Critical Essays on Saul Bellow (review)

Studies in American Fiction249 Frawley's analysis was very helpful; not quite incidentally, it strengthened my conviction that graduate students who are studying "the aesthetic implications of textual and biographical evidence" with me and "stylistics" with Stan Fish had better be studying psycho-linguistics at the same time. Anyhow, Frawley looked at Sherrill's habitual "if structure in two ways, on the prepositional level and on the discourse level. Frawley demonstrated that "potential mood" paraphrases underlie these superficially indicative clauses: "Sherrill has stylistically deleted the potential-mood, and pre-sentential marker, leaving on the surface only the syntactically manifest 'indicative' clause, which is really dominated in the structure by a potential mood marker; or more technically, the surface structure falls within the scope of a deleted semantic structure ('If it can be assumed that') which is actually the dominant meaning in the sentence." The pre-sentence, according to Frawley, is something like "It can be assumed that"; what follows ('The origins, forms, and trials . . . occurred") can exist in any tense because the hypothetical is expressed elsewhere, so Sherrill chooses the present pseudo-indicative. Under these structures, Frawley says, you can prove anything, even nonsense. The pseudo-indicatives (pseudofacts ) do not reveal their "potentialism" on a cursory reading, but Sherrill's arguments crumble when the true semantic structure comes out. On the discourse level, Frawley concluded, conditionality serves to link material outside of the discourse to material inside of the discourse, technically called collateral rhetorical structures. They serve to ground new information in terms of established information . By using pseudo-indicative in conditionality, Sherrill gives the impression that he is pointing outside of the discourse for a semantic grounding of his argument when in fact there is no pointing outside. That is, Sherrill uses conditionality in the discourse only to work inside of the discourse; thus his rhetoric proceeds coherently (statements are tight in the discourse itself), but there is no correspondence (exophora) or grounding, which would occur if his clauses had been truly indicative (factual) and not pseudo-indicative. Well, I knew something was wrong when I just could not read the book. A hundred or so of these non-grounded pseudo-indicative wonders puts a crimp in communication. No reviewer of this book should feel obliged to outline its arguments about the prophetic Melville: on a paragraph by paragraph basis the arguments do not come out in the open. University of DelawareHershel Parker Trachtenberg, Stanley. Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1979. 200 pp. Cloth: $27.50. As Stanley Trachtenberg suggests in his impressive introduction to this discriminating collection of essays and reviews, Saul Bellow from the beginning of his career has been perceived as central to our age, which for want of a better term is the "post-modernist generation." Although his first novel reflects the same claustrophobic subjectivism, that self-conscious posturing of the alienated soul, which characterizes modernist art—and about which Bellow would later have harsh words to say—its "self-pitying literalness" (p. 8; the words are Diana Trilling's) was itself prophetic of the author's concern for social reality as the medium in which the individual struggles for his integrity. As Irving Howe and Richard Poirier were equally forced to observe, however, social reality in Bellow had little connection to the political orthodoxies of the Left, Old or New, this despite the strenuousness with which Bellow was made the heir of that generation whose ideological 250Reviews anguish is still occasionally trotted out as the chief index of seriousness in American letters. When Howe describes Herzog as representative of "the glory and the foolishness of a postpolitical intelligentsia" (p. 30), this proudly concessive label reminds us of Howe's own generation, or at least those of it who fondly imagined themselves as Tocquevillean individuals courageous enough to resist their own culture. But Bellow has always outstripped the felt allegiances of his best critics, shouldering aside both their flatteries and their stings of envy. To link Herzog with the "post-political intelligentsia" is to reduce the scope of that doughty survivor, whose task is to study "the post-Renaissance, post-humanistic, post-Cartesian dissolution." This more ambitious subject is...