The Novel and Public Truth: Saul Bellow's The Dean's December

THE NOVEL AND PUBLIC TRUTH: SAUL BELLOW'S THE DEAN'S DECEMBER Martin Corner Kingston University Can the novel, at the end ofthe twentieth century, still speakpublic truth? This is a question that has haunted Saul Bellow's fiction since Joseph, in Dangling Man, could find no connection between his private experience and the historic realities of war. But it is more than an issue for a single writer. The conscious problem of our culture since Bellow's first fiction appeared in the 1940s has been the survival ofthe individual before the dominating public realities of political and economic power, and this is a problem that Bellow, in his first novel, forcefully identified. For the novel as a literary form, however, the problem has been the inversion of that. For fiction, the secure ground has been private experience; more and more the novel has withdrawn into the particularities of individual consciousness, has surrendered the larger issues to politics, history, and cultural theory. Though Bellow's fiction recognizes the novel's historic investment in individual experience— his own work is centered on a succession of powerful individualities, such as Henderson, Herzog, and Sammler—it has nevertheless always been his aim to characterize the public life of the age, to make some statement of larger truth. The public understanding of contemporary experience is an aspiration that neither Bellow's characters nor their creator have ever abandoned.1 But how can the novel move from the private and subjective to public statement? The Dean's December engages this problem directly, and, I shall argue, embodies an answer. This is a novel which, since its publication in 1982, has often been unfavorably judged as displaying what are claimed to be Bellow's characteristic failings: of characterization , of tone, of the achievement of a proper distance between creation and polemic. Bellow has been accused of writing a solipsistic fiction, dominated by the consciousness of one individual who is presented uncritically and who, in importantrespects, may be Bellow himself . The result, it is argued, is a univocal fictional world, in which other characters, events and places are reduced to the perceptions and meanings of the central consciousness; where, finally, public reality is excluded by the weight of an idiosyncratic individualism which is 114Martin Corner Bellow's own (see, for example, the discussions by Jonathan Wilson and John Updike).2 My contention is that in The Dean's December Bellow shows himself aware of this danger. He tries to plot a route from individual consciousness to public truth, and he does so by freeing both the central character and the novel itself from an inappropriate burden of totalizing explanation, so as to clarify the true resources of the novel for engaging with the public reality of the world. For the novelist the road to public truth necessarily lies through private consciousness, and Bellow's point of departure is Dean Corde, who is attempting the same journey. Like the novel, Corde is trying to move from the enclosure ofprivate awareness to truthful general statement , to the word that his time needs to hear. But how should he measure his success? Bellow has a clear criterion; there is for him one fact of shared experience which tests both the individual' s ability to engage with the common terms of existence and the novel's ability to declare the truth ofthe age, and that is the fact of death. For Bellow death is the central public fact of the age, the hard kernel of twentieth century history . The life of the time is written in loss and death, on a scale and with a pervasiveness that confound both individual consciousness and the resources of fiction.3 It is in these terms that one must give an account of Chicago in the 1970s and of Bucharest under Ceausescu; the bottom line, in both cases, is human dereliction, violence, murder. Bellow's practice insists that we will know when an individual has found a way through to this common reality; there will be an adequation of consciousness to the enormity of the public fact. In the same way it will be possible to recognize fiction that has breached the bounds of individualistic...