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7. Humboldt’s Gift and Jewish American Self-Fashioning "After Auschwitz"
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In his 1978 comments on the proceedings of the International Symposium on Saul Bellow, Tony Tanner sees Bellow’s protagonists as aware of the problems of history, but he argues that these problems “do not functionally enter his fiction.”1 Tanner’s cogent claim should resonate with any ongoing effort to assess Bellow’s novels within the historical framework of the Holocaust. To be sure, in four of Bellow’s novels the subject of the Holocaust is manifest. In the 1940s, early in his career, Bellow wrote the brooding novels Dangling Man and The Victim, both explicitly conceived in the shadow of genocide and the death camps. Much later in his career is the 1989 novella The Bellarosa Connection, which is about Broadway producer Billy Rose’s helping Harry Fonstein escape from the Nazis. And, of course, situated prominently between these novels is the widely read Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), one of Bellow’s “signature” novels from the decade that established him as among this country’s most brilliant novelists. But the survivor-refugee Sammler—a Polish Jew in the eyes of the Nazis, but scrupulously cultivating Britishness—often strikes the reader as oddly more absorbed in the medieval mysticism of Meister Eckhart or with utopian futures on the moon than with shouldering the 162 7 Humboldt’s Gift and Jewish American Self-Fashioning “After Auschwitz” elizabeth jane bellamy oppressive weight of history. In short, the character of Sammler, conceived some thirty years ago, is a key reminder that, in Bellow, there is no unified construct of “the Jew,” let alone a Jew definitively shaped by Holocaust catastrophe. As any number of Bellow scholars have argued over the years, Judaism is both central to Bellow’s characters and unpredictably refracted by the multiplicity and instability of their Jewish identity. In the final analysis, one could argue that the Holocaust is much more defining of the work of, say, Singer, Ozick, and Spiegelman , and that Bellow, when read in the light of Tanner’s claim that the problems of history “do not functionally enter his fiction,” cannot always fit comfortably in the category of “Jewish-American Holocaust literature.”2 Rather than directly attempting to insert selected novels of Bellow’s into a Holocaust framework, it may be more productive to read them with and against the grain of the temporal and psychic space of Adorno ’s “after Auschwitz,” conceived in 1949 as a means of designating the temporally discontinuous structure of trauma in the aftermath of the Holocaust.3 As a radical problematizing of memory, Adorno’s “after Auschwitz” can be provisionally defined as an obscure psychic threshold of repression, disavowal, denegation, or foreclosure—all psychic defenses against a working through of the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust that nevertheless cannot seal off these horrors entirely. The temporal frame of Adorno’s “after Auschwitz” emphasizes that there can be no incremental, progressive working through of the implications of trauma. If we always come “after” the event, argues Adorno, we are also always “too early” to grasp it. In such a scheme there can be no working through of Auschwitz, only an eruptive “acting out” where the return of the repressed horrors of the Holocaust nevertheless fail to induce a salutary consciousness of the trauma.4 Thus, Adorno suggests in his later essay “What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?” that a remembrance and “making sense” of the Holocaust are as much psychoanalytic as political imperatives.5 For Adorno, the temporal frame of “after Auschwitz,” particularly in Germany, enacts a psychoanalytic and cultural allegory of an extended melancholia that refuses to allow for a genuine mourning. I contend that it is worthwhile to reassess selected Bellow novels in the light of the difficult-to-trace psychic displacements of “after Auschwitz .” Novels such as Mr. Sammler’s Planet and The Bellarosa Connection explicitly engage the Holocaust. But to what extent can certain other Humboldt’s Gift & Self-Fashioning “After Auschwitz” 163 [34.238.242.168] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:37 GMT) Bellow novels be read as being not so much “about” Auschwitz as about the more elusive space of “after Auschwitz”—and all the psychic complexities this temporal frame entails? Adorno’s essay “What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?” was published in Germany in 1977, just one year before Tanner’s resonant claim, made in the smaller arena of Saul Bellow studies, that the problems of history “do not functionally enter...