The Awkward Aesthetics of Violence in Saul Bellow and Marguerite Duras

At a climactic moment of Saul Bellow's 1964 novel, Herzog, we find the titular hero finally moved to dramatic action. Moses Herzog, the cuckolded and abandoned husband, who has spent the largest part of the novel in an increasingly solipsistic spiral of epistolary narrative, finally feels ready to apply violence to the logic of his narrative. He stands at the window of his former home, ready to kill the elegant Valentine Gersbach, his wife's lover. There, Herzog witnesses a typical domestic moment, as Gersbach bathes Junie, Herzog's young daughter, before cumbersomely washing the bath. However, as his moment to act presses upon him—as the violence, which the situation seemingly demands, comes closer to expression—Herzog withdraws. Feeling a strange detachment, he examines his antique pistol, "[t]here were two bullets in the chamber....But they would stay there. Herzog clearly recognized that. ...Firing this pistol was nothing but a thought" (Bellow 2003a, 280). Here we find a moment of inaction, or rather, a pressure point at which direct violence becomes unworkable, impossible in Bellow's fictive universe:

As soon as Herzog saw the actual person giving an actual bath, the reality of it, the tenderness of such a buffoon to a little child, his intended violence turned into theater, into something ludicrous. He was not ready to make such a complete fool of himself.

(2003a, 280-81)

Daniel Brudney describes this episode as mere "murder fantasy," not to be "taken seriously" (2010, 313). His analysis focuses on "Herzog's theatricality, which [Brudney takes] to be his distinctive orientation" (312). And yet, there is more to the scene than mere "theater." Theatre, indeed, remains relegated to the subjunctive. Herzog is not capable of playing his role in the easy aesthetic tableau. What Bellow is introducing here is a certain metatheatricality. There is a self-awareness that to "perform" violence, like performing any well-defined role, is a matter of art or artifice. This is a profound moment of self-realization for Bellow's protagonist. He is forced to acknowledge that to seek violent revenge against the Other is to create a false aesthetic.

There are two aspects to the scene which make violence impossible, or, more accurately, inarticulate. First, there is a tenderness between Gersbach and Junie, which Herzog cannot fail to notice. Second, and perhaps more revealingly, there is a certain awkwardness to the scene which Herzog, like many of Bellow's protagonists, cannot reconcile with "theatrical" violence. Indeed, the tenderness expressed by Gersbach shows a character already "misperforming" his role in the anticipated "theatre" of violence. Here, the idea of direct violence becomes overwhelmingly awkward and certainly unworkable. This creates an awkward aesthetics of violence in the text.

It is this aesthetics that this essay will explore in Saul Bellow's Mr Sammler's Planet and Herzog, and Marguerite Duras' The Lover. The moment at which Herzog realizes the impossibility of murdering Gersbach is a moment that points to the limitations of literary violence in the novels of both Bellow and Duras. In Bellow, we find that the definitive moment of literary violence can be the inaesthetic moment—the moment at which actual violence must be suppressed or, rather, find more figurative forms of expression. Similarly, Duras' novella deals with violence in a linguistically awkward, broken way that seems to suppress violence rather than express it. In both Duras and Bellow, the threat of real, physical violence hovers over the narrative uncovering other, more subtle forms of violence. Rather than being performed directly, violence finds a symbolic outlet, through a strange, elusive, awkward aesthetics—an aesthetics that is discomforting, troublesome, unsatisfying, and yet revelatory of deeper layers of subjectivity. In both writers, violence can be positioned within an erotic, gendered narrative, but is always linked to the memory of collective violence. In both, direct violence is necessarily translated, transformed, or aestheticized in a way that creates awkward, jarring fissures in their narratives. This awkwardness explicitly brings these two post-Holocaust writers into dialogue with each other; it is almost as if it...