Saul Bellow's Enigmatic Laughter by Sara Blacher Cohen (review)

104Reviews Skepticism, despair over man's ability to penetrate objective reality, or even comprehend his own mind, informs masterworks such as "Ligeia" and "Usher." While displaying stunning linear logic, Poe's narrators are "capable of gross misperception, unreal construction, and instant irrationality" (p. 103). And the Gothic lighting and interior decor, frequently judged tawdry and melodramatic, are weird, but from Thompson's angle of vision also objective correlatives of tormented minds. This study will also be welcomed by intellectual and literary historians. Poe is directly linked to the German Romantic Ironists, especially Ludwig Tieck and August Wilhelm Schlegel. Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (first translated into English in 1815) alone joined Romantic melancholy with the ironic and comic. And, for a period, German Romanticism pointed the way "toward an ultimate harmony involving a unification of opposites, an annihilation of apparent contradictions and earthly limitations, and a merging of the subjective human personality and objective rational understanding into a penetrating view ofexistence from the height ofthe ideal—butalways with an eye to the terrors of an ultimately incomprehensible, disconnected, absurd, probably decaying, and possibly malevolent universe. The only attainable harmony out of all this deceptiveness and chaos was a doublevision, a double awareness, a double emotion, culminating in an ambivalent joy of stoical self-possession—in irony" (p. 164). In adapting the ironic posture, Poe was working in a well-established literary and philosophical context, not using the comic as a response to hysteria or for mere whimsy. Professor Thompson may not have proved other interpretations of Poe's fiction wrong; that was not his purpose. Scholarly caution will probably cause many readers to ponder for some time the synthesis he has attempted. But even the most cautious will have to agree that he has provided a fresh and provocative reading, and, in my judgment, a sound one. Glassboro State CollegeDonald Yannella Cohen, Sara Blacher. Saul Bellow's Enigmatic Laughter. Urbana: U. of Illinois Press, 1974. 242 pp. Cloth: $8.95. To an early self portrait, Chirico added the motto, "What shall I love unless it be the enigma?" The enigma of self and its alienation is the place from which Saul Bellow's earliest comedy began, and love, far from providing an answer to life's puzzle, is often the question. For Sarah Blacher Cohen, theenigmatic quality of Bellow's laughter results from the attempt to impose a comic vision on a fundamentally pessimistic view of thatquestion and though the argument is not explicitly made, her systematic analysis of the comedy of character, plot, ideas, and language in Bellow's major fiction seems founded on the conviction that the progressive maturity she identifies in Bellow's heroes emerges only in opposition to the comedy rather than as a product of it. In Dangling Man, for example, which shelabels a"sullen work," thecomedy is seen as ineffectual both in liberating the hero and in mediating the prevailing gloom in which he operates. The Victim, with its tight structure and traditionalnovelistic form, similarly relies on constrained and finally unconvincing antagonists. Only with The Adventures of Augie March does Cohen find Bellow finally liberating himself from a "cramped, saturnine humor," to achieve a "saturnalian" one which "celebrates more than it censures. . . ." In doing so, however, it is pushed to a forced if free-wheeling euphoria. Seize the Day Studies in American Fiction105 manages to express a more legitimate if cautious hopefulness despite the limitations of its hero. More exotic, the clowning romance in Henderson The Rain King contrasts with the intellectual irresponsibility of Herzog and finally gives way to the full bodied comedy of social analysis in Mr. Sammler s Planet. Even here, however, Cohen observes that "rather than valuing comic situations for their own droll sake, Bellow seems to include them so as not to disappoint fans who have come to expect a certain combination of mayhem and meditation in his novels" (p. 200). Primarily serving as relief from the weightier aspects of Bellow's fiction, then, the comedy emerges almost as a genre distinct from the novels, adding to them, subtracting, commenting, but never finally a characteristic mode. Drawing on such comic theorists as Bergson, Nathan Scott, Northrop...