The Jewish American Novel

Chapter Seven: Saul Bellow: Progenitor of the US-American Existentialist Model

123 Chapter Seven Saul Bellow: Progenitor of the US-American Existentialist Model Although Bellow’s early novels have often been dubbed “existentialist,” “Sartrean,” or “Camusian” (see Kazin, “Alone” 21; Finkelstein 262; Malin, Saul 164; Lehan, Dangerous 109; Glenday 15; Atlas, Bellow 94), a detailed analysis of what specifically related these works to French existentialism was often left out completely, or was conducted in such vague and general terms that the analyses remained at best tentative and unconvincing (see, e.g., Renate). Bellow’s early flirtation with existentialism has nevertheless become a critical cliché. But while most critics consider his first two novels as representative of US-American existentialist fiction, only very few have noticed its influence on Bellow’s later novels as well (see Finkelstein; Lehan , Dangerous; Aharoni, “Bellow”). By contrast, many critics even see Bellow as one of the chief detractors of existentialism. This view, however, is based primarily on Bellow’s—or rather Herzog’s—diatribe in 1964 against “the Waste Land outlook, the cheap mental stimulants of Alienation” (Herzog 81), and on a poor, restricted understanding of French existentialism itself. Thus, Helen Weinberg is convinced that Bellow “repudiates” Sartre and “other atheistic existentialist thinkers” (40). She argues that Bellow is opposed to all systems, “even such an open philosophical system as Sartre’s existentialism or Camus’s idea of the absurd . . . Bellow’s novel is a special form of inquiry, comes to no systematic conclusions, and is a metaphysical process in fictive terms; it is not a metaphysical construct, conclusion, system or statement, nor does it exemplify any system elaborated outside of and prior to the novel’s internal process” (36–40; my emphasis). Clearly, Weinberg’s argument does not prove Bellow’s aversion to existentialism; it only suggests that Bellow does not start out from a fixed, preconceived set of ideas or philosophical system. Yet, as my investigation shows, the conclusions finally reached in his novels can only be dubbed existentialist. This assessment of Bellow’s work becomes all the more obvious when even Weinberg ends up discussing his novels (in this case Augie March) in terms that are explicitly existentialist: “The choice of the particular goal of ideal being is dictated by the free self’s original uniqueness: The goal is only a symbolic 124 Chapter Seven projection of that original existential uniqueness. Existence is prior to essence or ideality” (68). Such statements obviously make it all the more curious that Weinberg insists on considering Bellow averse to existentialism. Only Sidney Finkelstein and Richard Lehan considered Bellow a full-blooded existentialist, Finkelstein dubbing him somewhat inappropriately “the self-appointed clown of the American existentialist movement.” Yet, he adds significantly that Bellow “is not, in his humor, satirizing the existentialist frame of mind because he has nothing to replace it with” (266). Like Finkelstein and Lehan, Malcolm Bradbury considers Dangling Man in- fluenced by “the soul-searching literature of modernism ..., above all Sartre and Camus , whose existentialist novels La Nausée and L’Etranger were now having considerable influence on American writers” (Modern 170). In 1963, Bradbury already noted that Dangling Man “shows Bellow’s clear debt to French novelists like Camus and Sartre” (“Saul” 119). John Clayton, by contrast, finds fault with Lehan for considering Dangling Man an existentialist novel, but Clayton’s assessment is based on such faulty assumptions as that “Sartre is less concerned with community, the relationship of person to person” (121) or that Sartre’s and Camus’s characters are “shallow creatures” as opposed to Bellow’s dangling man, a “complex human being with a rich inner life” (122). While the latter assessment might arguably be valid for the indifferent Meursault, it obviously does not apply to Roquentin. Clayton’s view clearly becomes untenable when even he has to admit: “It seems especially strange that Bellow, a defender of Man against writers of alienation and the void, should create in Dangling Man a novel so close in form and spirit to that classic novel of alienation and the absurdity of existence, Sartre’s Nausea. There are so many similarities that it seems certain Bellow in 1944 was consciously drawing on Sartre’s 1938 novel” (57). Later in his book, Clayton again notes his surprise at Bellow’s use of “ideal constructions”: “It is strange to find Bellow, a critic of existentialists, employing so central an existentialist tenet” (79). Keith Opdahl, then again, points out that there is an essential difference between Sartre’s universe and Bellow’s...