Dos Passos' U.S.A.: A Critical Study by Donald Pizer (review)

Studies in American Fiction117 that Diderot's work influenced Bellow's Dangling Man to Gloria Cronin's contention that through the use of parody Bellow's Henderson the Rain King exposes the "absurdities of absurdism, the banalities of historicist thinking, and the ignominy of post-modern sewer searching" (p. 192), from Mariann Russell's early interpretation of the "White Man's Black Man" paradigm in Mr. Sammler's Planet to Susan Glickman's emphasis on survival, after the Holocaust, in the same novel. The list is long, the articles are splendidly written and well chosen. As Matthew Roudané points out, the inner reality of Bellow's writing in The Dean's December reveals a successful fusion of ideas and image, what Michael Yetman sees as the "truth or reality of human experience, including its moral dimension" (p. 264). For more than four decades Saul Bellow has tried to show us, through his fictions , that we all have a soul, that we know innately what the soul needs but that somehow it has been buried or obscured, as Bellow put it in The Dean's December, "under the debris of false description or non-experience." Perhaps Bellow's concerns are a religious preoccupation, if a broad definition of religion is allowed. As he put it in Dangling Man, at the beginning of his career, it is important to ask how a good man, a mensch, can live. As he put it in The Dean's December, a late book, his is a search for "everyman's inner city, . . . the slums we carry around inside us." For reality did not exist out there but began to be real only when the soul found its underlying truth. As Cronin writes (in "Holy War," p. 77), "going against the stream describes Saul Bellow's lifelong determination to deflect the main course of modernist thinking which has dominated Western literature and American thought and culture in our century." Scorning absurdism, nihilism, alienation ethics, and a belief in Deus Abscondus, refuting historical pessimism, and defending the embattled self, Bellow has attempted to provide a counter-revision by affirming Judeo-Christian religious and ethical values more strongly perhaps than any other Western writer. As he put it in an interview with Nina Steers, Show (September, 1964), 37—38, "I may be disappointed in existence—but I feel I have a right to demand something other than romantic disappointment." The point is that modern literature, in Bellow's view, was dominated by a tone of elegy from the 1920s to the 1950s, as in Eliot's "Wasteland," or Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that verged on absurdity (see the interview with Gordon Harper, in Writer at Work, ed. Alfred Kazin [New York: Viking, 1967]). At base Bellow is a defender of the remarkable enduring powers of humankind and Western civilization. "I can't accept this foolish dreariness," Herzog says in Herzog. "We're talking about the whole life of mankind" (pp. 95—97). Indeed, what needs to be believed and acted on is the premise, central to Bellow's "Weltanschauung," that man is an artist, and that art is a name for something always done by human beings (Bellow, "Machines and Storybooks," Harper's, 249 [August, 1974], 48). Saul Bellow in the 1980s is true to Bellow and true to literary criticism. This is a major addition to Bellow criticism. Whether one follows Bellow's line of thought or not, this is an excellent place to start. The editors have chosen well and wisely. Pennsylvania State UniversityDaniel Waiden Pizer, Donald. Dos Passos' U.S.A.: A Critical Study. Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1988. 209 pp. Cloth: $27.50. The recent publication of several critical guides to the work ofJohn Dos Passos— Dos Passos: The Critical Heritage, edited by Barry Maine (1988); David Sanders' 118Reviews Comprehensive Bibliography (1987); and Donald Pizer's Dos Passos' U.S.A.: A Critical Study—signals renewed interest in the vision of a writer whose critical reception has always been particularly vulnerable to the political temper of the times. His reputation has suffered these extreme shifts primarily because his literary goals were inseparable from his political stances...