A Political Companion to Saul Bellow

5. The Jewish Atlantic—The Deployment of Blackness in Saul Bellow

101 5 The Jewish Atlantic— The Deployment of Blackness in Saul Bellow Carol R. Smith Listen, Chuck, there’s something I’ve always wanted that you can buy for me in Europe. A beautiful seascape. I’ve always loved paintings of the sea. Nothing but the sea. I don’t want to see a rock, or a boat, or any human beings. Only mid-ocean on a terrific day. Water water everywhere. —Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift Ships also refer us back to the middle passage, to the half-remembered micropolitics of the slave trade and its relationship to both industrialization and modernization. As it were, getting on board promises a means to reconceptualize the orthodox relationship between modernity and for what passes as its prehistory. —Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic Through significant and underscored omissions, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts, through the way writers people their work with the signs and bodies of this presence—one can see that a real or fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to their sense of Americanness. —Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark When Charles Citrine, the central protagonist and narrator of Bellow’s 1975 novel Humboldt’s Gift, makes plans to visit Europe, his brother Julius asks him to bring back to America a painting of the sea. As is apparent from the description quoted above, the image desired by Julius is remarkable for, in 102 Carol R. Smith Morrison’s phrase, its “significant and under-scored omissions.” The wish for such a seascape betokens a resistance to acknowledging the racialized history of Europe and America. What Julius wants in a European painting for his American house is a purified depiction of the sea, without a “rock”—no land; without a “boat”—no carriers of trade; without “human beings”—no historical agents. Such a desire implies not only a refusal to get on board the ship that for Paul Gilroy figures history, but also the wish to deny its existence. Yet in the context of Humboldt’s Gift this erasure of race from history is itself contained within a highly racialized and ethnically marked structure. The desire for a sublime representation of the sea is presented as a means to fulfill Julius’s identity as a successful American of Jewish stock, by adding cultural capital to his established sporting and economic prowess . Paradoxically, the ability of the desired painting to secure this cultural capital is dependent on its being emptied out of racialized historical signification . This decontextualizing move, which isolates the European aesthetic from history, is what enables the wished-for seascape to function as the emblem of Julius’s full realization of American identity. This empty picture is a product of the romantic Enlightenment, as the closing allusion to Coleridge’s The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner emphasizes , but one that shows none of the means of production of modernity. This is the sublime without the terror, through which Europe is constructed as a cultural producer of aesthetic objects and ideas which were and are important to America. In Bellow’s work, such ideas and objects symbolize the intellectual link of America to Europe and help to reinvigorate and to reinforce the coupling of liberal humanist ideology and American individuality . Importantly, however, while Julius’s desire for an imaginary seascape signals some of the complexities of the connections between race and national identity in Bellow, its embeddedness in Humboldt’s Gift suggests that the strategy just outlined is only a partial and conflicted element in Bellow’s negotiation of these relations. Julius’s desire is doubly frustrated in the novel, both conceptually by its being embedded in American capitalist acquisitiveness (Julius outlines a price range and implies that Charles will operate on commission) and also through narrative. Charles Citrine proves unable to find such an empty picture in Europe. For every seascape, “in all the blue and green, foam and sun, calm and storm, there was always a rock, a sail, a funnel and Julius wasn’t having any of that.”1 Instead of fulfilling the quest to realize American The Jewish Atlantic 103 identity through European aesthetics, the search for the painting prompts Citrine to dwell on the relationship between European and American identity and migration histories, specifically the Jewish diaspora. Citrine is represented as recognizing the similarities between his own family and the Spaniards from whom he is trying to buy a painting: “They resembled my parents and...