On Bellow's Planet: Readings from the Dark Side by Jonathan Wilson (review)

119 REVIEWS Wilson, Jonathan. On Bellow's Planet: Readings from the Dark Side. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1985. 193 pp. Cloth: $24.50. Advocates for Saul Bellow as "a lone voice . . . sounding the virtues of humanism" (p. 16) in defense of community and of man in the teeth of the prevalent nihilism of his age will find Jonathan Wilson's thesis no less critically provoking than theoretically provocative. It is that neither Bellow, nor his fictional protagonists, is life affirming. Nor is Bellow's bleak vision of the world as a "hostile place populated ... by hypocrites, egotists, grotesque swindlers, absolutists, and hardhearted 'realists' " (p. 18) something he has come to in testy old age, first unapologetically manifested in Mr. Sammler's Planet as many critics, including myself, have averred. Rather, this recoil from life itself is the voice print of all the fiction, for it is Wilson's contention that Bellow is less social realist than solipsistic autobiographer (p. 26), his cities less "representations of urban life" than "maps of a single consciousness" (p. 37). Enclosed by this mental geography, his heroes refract not so much of the world as of "the tensions in [Bellow's own] head" (p. 38). They, Bellow and his fictional protagonists, dangle indecisively between "a need for order in life and a propensity to create chaos" (p. 31), between the need to be politically and socially controlled and the will to be existentially free to act: in short, "between private and public worlds" (p. 134), "the harmonic world" within their own heads [the reference, here, is to Citrine, but is applicable as well to Wilson's Bellow and to "Bellow's other heroes"] and "the discordant world outside" (p. 161). The familiar dichotomies spew out resourcefully and endlessly, with the difference that the focus this time is on the negative half of the equations. The gross consequence, according to Wilson, has been for Bellow's narrative art to anesthetize the feelings of the protagonists ("Herzog 'changes it all into language,' Sammler changes it all into 'ideas' " [p. 153]) and to neutralize "the dynamic" (p. 162) in the fictive texture. An interesting sidelight on this bi-polar world is the place in it Wilson constructs for women, who, in an embarrassing flat side to Bellow's literary imagination, generally share the "American bitch goddess" lineage, equal parts nightmarish threat and fantasy wish fulfillment , of the Hemingway and Mailer females. Wilson discriminates "Bellow's shadowy women characters" (the " 'external' women in Bellow's canon") from the " 'real women' . . . firmly settled inside his 'real men' " (p. 74). There, the feminine nature of Bellow's highly emotional male protagonists becomes part of another polarity they contend with on the road to extricating their male selves from a brutal threatening world. In Bellow's (and Wilson's) iconographie shorthand, the problem reduces for "the Bellow hero" to resolving an antithesis of person: from having "both the heart of an irrational softy and the head of a bona fide, if eccentric, American intellectual" (p. 75), to being either a feeling sensitive person (that is, childish or womanly or foolish) or a thinking tough guy (that is, adult and manly and wise). I suppose Wilson's is a useful corrective to much of the uncritical adulation Bellow has been the recipient of. But does "the Dark Side" have to be so thoroughly black? Need the nay-saying "reality instructors" have such a triumphant day in the critical limelight? Is Bellow's world so unequivocally solipsistic and despairing? For the net effect ofWilson's labors (beyond, I suspect, his intentions) is to diminish Bellow's literary achievement as we have come to define and admire it, narrowing the humanistic breadth of his vision and the comprehensive realism of his novels by locking him up within the constricted reflexivity of late twentieth-century postmodernism and thus making him out as what he never consciously has striven to be. A serious loss for the fiction, philosophically and artistically, and most missed in Wilson's reading ofBellow, is the alleviating alembic of that novelist's comic perspective. A disappearing act of equal import is perpetrated on Bellow's incomparable roster of intellectual oddballs and memorable...