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?
Friday, February 19, 2010
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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