Saul Bellow: 2010

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Step by step, Tommy learns to overcome his selfhood. He feels himself part of a larger body. He feels love, as he does in the subway on his way to the Polo Grounds, when “a general love for all these imperfect and lurid-looking people burst out in Wilhelm’s breast. He loved them. One and all, he passionately loved them. They were his brothers and his sisters. He was imperfect and disfigured himself, but what difference did that make if he was united with them by this blaze of love” (84-5)? In this moment of love Tommy is able to forgive himself. This is not the false love of the impostor soul but the true love which can rid Tommy of his burden.
As he rushes out on to Broadway to look for Dr. Tamkin, Wilhelm makes a number of resolutions: to divorce Margaret, to sell the car and get money for his needs, to return to Olive and her love. He will change his relationship with his father, though he is not sure how: “‘As for Dad— As for Dad’” (115). Tommy seems prepared for a return to community.
The moment before the coffin is very much like the moment of love in the subway — it is an expression of Tommy’s true soul, his love for all men, and his acknowledgement their common humanity. As he looks down on the corpse of a stranger, he understands or at least feels the basic relationship between himself and all men — by the bond of mortality. All shall die live with joy and live in harmony. Thus, standing next to the coffin, Tommy begins to weep, softly at first, and then loudly and compulsively. He weeps for the dead man before him, another human creature. Through the tears and cries and the sobs, he realizes his heart’s ultimate need, a feeling of brotherhood and a love for all mankind.
Anyhow, the novel ends only with new possibilities and resolutions, but no guarantees that Tommy will finally become accommodated to society. Tommy still has to face the break-up with his wife. And he has no intention to reject his selfish character. His job is unsettled. If he makes enough money by chance, he may be able to join the community. If he not, where will he go? So his accommodation to society is only a psychologically temporary one.

Alienation in Seize the Day 4

Tommy and Olive love each other not only because they are physically attracted, but also because they share the similar predicament which finally leads to their mutual adorations:
When she would get up late on Sunday morning she would wake him almost in tears at being late for Mass. He would try to help her... with shaky hands; then he would rush her to church and drive in second gear in his forgetful way, trying to apologize and to calm her. She got out a block from church to avoid gossip. (94)
Whenever Tommy is in a desperate situation and suffers insults from his wife, he immediately thinks of Olive, eager to plunge himself into her arms for consolation. As he is deserted by society and his father and has left his wife, Tommy needs Olive to replace his wife for his troubled heart.   His love for Olive is mingled with hypocrisy and selfishness.
Carrying on a clandestine love affair with his mistress, still haunted by his wife, Tommy can not get rid of his feeling of loneliness.   Whenever he is, he feels out of place. Therefore, Wilhelm agrees “with the saying, that in Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn’t tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California, He himself had been one of these objects” (14-5).
All through the story of his day, Tommy summons into memory the critical mistakes of his past, among them the decision to go to Hollywood, the changing of his name, his elopement and marriage, the investing of his savings with Tamkin. He feels guilty and suffers from this past burden.   Meanwhile the anxiety about what Margaret and his father think about him tortures him. He can not solve his emotional problems (Olive, whom he adores, is tired of waiting for a divorce; Margaret has turned the children against him; she demands money and refuses to give him a divorce) as well as his financial one (he has lost his job and Dr. Adler offers advice rather than money). He has married suffering, dangling in deep misery.
The very title of Seize the Day indicates how Tommy, like Joseph, has run from reality, Dr. Tamkin tells Tommy:
The spiritual compensation is what I look for. Bringing people into the here-and-now. The real universe. That’s the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real — the here-and-now. Seize the day. (66)
To seize the day, to live in here-and-now, is to live with joy and live in harmony and complete one’s own life. One should not waste it lamenting and suffering from past mistakes. It is only at the end of the novel, when all Tommy’s defenses against reality have been stripped away — Margaret has been unmerciful, his pills are nearly gone, his father has wished him dead, his money is at an and — that he begins to face reality, the reality in which he and his beings live. Stripped bare, he confronts reality for the first time in the novel.
By the end of the novel, Tommy has to undergo three Ordeals   that will purge and redeem his soul. First, the land and rye figures on the stock market drop and Wilhelm realizes he is wiped out financially. The second Ordeal ends when Wilhelm is finally and completely rejected by his two doctors, Dr. Adler and Dr. Tamkin. Lastly, his unfinished telephone call to Margaret seems his final break in communication. She hangs up and he tries to rip the phone from the wall. He is cut apart from the world—without position, money or human contact.
Of course, Tommy, like all of Bellow’s heroes, does not want to cut himself off from other men. Just as Joseph longs for a “colony of the spirit” (DM, 32) and believes that “goodness is achieved not in a vacuum but in the company of other men, attended by love” (DM, 75), so Tommy longs for merger into community, and knows moments of loving commonality.

Alienation in Seize the Day 3

Time and time again, the protagonist attempts to convince the reader of his innocence and justification and at the same time of his wife’s evil and wickedness. In his eyes, Margaret is no better than a dog. It is she who deprives him of everything: home, children and even the pet he adores; and “she demands more and more, and still more” (47).
Like Madeleine, Margaret indulges in an insatiable appetite for life and is intellectually ambitious: “Two years ago she wanted to go back to college and get another degree…. But still she takes as much from me as before. Next thing she’ll want to be a doctor of philosophy” (47-8).
Margaret is so powerful and bossy that Tommy’s reaction to her is no more than an important rage. He cannot enjoy any peace and comfort with her, thus dying of drifting apart from her. Yet, she turns down his request for divorce. Consequently, he has to support her and the children beyond his financial ability. Tommy is obsessed with a feeling that she, like a ghost, is haunting him all the time. Like authoritarian Madeleine, Margaret orders him to neither send any postdated cheques nor to skip any payments. This financial burden leads him to the verge of a crack-up.
Margaret is a strong-minded and self-willed woman, capable of everything. Like Madeleine she can successfully win the sympathy of Tommy’s lawyer and make him stand on her side: “I got a lawyer, and she got one, too, and both of them talk and send me bills, and I eat my heart out” (48).
In the judgment of Tommy, his wife is a great “bitch” who demands not merely to be equal, but also to be superior. Whenever he thinks of her, he feels degraded, frightened, humble and irresolute. Towards the end of the novel, the reader sees him talk with his wife on the phone, begging her for sympathy and leniences “Margaret, go easy on me. You ought to. I’m at the end of my rope and feel that I’m suffocating” (113). But Margaret has no patience to hear him grumbling. She cuts in, “How did you imagine it was going to be — big shot? Everything made smooth for you” (ll4)? And in an ironic tone she asks him to call again when he has got “something Sensible to say”. Terribly insulted, he tries to “tear the apparatus from the wall” (114).
As it has been mentioned earlier, Marggret is filtered through the mind of the protagonist. For that reason, it is quite likely that Tommy narrates her through his own subjective view. But when the narrator becomes somewhat objective, the reader feels that she is not exactly the figure she has bean depicted. Tommy remembers when they were on good terms, his wife was kind and gentle to him: “Margaret nursed him. ... She sat on the bed and read to him” (89).
Additionally, both his wife and his father declare that “it was he who had left her” (113) on his own initiative. But, what caused the break-up of their intimacy? The reason might be, as his father estimates, that he has “bed-trouble with her” (5l). Perhaps he thinks his wife is too frigid to offer him sexual appeal, as his father says, “so now you pay for your stupid romantic notions” (51). He longs to divorce her so that he can seek new stimulation and fulfillment freely. Another reason is that Margaret herself is also a taker. So antagonism must arise between the two selfish persons. Hence it is not fair that Margaret should take all the responsibility for their break-up. Tommy ought to shoulder most of it.
Devoid of spiritual sustenance from Margaret, Tommy, like Joseph and Herzog, turns to his mistress Olive, who is a rather shadowy character. Olive, like Sono in Herzog, is obedient and gentle and offers Tommy flesh solace and sexual affection. Small, dark and Catholic, Olive stands a striking contrast to the energetic, big Margaret. Like Tommy, she is also passive, dominated by her powerful, domineering father and her priest. Despite her Catholic religion, she agrees to marry Tommy outside the church. Yet, her aspiration is thwarted by Margaret who firmly refuses to divorce Tommy, tike a chicken that confronts an eagle, she is no match for Margaret in the marriage rivalry.

Alienation in Seize the Day 2

The theme of spiritual isolation is established in the first several pages of the novel when Tommy stops to get his morning newspaper from Rubin, the newspaper vendor. They talk only about the weather, Tommy’s clothes, and last night’s gin game. Even though both men know many intimate details of each other’s personal lives. “None of these could be mentioned, and the great weight of the unspoken left him little to talk about.” (SB, 76). A few lines later, during the same meeting, Tommy thinks: “He [Rubin] meant to be conversationally playful, but his voice had no tone and his eyes, alack and lid-blinded, turned elsewhere. He didn’t want to hear. It was all the same to him” (8).
Even Tommy’s father, Dr. Adler, refuses to become involved in his son’s desperate loneliness. Tommy needs money which he assumes his father could easily supply, but Adler, is greatly pained, even shies away, when the subject is mentioned. Again and again, he appeals to his father for compassion, for money. But his appeal is always futile, for his father’s response are ever a cold, detached, yet bitter and angry analytical denunciation of Tommy’s past failures and present ignominy. Indeed, his father is ashamed of his son. “It made Tommy profoundly bitter that his father should speak to him with such attachment about his welfare” (10). Tommy even wonders if his father has lost his family sense.
Anyhow, Tommy’s subjective complaints about his father are not reliable. Tommy, himself, is very selfish. He always expects to receive and never gives — concern or anything else. His relation with his father is chiefly one of getting money from him, and the money is always wasted by him. Why should his retired old father give money to him? His father has no obligation to do so. He accuses his father of thinking only in terms of money because he won’t give it to him to waste, to gamble in the market. He feels he is not getting enough, so he keeps his relation with his father though it is not comfortable.
In a different way, the circumstances are the same with the rather mysterious Dr. Tamkin. Tommy feels that he can talk to and he understood by him; but here, too, a barrier of communication exists. In the words of Dr. Tamkin, it is impossible to separate truth from fiction, intellect from idiocy. At times, there is no doubt in Tommy’s mind that there is truth, even profound truth, in his philosophical and psychological teachings; at other times, Tommy knows he is being victimized by this combination psychologist, psychiatrist, broker, poet, gambler, counselor, father, and world-travelling philosopher. Hence, he consolation comes from the quarter. In order to get rich without paying any effort, Tommy gives his last savings to Dr. Tamkin for investment in stocks, though he has his doubts. Toward the end of the novel, Tommy finally finds that he has merely been cheated, that Tamkin does not care about him or his problems: “I was the man beneath; Tamkin was on my back, and I thought I was on his. He made me carry him, too, besides Margaret. Like this they ride on me with hoofs and claws. Tear me to pieces, stamp on me and break my bones” (105).
Tommy’s estranged wife, Margaret, reinforces his feeling of alienation. Like Iva in Dangling Man, she is presented to the reader through the mind of her husband, Tommy. Like Madeleine in Herzog, Bellow describes Margaret as a bitch and castrating sadist. She is cruel, cold and disagreeable. Speaking of his wife, Tommy says to his father: “Whenever she can hit me, she hit, and she seems to live for that alone. ... She can do it at long distance” (47-8).
As maintained by Tommy, Margaret is a vampire figure, motivated to remove air from his breath, and drink up his blood. She belongs to the sort of woman who “eat green salad and drink human blood” (H, 56). Margaret would tell him he did not really want a divorce; he was afraid of it. He cried “Take everything I’ve got, Margaret. Let me go to Reno. Don’t you want to marry again?” No. She went out with other men, but took his money. She lived in order to punish him. (94)

Alienation in Seize the Day 1

Again, one of the major themes of Seize the Day, is the isolation of human spirit in modern society. This time, Bellow projects his theme more powerfully, yet in a quite different way. The short story recounts a day in the life of a failing middle-aged American, Tommy Wilhelm, who has cut off from his wife and his children, and has made a series of poor decisions that land him jobless in his early forties at the Hotel Ansonia where his father lives in retirement. Bellow begins the novella with Tommy emerging from his room, assuming a bold front. He gives over the first three sections to Tommy’s past and his breakfast with his father, and the second three to his relations with Tamkin who promises to cure all of Tommy’s troubles. In the last climactic section, Tommy’s father denies him and Dr. Tamkin, having lost Tommy’s remaining savings, disappears.
Like Joseph, Tommy has lost his job with the Projax Company and dangles aimlessly. Unlike Joseph whose dangling is directly caused by specific situation, Tommy is a schlemiel, good for nothing. His alienation is mainly due to his self-centered character. He is a taker. He allows his wife Margaret to place burden upon burden on him, when he knows that “no court would have awarded her the amounts he paid” (29). He chooses to live with a cold reasonable father in a hotel for retired people. He chooses out of pride, to leave the company where he had been employed and does not look for other work. Throughout his life Tommy has made bad decisions he knew in advance to be bad. “He had decided that it would be a bad mistake to go to Hollywood, and then he went” with Maurice Venice (23) a talent Scout. Paying no attention to the work-hard advice of his father, he gives Tamkin, who is a swindler, his last $700, hoping to get rich quick with no effort. And he does not accidentally give Tamkin his money. “From the moment when he tasted the peculiar flavor of fatality in Dr. Tamkin, he could no longer keep back the money” (58).
Like Joseph and Herzog, Tommy is separated from the world.   He is not a good husband. His wife has been separated from him for a long time. He does not work well enough to keep his job. His father has rejected him as a slob. He has no friends and he does not trust his one acquaintance Tamkin, while he feels that his children’s affections have been poisoned against him. He is bitter, weighted down by grief, living on self-pity and pills. Alienated from himself, accepting the world’s values and rejecting himself, he sees himself as a swine, an elephant, a hippopotamus. What he sees is a cold alien world which reflects his own isolations:
And was everybody crazy here? What sort of people did you see?   Every other man spoke a language entirely his own … You had to translate and translate, explain and explain, back and forth, and it was the punishment of hell itself not to understand or be understood, not to know the crazy from the sane, the wise from the fools, the young from the old or the sick from the well. The fathers were no fathers and the sons no sons. You had to talk with yourself in the daytime and reason with yourself at night. Who else was there to talk to in a city like New York? (83-84)
Living in the Hotel Ansonia with the people waiting to die, Tommy constantly feels pains in the chest, or choking, or suffocating, as he shows his father by strangling himself and telling him, “Dad, I just can’t breathe.   My chest is all up — I feel choked” (109).
In Seize the Day, Bellow is concerned with the well-worn   dilemma of the individual desperately isolated and profoundly alone, caused by aggression of society and the shortcomings of his own character, as the story opens, Tommy finds himself in debt to his wife and the Hotel. Forty-three years old, huge, bearlike, over-emotional, and heavily dependent, he is caught in a world devoid of heart. In this world, there is no caring and no real communication among men. People talk to each other, do businesses, pass the time of day, but somehow do so only superficially; the human heart is never reached; masks and deceptions are the rule. There is no compassion, no understanding, and no love. Tommy is nakedly and miserably alone since he has lost his job and has no sense of belonging to the community of man.

Friday, February 19, 2010

Alienation in Dangling Man 6

On the other hand, Joseph is a man who defends human nobility and affirms the possibility of human mutual communication. He yearns to love and to have faith in men, tout his pride leads him to scorn men and hate himself. Believing in reason, in man’s potential beauty, Joseph is a humanist, a desperate one. He looks at Chicago and sees slums. He looks at “the lack of the human in the all-too-human”(127), and the bleak despair he feels makes him ask, “where was there a particle of what, elsewhere, or in the past, had spoken in man’s favor?”(20). Though realizing that “his humanism, is not viable in Chicago, he tries throughout the novel to sustain it” (SBDM, 25). He looks for signs of men’s common humanity. He does so because “I was involved with them” (25). Thus he defends traditional humanistic values — individuality, morel integrity, brotherhoods the individual and humanity, joined by love. Once he writes about himself, “He is a person greatly concerned with keeping; intact and free from encumbrance a sense of his own being, its importance” (22). He wants to preserve the self, its dignity and freedom. Therefore Joseph is unable to end his alienation, although he wants to. His reconciliation with his wife and society is not permanent until he finally gives up selfhood. Once again, “goodness is achieved not in the vacuum, but in the company of other men, amended by love” (75). If Joseph cannot be part of society as a whale, can he at least be part of a “colony of the spirit, or a group whose covenants forbade spite, bloodiness, and cruelty” (32)? He does not find such a colony because it is not in him to find it, but he longs for it, as surely Bellow does. This is the state of man, dangling to or fro, between participation and withdraw. Joseph represents a good example of Bellow’s desperate affirmation — his longing to affirm, but his inability to do so fully. His accommodation to society is only temporary since the army is not his lifelong home. After he leaves the army, where will he find his place?

Alienation in Dangling Man 5

The new revelation leads the protagonist to an objective judgment of his past relationship with Iva: Iva and I had not been getting along well. I don’t think the fault was entirely hers. I had dominated her for years; she was now capable of rebelling (as, for example, at the Servative party). I did not at first understand the character of her rebellion. Was it possible that she should not want to be guided, formed by me? (80) Towards the end of the novel, Joseph no longer insists that Iva be subject to his taste. So their relationship has been much improved after both sides have withdrawn somewhat to fit each other. Iva and I have grown closer. Lately she has been remarkably free from the things I once disliked so greatly. She does not protest against this rooming-house life; she seems less taken up with clothes? She does not criticize my appearance... And the rest: the cheap restaurant food we eat, our lack of pocket money. (126).
It remains unknown whether Joseph has ever realized that his isolation from his wife is deeply rooted in his male chauvinism. But he certainly becomes aware that self-esteem also means respect for others. Iva is his wife, not his puppet. Mere equal-minded, he is willing to accept his wife as a free person who has her own choice, her own taste and her own personality. He admits that “Eventually I learned that Iva could not live in ay infatuations” (81).
Besides the trouble with Iva, Joseph still can not get along well with other female characters, his mother-in-law and his niece Etta. Mrs. Almstadt is the stereotype mother-in-law who is dominant and bossy in handling domestic affairs. Joseph resents her, thinking that she is shallow, superficial and childish: The telephone was never idle for more than five minutes. Her friends kept calling, and to each she repeated the full story of her troubles. (15-16) All women are talkers. Maybe Katy (MTs.Almstadt) talks more than most, but you got to allow for that. She ...’Never grew up?’ (17)
As Joseph himself admits: “My niece and I are not on good terms; there is a long-standing antagonism between us” (50). According to him, women are born superficial and haughty, and their sole interest is to make up themselves. “Etta is a vain girl. I am sure she spends a great many hours before the mirror”(51). Finally they fight with each other. Declaring that “Beggars can’t be choosers” (58), Etta badly injures his self-esteem.
Since his relations with both male and female characters are ambivalent, Joseph, being jobless and aimless, feels heart-broken, rootless and alienated.
Through Joseph, anyhow, Bellow does not intend the darker view of our existence. As the story closes, Joseph and Iva are at least in a state of peaceful coexistence. He makes peace with his fellow tenant Vannaker, an old man, hard of hearing, a drunk and a thief, who has annoyed Joseph progressively throughout the seven months’ delay. Joseph also returns to his books. He learns that “goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love”(75). When Joseph gives up the battle and volunteers to join the army, he feels a great sense of relief. To join the army is to join the human race, since he does not and can not live alone in a world of which he is a part, and he needs connections for self meaning as well as for social meaning.

Alienation in Dangling Man 4

Joseph, typical of the male chauvinists in the 1940s, resolves to grip his ruling position in the family, and cultivate his wife into the model intellectual that he would like her to be. With his prejudice against women in mind, he deems it useless to probe into his wife’s inner world. No wonder that he has never been seen to exchange feeling with his wife. Despite all her meekness, Iva dearly cherishes her independence and individuality. Although Joseph desperately tries to remold her, yet, the more he attempts, the more she rebels against his manipulation. For instance, she opposes her husband’s will and insists that they accept the invitation to a party offered by their friend, Minna. At the party, Joseph orders her not to drink too much alcohol, but to his surprise, she disobeys him by asserting her own will, indulging herself in excessive drinking. As a result she gets dead drunk.
On account of the mutual resentments, the couple become estranged from one another. Devoid of emotional exchange, Joseph turns to another woman Kitty Daumler, so as to take “some pleasure in Kitty’s rooms” (81). Apparently Bellow intends to describe Kitty as a symbol of the protagonist’s irrational and sensual nature, which implies the conflict between the flesh and the soul, emotion and rationality within Joseph himself and every man. Joseph and Kitty yield to each other only because both need physically to meet their biological demands. No real love can be found between them. Sex is totally separated from love. But that turns out to be short-lived. Kitty, as a single woman, needs a man to solace her solitary soul. When Joseph declares their break-up, she commences to seek another substitute to replace him. When putting his affair with Kitty to an end, he earns a revelation about marriage and individual freedom. From this time onwards, he starts to understand Iva better.
No matter how they draw apart from each other, Joseph has never forgot the happy days they spent together. One day, Joseph is in bed with a cold, and his wife “at her most ample and generous best”(98) comes home to nurse him for an hour then they fell asleep together. Joseph has been ignoring his wife for so long because she does not live up to his expectation. But at this very moment he can feel her full existence; she is so valuable and dear to him -— even her breathing mingles with his. As a result, two halves have achieved a perfect harmonious integrity.
Though contaminated by prejudice for sometime, Joseph finally comes to see that it is wrong of him to cry to convert his wife’s personality, in-as-much as his wife has never attempted to change. Joseph becomes more respectful to his wife’s personality for he has now fully understood the meaning of the word “freedom”: The quest is one and the same...the difference in our personal histories, which hitherto meant so much to us, become of minor importance. (128)

Alienation in Dangling Man 3

It is fair to say that Joseph’s feeling of alienation from society is caused by both social prejudice against artists and the specific dangling condition. His estrangement from others is due to his own character. It is he who isolates his wife Iva. And his relationships with others both male and female are always uneasy.
Throughout the novel, apparently, Joseph considers himself an intellectual, for he has college education and is writing about eighteenth century figures. He seems to be an intellectual snob as well as a male chauvinist. Intellectual snobs look down upon people who are concerned with dressing nicely or having a pleasant house. The western tradition is that the husband should support the family. Today a man marries an equal in his own age group who is also a breadwinner, but he has not overcome the influence of the old tradition. The more equal his wife is, the more necessary it is to put her down, to find her inferiority to him. There is apparently no serious contradiction until their balanced relationship is disrupted by his “dangling” in a condition, where he cannot establish steady relationships with society and his wife becomes the only breadwinner. He has difficulty adjusting. Joseph’s feeling towards his wife is more complicated than simple male chauvinism.
Albeit that Iva is married to Joseph for six years, the reader never hears her speak in her own voice and think with her own mind. The reader has to judge her through the narrator’s — the protagonist’s mind and vision. As he is put in a position of dependence on his wife, Joseph tends to find faults with her to soothe his own pride. The reader has every reason to doubt the reliabilities of his portraits of his wife, though he is constantly shifting between his subjective view and objective view. Nevertheless, Bellow provides enough information for the reader to paint a clear picture of her type of personality and her situation as a woman. Iva is a librarian, young and energetic. Moreover, she is a gentle considerate and doting wife; ready to do anything for her husband. When Joseph is waiting for his induction, she shares his predicament and cheerfully moves into a rented room. And she cordially suggests that her husband take advantage of his temporary unemployment to complete his ambitious book project, instead of searching for new employment, and that they live on her salary alone.
Living on his wife’s salary is where all their troubles originate, for Joseph is incessantly obsessed with the disagreeable feeling that he is inferior to his wife. He wants her to be away, fearing any strength on her part and his being kept by her. Joseph longs to be a manipulative husband rather than a dominated better half. He constantly rejects any financial generosity offered by his relatives and friends, afraid that they will laugh at him for his being supported by his wife. His unemployment adds to the tensions accumulated between him and his wife in the past, and their marriage envisages a crisis. One of the major sources of their conflicts exists in the fact that Joseph, as an intellectual snob, tends to draw himself away from materialistic pursuit and preserves a contemptuous attitude towards Iva’s “shallowness” seem through her “superficial” taste. According to Joseph, his wife does not live in his world, but in her own small limited realm of “clothes, appearances, furniture, light entertainment, mystery stories, the attractions of fashion magazines, the radio, the enjoyable evening” (81). Such an attitude towards his wife is similar to his relation with his brother Amos, man of success. He cannot credit Amos’ good intentions and accept his money. Their relationship is ambiguous: it is never severed, but it is always uneasy and always hostile.

Alienation in Dangling Man 2

As a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and an amateur writer studying eighteenth century figures. Joseph is unable to continue his writing, feeling that the ideas of the eighteenth century cannot answer his questions. He reads the newspaper, goes for walk, tries to lead a life of reason and disciplined feeling. But in the social vacuum, he finds himself rootless, a failure.
One reason is that society does not accept him, as it rejects artists and intellectuals generally. Since these people do not perform in their narrowest sense, essential and productive functions, they have no status in the eyes of the respectable and productive members of the community. Or rather they have the status of children, tolerated and patronized by their elders who know a great deal more about the bread and butter problems of life. In his essay, Distraction of a Fiction Writer, published in 1957, Bellow asserts that society does not honor the imagination, which is so important to the writer. The writer feels, then, that society does not need him. The writer lives in a world where a man’s work is supposed to be in the practical realm of things. Not being practical, the writer is held in contempt. In the novel Joseph’s brother and his family document the antagonism of the middle class to those who, outside it, are searching for freedom and identity. Amos has contempt for his ineffectual brother.
Another aspect of the alienation motif is caused by the specific situations Joseph is waiting for his draft call when he will find a place in the army, and it is the notice not to arrive after he has cut his civilian connections that leaves him dangling and drifting aimlessly. Being jobless robs Joseph of a place. He has no sense of belonging to the community of man. For Joseph, the notion of community is breaking down. As it goes, he begins to lose feeling for the people around him, to lose touch with the magnetic chain of humanity. He feels himself imprisoned in one room: “I, in this room, separate, alienated, distrustful, find in my purpose not an open world, but a closed, hopeless jail. My perspectives end in the walls” (75). In this situation action seeps away. The hero devotes himself to the niceties of routine. He rises early, buys his cigars, drinks a Coca-Cola, and is down in the lobby by eight o’clock. Dangling between civilian life and the army, isolated from others, Joseph wonders who he is. He “suffers from a feeling of strangeness, of not quite belonging to the world, of lying under a cloud and looking up at it”(24). No longer “the sort of person I had been,” Joseph looks at himself, stands back and examines himself through the occasional use of the third person descriptions: “Joseph, aged twenty-seven, an employee of the Inter-American Travel Bureau, a tall, already slightly flabby but, nevertheless, handsome young man, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin....”(21). What is the strange object “Joseph”? “Only for legal purpose”, he says, is he his older self.

Alienation in Dangling Man 1

Dangling Man, Bellow’s first novel, is written in a journal form. It is this very first novel that demonstrates the plight of modern man caught in miserable alienated situation. The adjective “dangling” in the title indicates a situation of helpless waiting, of ambiguous swaying, of an airy suspension between alienation and accommodation.
The novel opens during WWII with Joseph, a resident of Chicago for eighteen years, in a state of alienation and isolation. Owing to a snarl of red tape, the draft call he is expecting, simply fails to come. He has given up his job, moved to a lower middle-class rooming house, and is being supported by his wife. He has severed relationships with his friends and acquaintances because “the main bolt that held us together has given away”(9). He is patronized almost beyond restraint by his in-laws and by his brother Amos and his brother’s family. His wife, Iva, is visiting her mother and they no longer seem to have anything to say to each other. In the solitude of his room, with his “freedom” from the usual family and social obligations, Joseph experiences a sense of total alienation. He is lost in the deep sea of quietness. Since no one is with him, he has to invent a Spirit of Alternatives to talk to so that his ideas can have a sounding board. The fact accounts for the form of the novel as a Journal, the proper form for an isolate.
Through his retrospections, the reader gets information about his dilemma. He is not only alienated from society but also estranged from people around him and himself. Inasmuch as Dangling Man is set during the period in which Joseph awaits induction, the title evidently refers to his dangling between civilian life and the army; and the war is directly responsible for a drastic change in his life. In a sense, then, the novel is a war story about what can happen to a man when he is caught in the exigencies of a national military struggle. But the book is about Joseph and World War II only in much the same sense that Huckleberry Finn is a book about Buck and the antebellum South. The setting of Bellow’s work is indeed World War II, but that fact serves only as background for an experience that extends far beyond the confines of any time and certainly any war. Different and more substantial “strings” than those of the war are involved in Joseph’s “dangling”. His separation from his own society is as much personal as social.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

A General Introduction to Saul Bellow and His Three Novels with a Brief Review of Its Theme Concern 8

Dandling Man is Bellow’s first novel which follows the above mentioned trajectory. The novel is presented as the journal of a young Canadian, Joseph, who is waiting for his induction into the U.S. army in 1942, and who “suffers from a feeling of strangeness of not quite belonging to the world, of lying under a cloud and looking up at it “(DM, 24). This novel established Bellow as a spokesman for the generation of his age during the war. In viewing Dangling Man. Edmund Wilson stated that it was one of the most honest pieces of “testimony on the psychology of a whole generation who have grown up during the depression and the war” (NY, 78-81). The novel as a representative document captures the feelings of men awaiting induction — a symbol of forthcoming disaster. Moreover, it seriously discusses the meaning of identity in the modern worlds touching upon the nature of good and evil, and the possibility of fulfillment. Its journal form immediately reveals Joseph’s isolation and his dangling condition. Commenting on the tons and the style, David Galloway speaks highly of it: “it also stands as a landmark of modern fiction” (MFS, 17).

A General Introduction to Saul Bellow and His Three Novels with a Brief Review of Its Theme Concern 7

Existentialism and Freudian psychoanalytic theory provide explanations of alienation. Basically, the existentialist view point is a sense of meaninglessness and lawlessness in the outer world. As soon as the man is given birth, he is thrown into an absurd, cruel situation and has to fight for his being. Coldness, hunger, illness, accident are hidden beside him all the time and ready to gulp down his life. So after the baby has left his mother’s body, he is immediately driven into never-ending anxiety. When he begins to understand things, someone else will strive to control him. Father wants him to be his ideal son. Teacher wants him to be a student by his standard, while wife, an appropriate husband by her taste. Many of us grow up by others’ standard, ideal, taste. Serving others, we never know our true qualities. Only self-consciousness and determination not to be directed by others can obtain our own existence. Then through free choice can he create his own essence. Society engulfs self and alienates man as tool. Why are men forever hostile to each other? Existentialism provides the answer: deficiency is the perpetual environment of human beings while each one tries to fulfill his own desire. This situation leads inevitably to scrambling among human beings. The state of alienation in which men are hostile to each other is absolute, eternal.

A General Introduction to Saul Bellow and His Three Novels with a Brief Review of Its Theme Concern 6

In Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx makes a brilliant exposition on alienation under private ownership of means of production. What he concentrates on is alienated labor. Marx calls attention to four aspects of alienation in capitalistic society. First, man is alienated from the products of his activity or work. Man’s labor is embodied, in an object and is bought and sold. The object is appropriated, owned by someone else and stands as an “alien being” to the worker. As a result, the more the objects produced by the worker, the stronger the hostile power is, the poorer the worker becomes. This is the alienation of object. Secondly the worker is alienated from his work since he sells his labor to others and is compelled to work for someone else. As a consequence, the worker feels like a human being only during his leisure hours. In this sense, the worker does not belong to himself but to someone else. This is also the worker’s self-alienation.

A General Introduction to Saul Bellow and His Three Novels with a Brief Review of Its Theme Concern 5

The modern period is a complex age, and many philosophical theories have come into being. In the 1950’s, existentialism entered American society. Greatly influenced by existentialism, Bellow accepts mainly the humanistic aspects of the theory that celebrate human being’s free choice. Basically the existentialist assumes that existence precedes essence. The existentialist’s view point is a sense of meaninglessness in the outer world. This meaninglessness produces a discomfort, an anxiety, a loneliness in the face of an absurd world. Human beings are totally free but also wholly responsible for what they make of themselves. This freedom and responsibility are to resume human being’s dignity. That is why Bellow’s depiction of man is subangelic. On the one hand, society is rendered in an almost unchanging, indifferent and powerful background against which his protagonists are seen impotent alienated, burdened. On the other hand, the protagonists at least have “the power to ‘overcome ignominy’ and to ‘complete his own life. Here Bellow means that any depiction of man should grant him the power to rise above the indignities of complete subjection to unseen and unknown forces, to give him a nature not totally in the chains of a miserable naturalistic impotency” (SB, 4) . Bellow insists that we are not gods, not beasts, but savages of somewhat damaged but not extinguished nobility. He wants to consider man as a little lower than the angels, not as insignificant or anonymous. Man actually has the power to complete his own life by his validity and his involvement in society. It is obvious, then, that the Jewish and the American experiences, commingling in the Americas-Jewish urban intelligentsia, are the traditions behind Bell1ow’s writing which affirm human dignity and possibility. He is both American and Jewish, manifesting both alienation and accommodation.

A General Introduction to Saul Bellow and His Three Novels with a Brief Review of Its Theme Concern 4

As a Jewish American novelist, Bellow’s Jewish experience and Jewish cultural tradition, lay great influence on him, and find expressions in his fiction writings. On the one hand, there is evidence of this Jewish background in his work. The Victim deals largely with the Jewish sense of persecution and the Jewish yearning for brotherhood; the early scenes of Augie March portray the lives of the Urban Jewish poor and lower middle class; the characters in Seize the Day are recognizable New York Jewish types; and in Herzog there is the portrayal of a Jewish childhood and an emphasis on Jewish family feeling. Simply speaking, Bellow’s comedy, intellectualism, moral preoccupation and alienation, his concern with the family and with rough Eastern European immigrants, his obsession with the past and with the dangler of an alien world, his emphasis on purity, his sense of the unreality of this world as opposed to God’s — all of these elements bespeak his deep Jewish concern. On the other hand, Bellow’s Jewish background, to some degree, determines his belief in man and in the possibility of meaningful existence. Bellow is not only a part of the affirmative Jewish tradition; he is self-consciously a part of it. Bellow has said that the “Jewish feeling” within him rejects the belief that man is finished and that the world must be destroyed. It is a yea-saying that Bellow longs to express in his work. The open concern with goodness pervades Bellow’s work. Joseph believes his only talent is for goodness; As a learns what goodness means; Tommy longs to be good. What is required is not certain actions but a goodness of heart, an openness to others. The strong family ties and the sense of community are responsible for the fact that the solitary protagonists of Bellow’s fictions discover a harmonious existence of means of love or putting down the burdens of the past, or by overcoming their self-imposed guilty feeling.

A General Introduction to Saul Bellow and His Three Novels with a Brief Review of Its Theme Concern 3

Bellow’s fiction contains three interwoven contractions. Firstly, Bellow shows a strong opposition to the cultural nihilism of the twentieth century: to Dadaism, to the Waste Lander’s ideology, and to the denigration of human life in modern society. Yet Bellow himself is essentially a depressive novelist and almost all his protagonists are horrified by the emptiness of modern society. Secondly, Bellow firmly denies the tradition of alienation in modern literature, and his works place a special stress on the value of brotherhood and human community; yet his protagonists are all masochists and alienated. Lastly, Bellow endlessly attacks the degradation of individual worth and never wavers in his confidence in the individual’s salvation, yet he contradictorily relinquishes individuality in all his novels.

A General Introduction to Saul Bellow and His Three Novels with a Brief Review of Its Theme Concern 2

Saul Bellow was born on 10 July 1915 in Montreal, Canada, two years after his parents had immigrated there from Russia. His father was a daring and not always successful businessman who in Russia had imported Egyptian onions and in the New World attempted several often unconventional businesses. His mother was an ambitious woman, who wished her son to become a Talmudic Scholar. Bellow grew up in the Jewish ghetto of Montreal and was “generally preoccupied with what went on in it and watched from the stairs and windows” (DALB, 82). He attended cheder, where he learned Hebrew thoroughly and at home he spoke Yiddish. His Yiddish is fluent. He has translated a number of stories, including Singer’s Gimpel the Fool, and he has written an introduction to, a collection of Jewish short stories.

A General Introduction to Saul Bellow and His Three Novels with a Brief Review of Its Theme Concern 1

Saul Bellow (1915—2005) is one of the most prolific and energetic writers in the contemporary literary world. Be is not simply a novelist, hut an essayist, a short-story writer, a playwright, a translator and an editor. Throughout his forty-year’s writing career he has published a dozen novels and novelette, dozens of short stories, hundreds of essays, articles and translations, a full-length play, and a biography. Nobel laureate and winner of numerous prestigious fiction awards, Bellow has commanded series attention from a large range of reviews and critics at home and abroad for more than forty years. By now he is possibly the most written about novelist of the contemporary American period.

As a novelist, Saul Bellow considers it his duty to attempt to work out solutions to distraction and cope with confusion of facts, idea and emotion of everyday life. As an essayist, he shows his concern for human integrity and explores the problem of human identity assailed by physical, psychological and intellectual distractions in a selfish materialistic.

PROFILE OF SAUL BELLOW

SAUL BELLOW, who died on 5 April 2005, at the age of eighty-nine, at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976, and received the Pulitzer Prize, three National Book Awards, and the National Medal of Arts. No American writer has garnered more honors.

He was born in Lachine, Quebec, a suburb of Montreal, on 10 June or perhaps in July 1915, the former date, however, being the one on which Mr. Bellow usually celebrated his birthday. His family-the parents and three older children-had emigrated from Russia to Canada only two years earlier. In 1924 the Bellows moved to Chicago.

SAUL BELLOW: AN APPRECIATION

It was the fall of 1975. The cover story in that week's Newsweek was about Saul Bellow, "America's Master Novelist." I had to find out who this master novelist was. Humboldt's Gift was Bellow's latest novel, the one being celebrated in that issue. Reading it was one of my first introductions to great literature. Many other experiences would follow, but Bellow, along with Thomas Wolfe, was there first.

Few American writers have enjoyed so much acclaim for such an extensive period of time as Saul Bellow (1915-2005). In his long and productive career, Bellow won a Pulitzer Prize, three National Book Awards and in 1976, the Nobel Prize. The post World War II era was marked by a string of ambitious novelists, all striving to reach the heights scaled by Faulkner and Hemingway. Of that generation, Bellow was the only Nobelist. But the prize was not a "ticket to one's own funeral" (as TS. Eliot dryly observed). Bellow was productive for a good quarter of a century following that honor.

A TRIBUTE TO SAUL BELLOW

"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 . . ." Many readers and writers have been quoting that sentence, the opening lines of the novel The Adventures of Augic March, now that its creator, Saul Bellow, has left us to our own devices. Since Melville opened Moby Dick with that first great line of American fiction"Call me Ishmael"-and Mark Twain opened The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in his own special way, no one but Bellow has fashioned an opening as memorable and as powerful-and as important-as this line that sprung open the padlock of American art language by using the pick of freestyle diction, this line that announced that American writers didn't have to glove their knuckles anymore when they knocked at the door. Bellow published The Adventures of Augie March in 1953. It won him national recognition, a National Book Award, a major place at the American literary table. "The book just came to me," he wrote. "All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it." Bellow had prepared for this one, though. His first novel, Dangling Man, came out almost a decade before. The Victim, his second novel, published in 1947, opened with a line that was almost as memorable, if more conventional: "On some nights New York is as hot as Bangkok." And then the rest of that novel's opening paragraph, as beautiful as anything by any of his predecessors or peers in the sweltering art of the novel: "The whole continent seems to have moved from its place and slid nearer the equator, the bitter gray Atlantic to have become green and tropical, and the people, thronging the streets, barbaric fellahin among the stupendous monuments of their mystery, the lights of which, a dazing profusion, climb upward endlessly into the heat of the sky." If Bellow hadn't upped the ante with the opening of Angie Mardi, this passage alone would have been a great opening to remember him by: the allusion to a South Asian city, the geographical breadth of the imagery, the transformation of colors, gray to green and tropical, New York bustle presented in terms of the Arab street.

Saul Bellow