Thursday, January 28, 2010

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.

From the beginning of the novel as a genre, there have been alienated heroes. Especially since WWII, with the rise of new trends of modernism and the prevalence of various theories of alienation, western literature has been concerned with the themes of estrangement and alienation. From the 50’s existential literature to the 60’s black humor, literature based on alienation began to flourish, so alienation became a fashionable term often used by literary critics. Literature of alienation, here, does not refer to the literary work which takes the phenomena of alienation as content in general, but the popular literary form which takes the dispirited inactive idea of alienation as content in particular.
The themes of Saul Bellow are not original. His recurrent themes are displacement, alienation, masochism and the search for an identity. The tone of alienation dominates his fictions. His fictions always take the American big city as their setting, Jewish intellectuals as their protagonists. His common character is a man “who keeps trying to find a foothold during his wanderings in our tottering world, one who can never relinquish his faith that the value of life depends on its dignity, not its success”(EWLTL,229). So just as, according to Proust, all Dostoevsky’s novels could well be called Crime and Punishment and all Flauberts’ L’Education Sentimental, all Bellow’s could be called Dangling Man.
The term “alienation”, despite its popularity in the analysis of contemporary life, remains an ambiguous concept with elusive meanings. It is a psychological sociological or philosophical — anthropological category, largely derived from the writings of Marx. It is hard to give an accurate definite definition. Considerable disagreement exists with regard to the abstract concept. In order to understand Bellow’s fiction it is necessary to do research into the different conception of alienation first of all.

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