke

NOTES SEX: SAUL BELLOWS HEDONISTIC JOKE Sarah Blacher Cohen State University of New York, Albany The humor in the relationship between men and women in Saul Bellow's novels rests not so much on the pandemonious clashes between male and female, but on Bellow's portrayal of the laughable nature of sex itself. The young Bellow protagonist regards copulation as a rollicking animal game in which he eagerly participates. Although he experiences some difficulty in learning the rules and familiarizing himself with the other players' techniques, he plunges headlong into the game. He enjoys taking an amoral holiday from his quest for a distinctive fate; he welcomes the refuge it affords from those "imposers-upon, absolutists"1 who want to conscript him to their versions of reality. He also views sex as an expression of love, a way of breaking out of his solitude and merging with another human being. But after the dissolution of one love affair after another, he realizes that he is not the selfless devotee of Eros. I Ie only turned to love to avoid the grimness of the impersonal world. He had permitted sex to fool him into thinking that he had fused with another person and was not alone. The middle-aged Bellow protagonist regards the human being in the act of mating as a funny creature, what with the devious stratagems and the awkward positions he must adopt to attain so ephemeral a bliss. Viewing copulation as a clumsy, undignified activity, he mocks his own and especially his female partner's tendency to invest it with romantic feelings and elevate it to the status of a universal panacea. Despite his ridicule of the sex act, after weighty internal debate and labyrinthine rationalizations, he indulges in it. It is not so much the physical pleasure that he seeks; rather he deludes himself into believing that he can escape from the anxiety and ambiguity of man's middle position between beast and god by losing himself in the animal. When his brief metamorphosis ends, he is all the more oppressed by his human state. More shameridden and constrained than ever, he now sees sex as a joke which his own nature and civilization, notably women, play on him. His distress is 224Notes short-lived, however, forhe soon allows himself to be the butt of another sexual joke. And so the delusion-disappointment pattern continues. The older Bellow protagonistviews sexnotas a joke, butas themost vile plague on earth, with women and blacks as the chief contaminators. Trying desperately to dissociate himself from the debased mortal state by denouncing the bestial and choosing the divine, he is not able to quarantine himself from the noxious presence of sex. Although he is not a participant of the hedonistic revels of the time, he is still the voyeuristic spectator of them and experiences the lurid thrill of the carnal. Much as he tries to be a god, his reaction to the sexual—either his shrill condemnation of it or his furtive titillation by it—does not allow him to transcend his human nature. Against his will, he, too, is the butt of the sexual joke. Augie March, Bellow's larky young hero, is primarily concerned with discovering a worthwhile destiny for himself. Most of his time is spent, however, not in self-scrutiny, but in fleeing from the Machiavellis in his life, those "heavy-water brains" (p. 524) who want him to play a supporting role in their fantasies. Often tiring of charting his life's voyage while having to dodgehis relentless drafters, he engages in sex as a diversion. Though he is the "by-blow of a traveling man" and "wellstocked , probably by inheritance, in all the materials of love" (p. 47), he does not always have an easy time of it. His sexual initiation is obstacleridden and far from idyllic. Unlike a Tom Jones who chances upon ready sexual gratification, Augie must first hoist his invalid employer Einhorn on his back, walk up a tortuous flight of icy stairs in the dark, deposit Einhorn before an astonished whore, choose a nameless woman himself, and then seek his own pleasure. And this pleasure Augie claims "didn't have...

Saul Bellow by Robert Dutton (review)

REVIEWS 113 Dutton, Robert. Saul Bellow. New York: Twayne, 1971. 177 pp. Cloth: $5.50. Saul Bellow once wrote to a critic that he would have been happy just to get a plus or a minus without the analysis. In the “subangelic vision,” which serves as the con­ trolling metaphor for this study, it is not certain which he comes out with. Taken from a remark in one of Bellow’s essays, the phrase refers to a resistance to naturalism— the view of humanity as a victim of determining forces—based on the existential power of man’s imagination. Though initially the term refers to an attitude rather than a description, in which man is seen to have some choice in “com­ pleting his own life,” it can be seen shifting to accommodate those qualities which allow the hero to overcome his limited condition, as well as to the state he reaches having done so, shifting, that is, from vision to description to condition, from author to character. Ultimately it is linked with the hero’s recognition of his own ability to sustain self-definition and thus impose a human meaning on an intransigent nature, an awareness, it is suggested, that develops organically in the body of Bellow’s work. This formulation of thematic progress imposes an almost necessarily schematic structuring, uniformly organizing the novels into levels of meaning. Characteristically these include general statement, cultural expression, and historical statements of literary attitudes. In addition there is an almost visible strain to establish literary parallels along with intrusive italicized references that direct the argument away from general context toward the narrower focus of the excerpt. The result is an often idiosyncratic reading. Typically, The Victim is reduced to “a story of man’s struggle to free himself from a state of victimization—an ironic struggle of self encounter.” This reading neglects the very real victimization for which Leventhal is responsible as well as that which he endures at the hands of external reality, the environment insistently evoked in determining along with the subjective vision the events of the narrative. Leventhal, for whom being human means willing to be held accountable in spite of both weaknesses, is consequently judged both less sympathetic and less trustworthy than Joseph, who in Dangling Man abandons just such an accountability but is thought at least to choose his surrender. Correlatively Allbee is regarded as a victimizing alter ego, whose attempted suicide forces Leventhal to the realization that he must "destroy this inner force for his own survival.” Yet Allbee is also credited with offering the wisdom Leventhal must learn if he is to survive. Moreover while Leventhal is unable to arrive at this wisdom, re­ mains uncertain, puzzled finally about the meaning of his experience, his alter ego does arrive at some reconciliation, like Joseph's, a willingness to come to terms with whoever runs things. Opposed to this concluding wisdom, Schlossberg, who insists that man choose dignity, is nonetheless convicted of a Victorian concern for form (and so compared with Madeleine Herzog), whereas his view of what it means to be human is precisely an affirmation of feeling. This wrenching of the text in support of a thesis emerges more clearly in the discussion of The Adventures of Augie March. Augie is seen finally as an artist of alienation, whose retreat from reality results in a general deterioration of character. Based on Augie’s lack of commitment, this judgment does not take into account Bellow’s attraction for the resistance uttered by the hero in the refusal to define himself, a resistance somewhat obscured by Bellow’s recurrent use of the term “ideal constructions” to describe it. Augie locates that resistance in the willingness to be 114 human rather than subangelic, explaining in his response to a Flemish painting or to a dream in which he is blessed by a dwarfed old woman with the hair of an angel. The supporting characters in the novel are correspondingly judged in terms of their contribution to the hero's subangelic condition. Einhom is regarded both as a response to the cultural environment of the twenties and a figure of its myth of realism. As such he is...

What Is Modern in the Eighteenth Century?–Not Science

SYMPOSIUM: THE MODERNITY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY What Is Modern in the Eighteenth Century?~Not Science Robert Schofield Every DISCIPLINE has its professional disease, some ailment of flesh or spirit to which its practitioners are peculiarly heir and against which they must guard themselves with particular care. For historians of science, possibly because priority disputes appear so prominently as dramatic elements in the sciences they study, the dis­ ease is that known as "precursoritis”—an endemic compulsion to locate some expression of a scientific law or discovery earlier than that commonly accepted as the first. It is, on the whole, a pleasant disease with no terminal complications, for the discovery of one precursor leads at once to the desire to find a precursor to that pre­ cursor, and so on through the span of time until one comes at last to rest with the Greeks. On the other hand, it is so infinitely con­ sumptive of time and ingenuity that professional historians of sci­ ence are inoculated against even the hint of precursors. To suggest, therefore, that one might find an aspect of modernity in the concepts of eighteenth-century science is to propose a viola­ tion of the canons of history of science on a centurial scale. Nor is this one of those rules established only for professional harmony, to be honored in cases like this one with canonical variations. For the rule is a realization of the nature of scientific ideas as products of creative imagination. An eighteenth-century novel is not modern because its plot employs the same elements employed in a modern novel. Tom Jones is not David Copperfield, and neither of these is Augie March, though all three are young men and each has experi­ 61 The Modernity of the Eighteenth Century ences with young women in his search for maturity. The tone, aim, and structure of the novel reflects the style of its age, and so it is with the concepts of science. The scientific style of an age is established by the way in which particular phenomena are set within a world view defined by selection from a limited set of fundamental dichot­ omies. The world may be finite or infinite, vitalistic or reductionist, static or changing, continuous or discontinuous, mechanistic or ma­ terialistic. Unless the selection of alternatives and the mode of order­ ing phenomena within that selection are both congruent to a mod­ ern view, there is no possibility of true precursority. If we look closely, every apparent case of conceptual similarity between eighteenth-century science and our own reveals just those incongruities which justify the canonical exclusion of comparisons. The elementary version of modern thermodynamics is a kinetic the­ ory reminiscent of eighteenth-century mechanical theories of heat. But only in the unpublished work of an anachronistic Henry Cav­ endish and in the scarcely-read suggestions of Daniel Bernouilli did that mechanical theory reach toward quantification, and their work scarcely approached the indeterminacies of twentieth-century statis­ tical mechanics. Eighteenth-century electricity was entirely static, while electrical theory from the nineteenth century to today is essentially current. Only the concept of charge conservation and the force law between charges remains unchanged from the eighteenth century. But con­ servation of charge, like that of heat, meant to the eighteenth century a conservation of material substance—that fluid of electricity which was also of conceptual significance in Coulomb’s determination of electrical force laws. Whatever electricity may be assumed to be —and the question is scarcely asked today, let alone answered—it is not regarded as a material fluid. Conceptually, eighteenth- and twentieth-century electricity are very different. Similar demonstrations can be produced for nearly every eigh­ teenth-century theory wistfully projected into the twentieth century. Newton’s light particles, with their periodic interactions with mat­ ter, are neither formally nor empirically equivalent to the photons of Einstein. Boscovich’s atoms, physically neutral point nodules of a forcefully described space, have no conjunction with modern atoms, 62 Symposium: Science filled to overflowing with strange particles and still stranger proper­ ties. The physiological speculations of iatro-physicists were not even related to the physical reductionism of the mid-nineteenth century and bear no...

Bellow's Africa

4 ENDERSON THE RAIN KING is surely the most brilliant of Bellow's I novels, a dazzling achievement that displays his powers of invention and reveals the esemplastic quality of his imagination. Bellow has exploited a wealth of creative material in this novel. King Dahfu, for example, is a strange synthesis of Wilhelm Reich and William Blake. The lion-therapy that he uses to treat Henderson is savagely, and quite comically, Reichian. And the king's vision, especially his faith in the human imagination, is essentially Blakean. Also, Jeff H. Campbell has shown us how Bellow has parodied various contemporary quests in the opening chapters before allowing Henderson to set foot in Africa.' Bellow's Africa is not a geographical continent but a strange land summoned into existence by Bellow's imagination. It is, of course, a metaphysical Africa. The two locales and the two tribes, the Arnewi and the Wariri, remind one strongly of the two worlds of Asa Leventhal in The Victim. The Arnewi world is parallel to the lucky, ignorant state Leventhal is content to be in until he is propelled into the real, savage Wariri world by Allbee and the death of Mickey. The Wariri world is the Hobbesian world where existence is nasty, brutish and short, one that Joseph (Dangling Man) avoids, not knowing how to account for it. It is also the dark world which Augie March is aware of but larkily refuses to succumb to. And it is a larger, more terrifying version of the hard, treacherous, aggressive world of Seize the Day. Bellow's Africa is a paradigm of the modern world seen through a distorting, fantastic lens. By allowing his protagonist to wander around in this Africa, Bellow was able to give free rein to and yet control (as he could not do in The Aduentures of Augie March) hiJ talent for comic invention and improvisation. Bellow did not conjure up his Africa out of airy nothing. His Africa has been assembled, probably, from travel documentaries he

The Style of Bellow's Comedy

In Augie March, Henderson, and Herzog, Bellow has created an open style of ideological comedy that relates him to Rabelais, Burton, Sterne, Melville, and Joyce, earlier masters of an encyclopedic comedy of knowledge. The lively voice and intellectual probing in Augie March can be more fully valued when the book is related to such predecessors rather than to the picaresque tradition. Bellow's comic characters have an individual idiom, voice, and range of concern that unobtrusively unify his apparently formless books. What emerges in Augie March and Herzog—the comedy, suffering, and encyclopedic speculation; the concern for personal fates, social facts, and cosmic issues; the interest in observed actuality and abstract symbol; the tension between a cruel, deterministic reality and the impulse toward creative freedom and joy; the precarious reliance on metaphoric probing and an open form—all suggest that against great odds, both public and personal, Bellow has succeeded in reanimating a style of intellectual comedy that illuminates and celebrates the present even as it connects us and Bellow with some of the most powerful imaginations of the past.

Idiomatic Language in Two Novels by Saul Bellow

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.’

Character and Society in The Adventures of Augie March

The Adventures of Augie March, although it suffers a complete breakdown in structure and in quality of writing two-thirds of the way through, nevertheless is the most brilliant attempt to write the great American novel. That is, it belongs to a group of novels which either, like dos Passo's U.S.A. try to convey the experience of America, or, like Look Homeward, Angel, the experience of being an American. Augie March, in the Chicago scenes — the first two-thirds of the novel —does both, and this is why it is so richly-textured and inclusive in its sense of life. Bellow's grasp of character, in this context, of being an American, is concentrated in the central figure of Augie March himself, growing from childhood to maturity through a specific historical and social situation. The continuity of natural growth, and Bellow's strong sense of the progression of time — not merely the private chronology of Augie's life, but time as history — give the tale a compulsive drive forward (the impetus of the bildungsroman rather than that of the picaresque novel).