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The Style of Bellow's Comedy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert Shulman
Robert Shulman*
Affiliation:
University of Washington, Seattle
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Abstract

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

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 83 , Issue 1 , March 1968 , pp. 109 - 117
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1968

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References

1 In his essays as well as novels, Bellow articulately expresses his sense of the present and his unwillingness to submit either to waste-land cliches or philistine affirmations of America. See particularly “The Sealed Treasure,” TLS, 1 July 1960, p. 14.

2 See, e.g., Morris Croll, “The Baroque Style in Prose,” Studies in English Philology: A Miscellany in Honor oj Frederick Klaeber, ed. Kemp Malone (Minneapolis, Minn., 1929), pp. 427–456, and Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N. J., 1957), pp. 303–314.

3 The Adventures of Augie March (New York, 1953), p. 201, and hereafter cited in the text. As he was completing The Adventures of Augie March, Bellow wrote in a review of Sholom Aleichem's The Adventures of Mattel the Cantor's Son, “The most ordinary Yiddish conversation is full of the grandest historical, mythological, and religious allusions. The Creation, the Fall, the Flood, Egypt, Alexander, Titus, Napoleon, the Rothschilds, the sages, and the Laws may get into the discussion of an egg, a clothes-line, or a pair of pants” (SRL, xxxvi, 30 May 1953, 15). Yiddish conversation is basic, but as it emerges in the prose of Augie March, I suggest that the energies and range of allusion of writers like Melville, Sterne, Burton, and Rabelais have also helped Bellow create his unique version of their style. As I indicated above, however, I am not trying to establish direct influences.

4 In so doing, Bellow deliberately opposes T. S. Eliot's hostility towards democracy, the ordinary man in a democracy, and the Jew in the modern world. Where Eliot puts the resources of his learning and culture to the uses of denigration—we need go no further than Bleistein and Sweeney— Bellowacceptsthechallenge and uses the power of his learning and culture to criticize and celebrate what the early Eliot was able only to dismiss. The first third of Augie March is designed partly to reverse Eliot's images of Sweeney and Bleistein. To take only one example, the handling of classical allusions in the scene with Einhorn and Augie at the whore house should be related to the handling of similar allusions in “Sweeney among the Nightingales.”

5 See, e.g., Gerald Jay Goldberg, “Life's Customer, Augie March,” Crit., iii (1960), 15–18; Robert Alter, Rogue's Progress: Studies in the Picaresque Novel (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), pp. 121–125; John W. Aldridge, In Search of Heresy (New York, 1956), pp. 136–139; and Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel (Princeton, 1961), pp. 309–311.

6 Hassan locates the central failure of the novel in a distinction between Augie's voice and Bellow's style, between Augie's picaresque simplicity and enthusiasm and Bellow's sense of greater complexity (pp. 309–311). This distinction between voice and style is less convincing if we see Augie as more closely related to Tristram Shandy and Moby-Dick than to Joseph Andrews, and if we attend (as Hassan, in his perceptive account does not) to the complex unifying functions of that voice. J. C. Levenson, “Bellow's Dangling Men,” Crit., iii (I960), 3–14, discusses Bellow's fusion of Yiddish and American language, as does Leslie Fiedler, “Saul Bellow,” PrS, xxxi (1957), 108.

7 For a complementary view of the formal implications of Augie's nature, see Frederick Hoffman, “The Fool of Experience: Saul Bellow's Fiction,” Contemporary American Novelists, ed. Harry T. Moore (Carbondale, 111., 1964), p. 83.

8 See, e.g., Mark Schorer, “A Book of Yes and No,” HtidR, vii (1954), 137, and Robert Penn Warren, “Man with No Commitments,” New Republic, cxxix (2 Nov. 1953), 22.

9 Bellow perfects this parallel between the protagonist and his period in Seize the Day.

10 Dangling Man (New York, 1944, 1965), p. 22.

11 Herzog reads Dryden and Pope in his bathroom, and Pope's line, “I am His Highness' dog at Kew” is one of the self-deprecatory refrains of this “broken-down monarch” (pp. 121, 311). The other half of the couplet—“Pray tell me, Sir, whose dog are you?”—suggests that Herzog is perfectly capable of using satire to fight back. Simkin, a name from Mac Flecknoe (1. 81), reappears as a character in Herzog; and the play on monarchy, which both elevates and satirizes Gersbach, perhaps echoes the opening of Dryden's poem. The quotations from Herzog (New York, 1964) are cited in the text.

12 “Address by Gooley MacDowell to the Hasbeens Club of Chicago,” HudR, iv (1951), 227.

13 Goldberg, “Life's Customer, Augie March,” twenty comments on the scklemiel and schlimad in Augie March.

14 The magistrate's court scene is also particularly close to Whitman in its accumulation of American faces and social classes and in its willingness to deal with ordinarily suppressed horrors and sexual abuses.