Why do I feel like Samuel Beckett when I write about Saul Bellow? Maybe I'm getting jaded about this novel form. Bellow has Topics that are Relevant, Surges of Rhythmic Prose. He drops cool names, and in context. Perhaps worse, I just got done second-guessing Said and Achebe over their reactions to Conrad.
I agree with most of what Achebe and Said said about Joseph Conrad and Heart of Darkness: Conrad's racist, yes; it's not just Marlow. But when Marlow so carefully distances himself from Kurtz and the colonizers, when the narrator distances himself from Marlowe and Conrad from the narrator, leaving the accusation as though Conrad were simply racist does no more justice to the critics' ideas than to Conrad's.
But I have this fear that Mr. Sammler and Mr. Bellow are joined at the medulla oblongata or something.
Bellow makes gestures that at least suggest distance. He begins, with an epistemological credo that at least partly belongs to Mr. S.
Shortly after dawn, or what would have been dawn in a normal sky, Mr. Argur Sammler with his bushy eye took in the books and papers of hiw West Side bedroom and suspected strongly that they were the wrong books, the wrong papers. In a way it did not matter much to a man of seventy-plus, and at leisure. You had to be a crank to insist on being right. Being right was largely a matter of explanations. Intellectual man had become an explaining creature. Fathers to children, wives to husbands, lecturers to listeners, experts to laymen, colleaues to colleagues, doctors to patients, man to his own soul, explained. The roots of this, the causes of the other, the source of events, the history, the structure, th reasons why. For the most part, in one ear out the othe, the source of events the history, the structure, the reasons why. The soul wanted what it wanted. It had its own natural knowledge. It sat unhappily on superstructures of explanation, poor bird, not knowing which way to fly.
These are fairly typical 20th Century post-Joycean conventions, right? -- 3rd person, occasionally, a Hemingway you but without the narrative voice in which he first met it. We wa a ander in and out of S's head, and B seems to think he owns it. S not only suspects, but "suspected strongly." Who's calling whom a crank here?
Saul Bellow seems to have set Mr. Sammler up to discuss certain ideas of Saul Bellow's. Now, I don't mean to pretend that I think that Bellow should not do such things, and I care to hold authors to the attempts at completely or near-completely hard language as in nouvelles romans like Robbe-Grillet's Le Voyeur or Jalousie. But I suspect Bellow isn't altogether sure whether he's in Sammler's head or out of it, and this leads me to wonder just where and when and to what extent Bellow or Sammler is the bigot, as prejudices fall in thick showers through the book. A few:
- The black pickpocket -- bold, suave, exquisitely dressed, athletic, runs very rapidly, and intimidates Sammler -- get this -- by showing the elderly man his genitals, which strike Sammler as extremely large.
- University students interrupt a lecture to not only disagree with Mr. Sammler's take on George Orwell, but swear at him and insult him. I went to school in the '60's, 70's, 90's, and recently; I teach at a community college now. I have heard students and instructors being pigheaded more than once, but I've never heard a student over 12 or 13 treat an instructor in that fashion. The youngsters who did -- and this was roughly contemporaneous with the publication of this book -- were ejected from class, usually with violence. When Sammler tells the teacher of the class, he dismisses it as normal, since some students dislike Orwell for his disenchantment with Stalin.
- Women are crass when sensual, crazy or troubled when smart.
- Sammler's younger relatives are nuts, yet this does not reflect in any way on Sammler's character or any actions current or prior by Sammler or his late spouse.
- Sammler's terrible confrontation with Nazism informs his actions, but does not impair his perception by its trauma.
- Sammler (or Bellow, or Sammler-Bellowo) can pontificate, at least in interior monolog, The "natural knowledge" of the "soul" above is one example, though one that Bellow assigns relatively cleanly to Sammler. He ends on another: "The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. FOr that is the turth of it -- that we all know, God, that we know, that we know we know, we know'".
Again, technically, this is given a character -- even quoted, for once. But these are also the last words of the novel.
We know we know we know, but we also try we try we try, and we fail we fail we fail, because we don't don't don't don't don't understand. And what the hell does that mean? Perhaps Sammler-Bellow's we feels but denies or has the impulse of feeling but refuses to fully feel, has a sort of affective vouloir-dire. But Bellow -- I'm leaving Sammler out of this one on purpose -- does not deign to investigate this further.
Any given book can investigate some things and must leave others alone, granted. But this book presents itself, beginning and end, as an investigation of knowledge. Bellow plays, as it were, in an epistemological key. And the error seems built right into his thesis: the soul has its own natural knowledge; explanation makes this knowledge, or perhaps its knower, uneasy.
So what? So Bellow confuses the legitimacy of the impression (or whatever he means by natural knowlege of the soul that may exist outside of or even opposed to superstructures of explanation; therefore, he refuses to put those impressions to comparison with said superstructures, or at least refrains from certain comparisons. That is, Bellow or Sammler takes care even to maintain that those impressions remain untroubled by structure. Since the impressions must in any literal sense be as completely structured as anything else, what this seems to mean is that Bellow-Sammler refuses to examine structure. Insofar as one considers this true, one would conclude that Bellows-Sammler's examination of the stereotypes of minorities, children, women, students, and popular resistance is severely compromised.
And indeed, that is not a conclusion that one must strain for. Sammler comes out in 1971, forgets the contextualizations of Vietnam, Civil Rights, and the Women's movement; more specifically, gender roles and student expression on Sammler's Planet exist for motives less human or appreciable than those of seasons or stars. Might such glaring omissions just be peripheral to the awareness of an educated character born around 1900? Perhaps, but older people do read newspapers. I have to wonder whether Mr. Sammler is not being stereotyped, too.
Now, as a final note, what does this tell me about Said and Achebe's willingness to ignore prominent structural elements in their response to Conrad? As relevant structural events are ignored and their messages contradicted, the social appraisal suffers correspondingly. Though one or another aspect of formal analysis might well be irrelevant to someone's project at some point, some formal analysis must always remain relevant, since ignoring form ignores not just a meaning, but an aspect of all meaning.
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