Madness and Subversion in Saul Bellow's Later Novels: A Deconstructive Perspective 1636671497, 9781636671499

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Madness and Subversion in Saul Bellow’s Later Novels examines how and why intellectuals were regarded in European humanistic tradition as wise heroes who sought to deconstruct the norms of their society, which was dominated by low culture. It goes on to explain the unravelling of the Bellovian paradigm, unrealizable in a society where democracy and capitalism were the dominant ideologies. Author Ramzi Marrouchi uses a combination of Derrida’s premises on deconstructionism, Foucault’s conception of “épistémè”, and de Man’s view on blindness and insight to explain the social and historical fracture from which Bellow’s intellectuals suffered. This book is the first to investigate Bellow’s later novels from a deconstructionist perspective. It will be appeal to all scholars and students interested in Bellow’s creations, and in the intellectual and literary history of twentieth-century America. The book, like its author, is innovative, clear, and able to open pathways to new ideas. —Dr. Wael Mustafa, Associate Professor of Literary Theory and Criticism Hilariously entertaining and thoroughly written. —Dr. Shaimaa El-Ateek, Associate Professor of Literary Theory and Criticism

www.peterlang.com

Ramzi Marrouchi

Ramzi Marrouchi is assistant professor of Jewish American fiction. He has Canadian BA, MA and PhD in modern American Literature and criticism. His field of interest is Jewish American fiction, deconstructionism and theories of texts.

Madness and Subversion in Saul Bellow’s Later Novels

Saul Bellow emphasized to a remarkable degree that the protagonists in his later novels were intellectuals trained in the humanistic traditions of European liberal education. He supposed that these protagonists would lead modern American society and predict its future. However, they were ostracized from the intellectual center of modern America, marginalized and rejected by the ethics of capitalism, and therefore denied any significant moral or ethical role. Bellow addressed this gap and acknowledged that deconstructing the negativity of capitalism helped solve this intellectual and moral decay in America.

Madness and Subversion in Saul Bellow’s Later Novels A Deconstructive Perspective

ISBN 978-1-63667-149-9

9 781636 671499

9781636671499_cvr_eu.indd All Pages

Cover image: Trifonov_Evgeniy

Ramzi Marrouchi

04-Nov-23 17:15:46

Madness and Subversion in Saul Bellow’s Later Novels examines how and why intellectuals were regarded in European humanistic tradition as wise heroes who sought to deconstruct the norms of their society, which was dominated by low culture. It goes on to explain the unravelling of the Bellovian paradigm, unrealizable in a society where democracy and capitalism were the dominant ideologies. Author Ramzi Marrouchi uses a combination of Derrida’s premises on deconstructionism, Foucault’s conception of “épistémè”, and de Man’s view on blindness and insight to explain the social and historical fracture from which Bellow’s intellectuals suffered. This book is the first to investigate Bellow’s later novels from a deconstructionist perspective. It will be appeal to all scholars and students interested in Bellow’s creations, and in the intellectual and literary history of twentieth-century America. The book, like its author, is innovative, clear, and able to open pathways to new ideas. —Dr. Wael Mustafa, Fayoum University, Cairo, Egypt, Associate Professor of Literary Theory and Criticism Hilariously entertaining and thoroughly written. —Dr. Shaimaa El-Ateek, Imam University, Riyadh, KSA Associate Professor of Literary Theory and Criticism

www.peterlang.com

Cover image: Trifonov_Evgeniy

9781636671499_cvr_eu.indd All Pages

Ramzi Marrouchi

Ramzi Marrouchi is assistant professor of Jewish American fiction. He has Canadian BA, MA and PhD in modern American Literature and criticism. His field of interest is Jewish American fiction, deconstructionism and theories of texts.

Madness and Subversion in Saul Bellow’s Later Novels

Saul Bellow emphasized to a remarkable degree that the protagonists in his later novels were intellectuals trained in the humanistic traditions of European liberal education. He supposed that these protagonists would lead modern American society and predict its future. However, they were ostracized from the intellectual center of modern America, marginalized and rejected by the ethics of capitalism, and therefore denied any significant moral or ethical role. Bellow addressed this gap and acknowledged that deconstructing the negativity of capitalism helped solve this intellectual and moral decay in America.

Madness and Subversion in Saul Bellow’s Later Novels A Deconstructive Perspective

Ramzi Marrouchi

08-Nov-23 19:44:04

Madness and Subversion in Saul Bellow’s Later Novels

Ramzi Marrouchi

Madness and Subversion in Saul Bellow’s Later Novels A Deconstructive Perspective

PETER LANG Lausanne • Berlin • Bruxelles • Chennai • New York • Oxford

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Control Number: 2023028390

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. The German National Library lists this publication in the German National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://​dnb.d-​nb.de. Cover design by Peter Lang Group AG ISBN 9781636671499 (hardback) ISBN 9781636671505 (ebook) ISBN 9781636671512 (epub) DOI 10.3726/​b20621 © 2023 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne Published by Peter Lang Publishing Inc., New York, USA [email protected] -​ www.peterl​ang.com All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilization outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed.

To the memory of my father, to Koussey, Haneen and Wateen, thank you for making my life possible in every way. Koussey, Haneen and Wateen; my moon, my stars and my anchor, thank you for all the time you were there for me, and for all the time I was not there for you.

The worlds we sought were never those we saw; the worlds we bargained for were never the worlds we got. […] But I must know what I myself am. Joseph. Bellow, S. 1944. 23.

The true vision of things is a gift. Augie March. Bellow, S. 1953. 23.

Who—​who was I? A millionaire wanderer and wayfarer. A brutal and violent man driven into the world. A man who fled his own country, settled by his forefathers. A fellow whose heart said, I want. I want. Who played the violin in despair, seeking the voice of angels. Who has to hurst the spirit’s sleep or else. Bellow, S. 1956. 23.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Introduction

1

Chapter 2 Themes in the Works of Bellow

13

Chapter 3 The Deconstructivist Perspective

75

Chapter 4 Madness as the Wisdom of Intellectuals

89

Chapter 5 The Agony of Intellectuals and the Decline of Civility

109

Chapter 6 Deconstructing Capitalism

143

Chapter 7 Conclusion

167

References

177

·1· INTRODUCTION “Enlightenment? Marvelous! But out of hand, wasn’t it?” Bellow, S. 1970. 34.

Saul Bellow’s position as one of the major Jewish American postwar writers has already been solidly established. Part of this distinction stems from the fact that his eccentric fictional world is able to touch the hearts and minds of many of his devoted readers. His artistic qualities include “his ability to describe experience in a human voice so that the texture of the experience comes through and his ability to convey the philosophical-​moral complexities of human life without losing that life itself” (Clayton, 1979, p. 1). He believes that the best author is the one who is inspired, whose writings should respond to the social, historical, political, intellectual and cultural inquiries of the age. Bellow is successful at reaching such a diverse audience because he draws heavily on biographical emphases, life experiences such as childhood, marriage, divorce, and even the deaths of loved ones. Bellow’s life in New York and Chicago as an aspiring writer gave him the opportunity to be acquainted with literary circles, and gave his works the quality of life in big cities, streets and suburbs, people young and old, rich and poor, colorful personalities, hoodlums and mobsters, doctors, lawyers, students, business, politicians and common people. Bellow’s place in the romantic and transcendental traditions of literature as well as the Jewish quality of his fiction and mind are striking. In fact,

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Madness and Subversion in Saul Bellow’s Later

regarded as the descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walter Whitman, he celebrates the dignity of the human being, defends humanism, “insists on the value of a future for humankind, stresses the importance of imagination and dream, recognizes the primacy of the self, and celebrates personal intuition amidst the whirlwind of mass culture” (Tajima, 1981, p. 3). As Cohen points out, the “Jewish characteristics of Bellow’s work stem from its religiosity, sentimentalism, pathos; its prominent element of storytelling; its marked family orientation, humor, and transcendentalism” (1974, p. 12). He succeeded in addressing contemporaneous issues such as the alienation of intellectuals, the mental and the emotional uncertainties and ambiguities of his heroes, the anxiety of the age, the devaluation of the self, the endless quest for meaning in life, the gloomier aspects of the postmodern era and existential themes that seem to deprive humanity of any hope. Accordingly, his later novels are distinguished by their concerns about madness, subversion, deconstruction, a profound interest in ideas, and the importance of serious intellectual work. Bellow warns against the ready-​made opinions and ideas of mass society, ignorant people, and low culture. On this basis, this study establishes a deconstructive approach that tackles madness as wisdom and subversion as deconstruction. It is the wisdom of intellectuals who struggle to affirm life over chaos, intellectual thinking over mass society, and high culture over low culture. Therefore, it becomes necessary to ask how and why Bellow’s heroes subvert and deconstruct the ethics and morals of their society in the body of his later novels. The eminence of Bellow in American letters today is generally recognized by both the scholarly community and the reading public. In his The Role of Intellection in Saul Bellow’s Fiction, Tajima regarded Bellow as likely to be a “most richly decorated and most famous author. His books are widely read, widely taught, widely discussed. It is clear, then, that he possesses the qualities to attract and sustain a large and appreciative audience” (1981, p. 1). Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1976, and before that the Pulitzer Prize, and was a three-​time winner of the National Book Award, and his international reputation has continued to grow. Behind Bellow’s realistic, Jewish, romantic, existential and universal literature lie qualities that vehemently categorize him as both a modernist and a postmodernist writer. While he “insists on the dignity of the human being, on the human capacity to create a meaningful mode of existence and on the transcendental qualities of human experience” (Harper, 1975, p. 1), the fact remains that “Bellow’s presentation of the human

Introduction

3

condition in the contemporary world continues to be widely influential and, more often than not, enthusiastically applauded” (Harper, 1975, p. 186). This study initially derives from an admiration of Bellow’s insistence on the validity and the integrity of intellectuals in the face of the deconstructive forces of low culture and mass society. Among contemporary American writers, Bellow is most compelling for addressing the spirit of intellectuals, whether poets, philosophers, politicians, thinkers or even artists, from which he emerges with wisdom and subversion. His concern for defining the dimensions of intellectuals appears to be both striking and unconventional. Closer scrutiny of his novels indicates Bellow’s vision with regard to the paradoxical relationships between his protagonists and mass society in America. The affirmation of intellectuals is made largely at the expense of a society that is dominated by low culture. In attempting to probe the major difficulties inherent in the process of working on Bellow, the author was unexpectedly plunged into a series of problematical issues over the fictional wor(l)d of the author as well as the quality of his writings. During some of the time spent reflecting upon his writings (novels, plays, poems, essays and critiques), the “world” in which he lived and the most sublime ideals he vehemently supported, the author was deeply fascinated by the way Bellow redefined the concepts of madness and subversion and the way he deployed them in his world of fiction. In recent studies and collections of critical essays such as The Quest for the Male Soul:  In Search of Something More, Quest for the Human:  An Exploration of Saul Bellow’s Fiction, On Saul Bellow’s Planet: Readings from the Dark Side and Herzog: The Limits of Ideas, Jonathan Wilson, Martin W. Pable and Eusebio L. Rodrigues have respectively explored the implications of basic Bellovian ideas including the Holocaust, exile, memory, identity, politics and the responsibility of Man for the consequences of his wrongdoing. The present book continues the same sort of investigation with regard to the same topics, but, from a deconstructive perspective. This dissertation presents its originality and difference by addressing an uninvestigated area of research and attempting to unravel and clarify certain blind spots to readers. The author proposes to tackle ambivalent and eccentric aspects of writing in Bellow’s fictional world, which results in examining madness and subversion. Mad intellectual heroes and their attempts to subvert and deconstruct the existing norms of their society and culture is, therefore, the focus of this research. This book’s examination of Bellow’s fictional world in its relationship with madness, deconstruction and subversion focuses on the texts of Henderson

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Madness and Subversion in Saul Bellow’s Later

the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Humboldt’s Gift and The Dean’s December. The choice of these texts is due to their being emblematic examples of the maturity of the author as well as the trajectory of the development of subversion in his writings. These novels redefined the themes of madness and subversion and made it possible for them to be investigated in line with deconstructionism. It appears that Bellow has unfathomably benefited from the insights of the philosophy of modernity and postmodernity, and interestingly, sought to subvert their fundamental ideals. Nevertheless, this does not mean that other writings of Bellow, which include essays, short stories, diaries, plays and conversations, shall be neglected. For instance, It All Adds Up: From The Dim Past to the Uncertain Future, The Actual, The Bellarosa Connection, To Jerusalem and Back, The Last Analysis, Dangling Man, The Victim, The Adventures of Augie March, Seize the Day, and many others help demystify the development of the intellectual maturity of the author, and give further insights about the world in which he lived and the ideas he most espoused. In line with this thought, the concept of madness is not used to depict the pathological state of the mind of the subjects, nor is it deployed to inform about the mad figures that Foucault (1965) investigated in his Madness and Civilization. Rather, it should be understood as the wisdom of intellectuals. Consequently, intellectualism shall be introduced as another concept that is related to madness. Madness and intellectualism in the Bellovian context are reason and sanity. It is the sanity of the intellectual in the age of vulgar and mass culture, the postmodern age. It is the embodiment of philosophy in everyday life. The America which Bellow addressed is that of the immediate postwar era, that of the stormy sixties and the prosperous seventies and eighties. In terms of values, it is the America that was dominated by the ethics of capitalism. In fact, the novels investigated in this work cover a historical period of time that runs from the early fifties up until the late eighties. This era was generally coined with radical, striking and sometimes contradictory changes in America. For instance, America witnessed unprecedented economic prosperity which had deep impacts on its political and military dominance in the world. The student protests, the black civil rights movements, the emergence of the new elites, the new bourgeois class or what was commonly known as the masses and the decline of intellectuals marked the fundamental social and cultural changes that categorized the American intellectual mood. As a result, America was governed by the dictatorship of the common place, the power

Introduction

5

of the unqualified individual who belongs to the sovereign mass. Barbarism defined the absence of norms, ethics and morality. Accordingly, Bellow’s protagonists are not fictive, but are based on real American artists and a real historical background. They are named after real American artists, poets, politicians, thinkers, and philosophers. They are heirs to the tradition of Poe, Melville, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck and others. More strikingly, “deeper attention tells that they are a whole generation of Jewish-​ American losers in the 1930s and the 1940s including Bellow himself” (Rho, 1999, p. 99). The context of the fifties was positive, hopeful, idealist, open for creativity and romanticism, “in spite of the dismal shadow spread over American society in general because of the Depression” (pp. 100–​101). But as America became more industrialized in the sixties and the seventies, intellectuals and artists faded away and got marginalized, and pushed out of the center of American society. Their literature, philosophical mediations and romanticism were deleted from the modern American canon because “the bastards, the literary funeral directors and politicians who put together these collections had no use for [philosophers]” (Bellow, 1985, p. 5). And the more America becomes involved in industry and the mass production system, the more men of letters are destined to suffer. Thinking becomes a dangerous occupation in America because the American climate is not still suited for thinkers. They are out of business, for “monopoly capitalism has treated creatives like rats” (Rho, 1999, p. 135). Capitalism alienates artists, degrades literature, makes beggars of poets, and ensures a business spirit is at the root of American culture. The ideology of capitalistic democracy is behind this intellectual and artistic backdrop as it does not value intellectuals and philosophers in the European classical tradition. This is the America which Bellow addressed and attempted to change in his later novels. Bellow’s protagonists are widely regarded as wise intellectuals. They are possessors of European high culture and are deeply immersed in European liberal education, namely, in the humanities. By high culture, he refers to what intellectuals in humanities are concerned about, morality and ethics, while denigrating other aspects of culture as “low culture” or “mass culture.” Bellow supposes that they lead modern American society, predict its future, and provide humanistic values for Americans. Accordingly, the protagonists of his later novels are expected to exert painstaking efforts in order to be recognized as moral legislators by their society, and bring, therefore, some change to the world.

6

Madness and Subversion in Saul Bellow’s Later

However, these intellectuals are ostracized from the center of modern American society. They are marginalized, forgotten about, and fade away from the public’s attention. As America became more industrious after the Second World War, its society turned out to be a product of this massive industrialization. Americans closed their mind to classical culture and classical works, and consequently, morality and humanism have little meaning for them. Additionally, they lead a common life qualified by liberal democracy, scientific experimentation and junk culture. They are the same as the products in a factory, standardized goods without creative minds or flexibility. They do not learn how to think and decide. They learn skills, instead, and how to operate their segmented knowledge. They are more specialists than intellectuals. They are not what they are supposed to be, nor are they what Bellow would have expected them to be since they engender vulgarity, barbarism and materialism in modern American society. This era of concern presents a gap between what Bellow hoped to see in post-​industrial American society and what really exists. This highlights the need for further understanding and investigation. In response to this problem, this study aims to investigate this gap from a deconstructive perspective which offers two ways to solve it. First, it addresses the negative effects of the post-​industrial norms of mass society on intellectuals and offers the possibility of deconstructing them by means of morality, wisdom and humanism. Second, it questions the function of capitalism and deconstructs its principles of utilitarianism and materialism. The reason behind this is that capitalism represents the core cause of this cultural and intellectual backdrop in modern America. Additionally, the moral, ethical, economic and political impacts are remarkably seen to improve the current situation of intellectuals and move it closer to what Bellow initially expected. This study will benefit policy makers, mass society, intellectuals as well as researchers. Policy makers may decide to change certain nihilistic norms of capitalism. Mass society will benefit if the results indicate a change is needed in their own behaviors. Intellectuals will benefit by their moving from the periphery back to the center and their regaining their place as moral legislators in American society. Finally, researchers will be able to carry on the present work to bridge the gap between masses and intellectuals, and make politicians aware of the negativity of capitalism. They will increase, thereby, the relevancy of this research to the current world. In determining the extent of the abovementioned problem, there are several questions that arise. First, in what way is madness epitomized in terms of

Introduction

7

wisdom and morality, and how does this wisdom generate and further aggravate the gap between the intellectual heroes and the masses in Bellow’s later novels? Second, what are the manifestations of marginalization and suffering of Bellow’s intellectual figures in his later novels, and how does this help engender the cultural decline in modern America? Third, what actions do these intellectual protagonists take to solve their problem of marginalization, bridge the gap between them and the masses and low culture, and eventually prevent the decline of civility, and to what extent do their efforts help regain morality and humanism in modern capitalistic America? Before moving onto these questions, Chapter 2 of this book provides the literature review of the subject. It presents the concept of madness as being redefined by Bellow, and introduced in terms of wisdom, sanity and intellectualism. It refers to Foucault’s (1994) definition of madness in the age of reason only to show that Bellow’s understanding of the concept has nothing to do with clinical terms and historical definitions. The theme of madness has been mapped out from different angles of view and specified in Bellow’s later novels in terms of wisdom and overconsciousness. The differences between the author and the relevance of the deconstructive perspective are presented by mapping out the early and the late readings of the novelist and analyzing how they missed certain gaps of research, and undeliberately left them hidden. Ultimately, the present work conveys the relationship between subversion, deconstruction, modernity and postmodernity, arguing that the deconstructive perspective will not be grasped in detail without ascribing it to the modern and postmodern contexts. Chapter 3 tackles the questions about deconstructionism. It refers to Derrida’s and de Man’s principles of the deconstructive theory, focusing on the boundaries between discourses, namely the philosophical and the literary, the unreadability of the literary text, and the state of meaning as being ceaselessly differed, erased and changed in order to present the theoretical background that explains madness and subversion. Certain concepts, which the author thinks are guiding key terms, are explained with regard to the deconstructive perspective as well as the themes of madness and subversion. Methodologically, deconstructionism has particular affinities with logocentrism, modernity, postmodernity, philosophy and literature. Certain themes in the Bellovian fictional world such as alienation, intellectualism, high culture, synthesis and entropy, intimations of immortality, suffering and the restless quest have something to do with madness and subversion. The revelation and the explanation of these concepts and themes are crucial in order to

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Madness and Subversion in Saul Bellow’s Later

analyze the protagonists’ achievement of wisdom and transcendence by subverting and deconstructing the norms of their society. Although these themes acquire existential connotations, the purpose is not to investigate Bellow from an existential perspective, but to show the ties between existentialism and deconstructionism. Chapter 4 analyzes how and why madness is sanity and overconsciousness. The protagonists’ overconsciousness engenders the main values of what Bellow calls high culture. Here, one can see how and why Bellow’s heroes and, behind them, American artists have been regarded as wise and idealized intellectuals. They are culture collectors, unrecognized poets, philosophers, historians, scholars, university professors. They are Enlightenment and modern intellectuals, immigrants in America, observers of the culture of American democracy and comparers of European high culture with American mass culture. They find that there is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. Their madness leads them to be fascinated with becoming aristocratic intellectuals who theorize for the future of their society and nation. Bellow proposes that the true spirit, human welfare, moral worth, reason, faith, wisdom, peace, happiness and self-​autonomy should be essential ways of responding to the mass culture habits that face his heroes. For Herzog and Humboldt madness should be peace and the gift that paves the way for wisdom. The natural law of life, for Sammler, is to be that of reason and faith, wisdom and belief, philosophy and God. However, the ethical values he brought from Europe are fiercely challenged. He is contrasted with the New Left, radical youths, and the countercultural movement in the 1960s. He is Alexis de Tocqueville in the 20th century in so far as he is a student of democracy in America. Chapter 5 demystifies how sane intellectuals deconstruct the negativity of the masses and low culture. It argues how Bellow’s protagonists are supposed to be culture-​makers insisting that everything possible must be done to restore the credit and authority of art, the seriousness of thought, the integrity of culture, the dignity of style. They are men of ideas, not men of action, nor men of decision; they are poets, theorists, philosophers, idealists, dissenters and revolutionists of the age. But they are satirized, decentralized, humiliated, degraded, victimized, and rejected in spite of their celebrity and their contributions to American culture. American artists are forced to feel alienation, ‘discrimination’, agony and desperation. They are always forgotten at the end of their lives; they are haunted by the conflict between intellectualism and the culture of consumerism, commodities, and the capitalism of the postmodern

Introduction

9

age; they are exploited by a non-​artist mass society; they are lunatic, yet their lunacy is creative, constructive and subversive. Chapter 6 takes the project of deconstruction to the extreme. It analyzes the way Bellow deconstructs capitalism itself, as it is the core cause of the cultural decline in modern America. In a typical Derridian gesture, the heroes ask what to decipher next. Adopting a Foucauldian strategy of digging into the structures of thoughts, episteme, Bellow questions the roots of capitalism. He reaches the conclusion that modern knowledge is only a crisis of capitalism; ethics are values without moral codes, hope is desperation, identity is life without stories; and politics is exile. Grand ideas, intellectualism and what they refer to as high culture are illusions. Although they abandoned mass/​low culture, however, they are not satisfied with any other culture, democratic capitalism, either. Neither in America, nor in their imaginary homelands do the intellectuals feel at home. They realize that there exist dictators everywhere and no intellectual is welcome in either place. They find themselves alienated from everything around them: the American masses, their universities and even their utopian high culture. Chapter 7 concludes the study and formulates recommendations and contributions to the body of knowledge that the author assumes to be fundamental. The findings achieved in this study will help to design suggestions and recommendations that will have implications on modern American society. These measures, which must be taken by policy makers, intellectuals and legal institutions, are meant to bridge the gap between intellectuals and the masses, high culture and low culture, in order for the place of God in America to be regained and for the European humanistic tradition to be transplanted in the American soul. The significance of this book is concomitant with its contribution to the field in terms of methodology, theoretical and practical knowledge. In fact, the deconstructive approach marks the undiscovered and striking connections between Bellow’s later novels and deconstructionism. This theoretical platform outlines the methodological contribution while addressing madness and subversion. The results of the study will be of great benefit to the following: Policy makers:  The findings made from the discussion and the analysis of Bellow’s later novels will provide policy makers with information on how the negative aspects of capitalism degrade and marginalize high culture, intellectuals, and the moral and ethical norms of American society. The results will enable policy makers in America to re-​evaluate the negativity of capitalism and improve legislation in favor of morality and humanism. The data

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Madness and Subversion in Saul Bellow’s Later

gathered will also help policy makers initiate collaboration among universities, intellectuals and legislative institutions to help plan the transplantation of European humanistic culture in the American soul. Intellectuals:  The results of the study will help intellectuals in the European humanistic tradition regain their central position on the American cultural scene. The results would also renew the functions of intellectuals as moral and ethical legislators for their society. Masses: The findings will shed light on the savage, barbarous and material face of the masses as well as the negative features of capitalism in modern America. This will help intellectuals deconstruct and subvert all ethics related to the masses. They will accordingly be required to revise their negative contribution on the cultural, economic and political scene in America. Humanism: This study will help improve the awareness about the necessity of moral, ethical and humane norms in a society which is dominated by the ideology of the masses, low culture and capitalism. It will also foster new ways of enhancing the role of intellectuals in formulating cultural, political, economic and philosophical policies and practices in modern America. Additionally, the significance of this study exists in the author’s attempts to affirm the dignity of human being and the possibility of human life in the present day. In fact, the author continues the struggle against the stream of 20th-​century cultural nihilism and points out the origins of that struggle in Bellow’s later novels. This is achieved by the author taking three significant positions:  a) Standing in opposition to the cultural nihilism of the 20th century and the tendency in wasteland writers, in anti-​literature, to negate human value in modern society, b) Rejecting the classical concept of madness in modern literature and thereby emphasizing morality rather than marginalization, and c) Being strikingly hostile to the devaluation of the alienated and marginalized self in modern literature and, therefore, valuing the wisdom of intellectuals and their attempts to decipher and deracinate the low culture of mass society. This enables the author to show faith in human being and in the possibility of his union with others. More importantly, the significance of this study stems from addressing missed and undeliberately neglected areas of research with regard Bellow’s later novels. In fact, several themes and issues ranging from identity, to the images of women, suffering, chaos, the metaphor of the city, deception, irony, immortality and existential consciousness, have been investigated without much attention being paid to the rapidly developing and changing theories of texts and philosophy, particularly deconstructionism. Contrary to what

Introduction

11

has been done before, this book relates Bellow’s fictional world to the deconstructive theory. Its significance and originality exist in its attempts to analyze Bellow’s novels in line with the findings of Derrida’s and de Man’s premises of deconstructionism and Foucault’s (1994) concept of episteme. The protagonists’ ceaseless subversion and deconstruction of low culture and the worldly desires of American masses are emblematic examples in this regard. Ultimately, this study opens up new avenues of research while addressing Bellow. It does not limit itself to a re-​evaluation of the early or the classical readings of the author; rather, it locates him within modern and postmodern contexts of madness and subversion. The deconstructive perspective does not provide answers as much as it generates more questions and inquiries that scholars need to examine. The renewed interest in Bellow exists in his awareness about the crisis of capitalism in modern America. In fact, Bellow has remarkably confirmed the negative role which capitalism has been playing on the socioeconomic, political, intellectual and cultural scene in modern America. This negativity deepens the agony of intellectuals and displaces them from the heart of decision-​making in America. In his later novels, the intellectual heroes depict this marginality, and suggest the deconstruction and the subversion of the ethos behind it. Bellow recommends the bringing back of the intellectuals, i.e., those who are trained in the humanities, to the center of American life and decision-​making and the transplantation of a humanistic culture that replaces or even softens at a first stage the vulgarity of capitalism. The other reason behind the interest in Bellow is the chance to understand and discover the secrets of the author while reading his novels in line with the insights of Derrida’s deconstructionism. The point behind this is that while first reading Bellow, the author has noticed the gap of his not being accounted for within the perspective of deconstruction. It was also remarkable that his later novels were extensively interpreted in a classical way which focused on thematic and fictional perspectives and neglected relating them to the problems of capitalism and the agony of intellectuals in modern America. When the author first introduced the themes of madness and subversion to the relationship with deconstructionism and cultural decay in America, the assumption might have been that this book is about a philosophical reading to Bellow. However, this book is not philosophical in its ends; rather, it is a literary work with an archaeological design and a deconstructive perspective. Its primary objective is to depict the manifestations of the agony and marginalization of intellectuals, the cultural decay in modern, democratic and

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Madness and Subversion in Saul Bellow’s Later

capitalistic America, as well as the way to subvert this by means of morality and wisdom. Deconstructionism with regard to Bellow’s later novels has always been related to the means of finding solutions to the agony of intellectuals and the decline of culture in America. The present work, then, focuses on these neglected connections. It seeks to establish the ways in which Bellow develops and responds to recent deconstructive philosophical views, the moral and ethical codes of his time, and the postmodern views of life and the world in general. The striking affinities between his works and the deconstructive theory can only suggest an implicit dialogue between the man and the world in which he was living, the fiction he was writing and the history he was recollecting, a dialogue that is worth investigating in detail.

·2· THEMES IN THE WORKS OF BELLOW “My God? Who is this creature? It considers itself human. But what is it? Not human of itself. But has the longing to be human. And like a troubling dream, a persistent vapor. A desire. Where does it all come from? And what is it? And what can it be! Not immortal longing. No, entirely mortal, but human.” Bellow, S. 1964. 23.

When one considers the place of Bellow in the Western Canon, to recall Bloom’s terms, it appears that critics like Malin, Hassan and Bradbury have not re-​evaluated the novelist in the light of contemporary critical theories and, particularly deconstructionism. Instead, they adopt general, historical, thematic and autobiographical methods to analyze and understand the author’s world of fiction. The early criticisms in the seventies and mid-​80s of the last century failed, to establish a theory of literature that could account for the diversity of his writings on the one hand, and the plethora of factors that were responsible for their production on the other. This generated polemical disputes among critics with regard to the intellectual and literary maturity of the writer. As a result, the indecisive gestures that categorized most of Bellow’s criticism misrecognized and sometimes undeliberately neglected fundamental blind spots such as madness, subversion and deconstruction in his later novels, and thereby, left them to future research. It is because of this reason that the book endeavors, in this respect, to establish a deconstructive approach that seeks to displace the classical readings of the author, redefine the concepts of madness and subversion, and investigate him from a completely different standpoint. Before analyzing and evaluating the past criticisms on Bellow’s

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works based on the major themes addressed by critics, this chapter begins by investigating the concept of madness from a wider perspective. Sketching Bellow’s peculiar reflections on madness is a challenge, as defining madness itself is challenging. For the purposes of this project, the term madness shall be used to refer to a state of mind that is quantitative, rather than qualitative, and in excess of ordinary consciousness—​though that excess may come to appear as a qualitative difference. What is meant by this is that anyone can understand the jolt of euphoria, the weight of sadness, the concern of an iitynabil to sleep or concentrate, or the surprise of an unbidden thought, yet when these experiences come in excess, beyond the quantity of common experience, they become less understandable and are thus subject to a diagnosis of mood or thought disorders. This quantitative excess of thinking might be seen as an alternate way of perceiving the nature of things. Calling this excess of consciousness madness, gives the concept of madness a very specific definition. However, this does not mean that excess is a malfunction, bearing in mind clinical terminology and definitions. The definitional challenge stems from the literary, social, political, historical and intellectual agendas that lurk behind the concept of madness. Most scholars such as Foucault (1965), Donnelly (2012), Althusser (1993), and Deleuze (1994), who write on this subject, adopt an ‘archaeological method’ to unravel the complicated connections between madness, history, politics and society. They also show a deliberate awareness of the choice of the terminology they used. Miller (1993) dedicated an entire appendix to their use of the word ‘insanity’. Doctors usually use more clinically accurate terms such as mental illness, physical illness, cancerous people, and schizophrenia instead of madness. In addition to this aspect, madness will also be referred to in terms of cultural connotative power. The point is that narrowing the definition of madness at this level might close down drastic questions. When it comes to the historical mapping of madness, Foucault is an inescapable figure. In his famous book Madness and Civilization, Foucault (1965) proffers that madness, as a mental illness, has been recognized as part of truth engendered from the Classical Age, to the Renaissance and up to the Enlightenment era. The central contention is that madness is a political invention and social construction induced by the social and economic changes of the Enlightenment. The mad were isolated from society during that period, particularly when they posed a threat to others and themselves. In Gutting’s words, “the mad, being idle, were a threat to the stability of a bourgeois society in which labor was the central value … the mad were distinctive for their

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animality” (1989, p. 55). Within this category of unreason, mad figures are put in radical opposition to the human domain of reason. The animality of the mad is one central image that Foucault (1965) attempted to epitomize. This includes people who are interned:  sexual offenders, serious criminals, and those guilty of religious profanation. And it is because of this that they are marginalized, separated from society, and put in asylum zones (Gutting, 1989, 2005). In all cases, these behaviors represent a violation of bourgeois morality and ethics of work. Gutting sums it up by assuming that the knowledge of the age was not able to cure the mad people (1989, 2005). As an idealist historian, Foucault (1965) established the episteme theory. This term describes the set of cultural and intellectual factors that go into the formulation and acceptance of an abstract concept at a certain moment in time. Donnelly (2012) states that Foucault’s argument is that aspects of culture sometimes change gradually and sometimes in sudden epistemic breaks. Madness is an emblematic instance in this case. Adopting an archeological method and a genealogical design, Foucault (1965) has noticed that madness has always been related to sanity and wisdom in the Greek episteme. It is, therefore, defined at that moment of thinking in the relationship with reason and logos. The recent American history of madness can be approximated in three eras:  the eugenic, the psychodynamic and the neurobiological episteme. In each era, the forms of illness in the air have varied. A history of madness (and its forms) tends to correspond to the history of theories and practices surrounding its treatment. This book does not aim to rewrite that history here, as others have approached the project far more ably than I could (see Hale, Porter, Shorter, Grob, Whitaker). However, it is worth noting that these definitions are scrupulously related to clinical and medical domains engendered by the atrocities of the Great Wars of the 20th century, Nazi Germany, and Freud’s newly emerged science of psychology and the unconscious (Gutting, 1989). This study is not concerned with previous understandings of madness, though they pinpoint significant keys to the historical development of the concept. However, it juxtaposes madness with certain existentialist premises such as: chaos, suffering, failed quest, stillness, intellectual anxiety and alienation. Bellow is not going to be proved existentialist as much as attempting to use Foucault’s (1965) archaeology and genealogies to redefine the concept of madness anew. This can be linked to the earlier attempts to exploit “the fool” as a state of mind in Shakespeare and others. The fool as a dramatic character represents, wisdom, intactness and the inner voice of truth. The book thus

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cuts with medical and clinical definitions of madness, and introduces it as the wisdom of alienated intellectuals in the Bellovian fictional world. In short, madness turns out to be the wisdom of intellectuals who struggle in the quest for truth and values, and showing a high level of consciousness, each seek a path amidst corruption and absurdity. Admitting that Bellow exalts madness, contrary to the Foucauldian fashion, and elevates it to a state of peace and gift, wisdom and high culture, how does this intensify the overconsciousness and the wisdom of his heroes? How and why does it help deconstruct the norms of mass society and low culture? To answer these questions, one should first acknowledge that Bellow belongs to a Western cultural paradigm that acquaints madness with intellectuals and wisdom. Although this tradition has been sketched in Foucault and Derrida, Donnelly, in his Vogue Diagnoses:  The Functions of Madness in Twentieth-​ Century American Literature (2012) states that its roots could be traced back to metaphysics and the Renaissance. Conversely, Foucault and Derrida devoted more attention to the concept of madness in terms of consciousness about truth. On this point, Foucault in his Madness and Civilization states his belief that “madness has been recognized as part of truth” (1965, p. 20). Derrida paradoxically states that it should not belong to that sort of metaphysical truth. According to him, madness is already there, in the origin of geometry (Derrida, 1982), to recall Husserl; in other words, it is a form of knowledge in “the structure of thought,” to borrow Foucault’s term (Foucault, 1973, p. 31). Madness in the Derridean sense begins only with the moment of skepticism about metaphysics, and the decentralization of Enlightenment reason. Foucault (1973) examines the issue of madness from two opposite angles: a) As a phenomenon in history which is related to unreasoned people who are confined, b) As a kind of knowledge to cure unreason in the age of reason. These views find their way in Bellow’s fictional world, which not only shows his awareness of this theoretical edifice but also places him in a position that echoes Derrida’s perpetual equivocation to metaphysical thought. Foucault declares that “unreason becomes the reason of reason … I had been mad enough to study reason, I was reasonable enough to study madness” (1973, p. 55), implying that in order to achieve peace, wisdom and morality one should first experience madness. For his part, Derrida insists that one should question the foundations of metaphysics and subvert them. The purpose of that is to liberate the power of reason from the authority of unreason, the sense of wisdom from the nonsense of madness.

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Modern American narratives represent madness as a retold trauma theory. In her Readings of Trauma and Madness in Hemingway, H.D., and Fitzgerald, Anderson (2010) explores how modernist fiction narratives represent trauma as a sign of madness. She considers first the struggle between the need to speak about one’s trauma and the equally powerful impulse to keep silent. Male representations of trauma differ noticeably from those of women. She reveals social restrictions on both groups, and offers an opportunity to explore the conditions under which characters both suffer trauma and retell it. According to Anderson, madness is another indicator of trauma, and in order to have a better insight into it, she offers an investigation of trauma theory and traces the way it generates madness. In 1896, Sigmund Freud presented “seduction theory” as the cause of hysteria in his female patients. Sexual trauma is posited as the source of his patients’ unusual behavior, including mutism, feelings of being choked, and seizures (Freud, 2003). The details of his theory, oddly, changed over the years, as it is deeply hinged on whether female figures narrate their trauma stories or not. Twentieth-​century feminist critics such as Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous have largely depended on Freud’s “seduction theory,” in which he stated that incest and the rape of young girls should be the cause of their hysteria, to relate trauma findings to madness. Judith Herman (1977) claims that hysterical symptoms could be alleviated when traumatic memories, as well as the intense feelings that accompanied them, are recovered and put into words. Modern American fiction introduces trauma in terms of terrible and painful events that victims cannot understand or incorporate into their normal existence. As Herman suggests, “The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma” (1977, p. 1). Wounded soldiers of the Second World War appear in the literature of this period, and carry with them the memories of their combat experience and the burden of not being able to tell their stories. Colonel Cantwell, in Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees, suffers from the knowledge of his mistakes and injuries as well as the burden of being silent about them. The novel reflects this battle between the two forces of speech and silence. Doolittle’s (1981) narrator in her autobiographical novel HERmione is compelled to speak about her psychological trauma. The novel itself is evidence of the way the protagonist resists revealing the sexual and social pressures she faced during her young adulthood. The heroes in general are intelligent figures who suffer from physical ailments ranging from seizures

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and hallucinations to radical mood swings, and modernist trauma fiction quite often portrays the manifestation of trauma as madness. Madness converges with 19th-​century hysteria and 20th-​century schizophrenia. Schizophrenic literary heroes are commonly regarded as symbols of linguistic, religious and sexual breakdown and rebellion. From the 1930s into the 1960s, through autobiographical narratives, novels, and poems, figures in mental institutions “transform the experiences of shock, psychosurgery, and chemotherapy into symbolic episodes of punishment for intellectual ambition, domestic ambition, domestic defiance, and sexual autonomy” (Showalter, 1985, p. 210). In their Traumatic Pasts:  History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870-​1930, Micale and Lerner reveal trauma and madness in terms of cultural agony. They claim that “historical investigations of trauma must part fundamentally from clinical goals … In the post-​Freudian, post-​Holocaust, post-​Vietnam West, the historical study of trauma enables us to locate, draw forth, and shape into significance the sufferings of modern humanity” (Micale & Lerner, 2001, p. 25). Madness in this way crystallizes the sufferings of the age, or what Farrell calls a “cultural trope” (p. 14). Farrell elaborates saying that trauma is a type of history that interprets the past and claims, “Like other histories, it attempts to square the present with its origins. The past can be personal or collective, recent or remote: an artifact of psychoanalysis or an act of witness; a primordial myth or a use of ancestral spirits to account for misfortune or violation” (1998, p. 14). “Histories, origins, past, collective, misfortune, violation, spirit” overtone the deep connections between trauma in history and literature, writing and memories. Debra Horvitz writes that “individuals internalize the material conditions of their lives, by which I mean their social and economic realities, through symbols, fantasies, and metaphors in order to build a unique and personalized interpretation of the world” (2000, p. 5). Contemporary novelists such as Morrison (1970) and Allison (1990) have largely illustrated this form of theory. They have been eager to attribute trauma narratives to current cultural situations, arguing that postmodernism is a prerequisite for trauma fiction. Vickroy contends that “trauma narratives are personalized responses to this century’s emerging awareness of the catastrophic effects of wars, poverty, colonization, and domestic abuse on the individual psyche” (2000, p. x). She adds that “trauma fiction emerges out of postmodernist fiction and shares its tendency to bring conventional narrative techniques to their limit” (2002, p. 82). Twentieth-​century American literature has engaged with studies of madness which dealt specifically with representations of mental distress rather

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than physical otherness, and examined how madness enables writers to convey certain meanings or produce certain stories. These meanings are infused in minor characters as they stand for the symbol of mental and physical disability. Madness functions as a device for plots, psychological depth (of other characters), and thematic resonance. Donnelly in his Vogue Diagnoses:  The Functions of Madness in Twentieth-​Century American Literature maintains that: Mad protagonists follow particular plot patterns prompted by the temporal, existential, or hermeneutic mystery posed by madness. Male madness narratives often engage with the legitimizing etiology of war, freeing them from the temporal mystery—​“what caused this to happen?”—​and allowing them to address the existential mystery—​ “what is this like?”—​through formal experimentation. Female madness narratives, grappling with a medical discourse that emphasizes endogenous causality for women, retort to such discourse by emphasizing a broader temporal plot. (2012, pp. iv–​v)

Madness narratives generate a particular plot pattern “prompted by the temporal, existential, or hermeneutic mystery posed by madness” (Donnelly, 2012, p. iv). Male heroes date their madness back to the etiology war and the atrocities of the age. The reason of their mental disability is always explained by the radical changes that have occurred in the 20th century, and it is because of this that they amalgamate the fictional and the historical, the real and the imaginary, the literary and the philosophical in telling their stories. Female protagonists explain their madness by deploying a medical discourse “that emphasizes endogenous causality for women,” and “female madness narratives show that subjective experience exists within a social, as well as a biological, framework.” In their stories, they use memory and metaphor in many ways to convey “recalcitrant experiences of distress not only engages with existential and hermeneutic mystery…, but suggests a way forward for intersubjective understanding that sympathizes without co-​opting, allowing for meaningful communication and political action across differences” (Donnelly, 2012, p. v). Twentieth-​century American madness studies have also addressed mental illness and disorder. They have investigated other different minds rather than other bodies. “Historically, madness looks like the discolored and savage face and clothed hyena figure. Or it looks like the eyes of Septimus Smith, with their look of apprehension in them which makes complete strangers apprehensive too” (Donnelly, 2012, p. 3). The specific indicators of physique, demeanor, or décor may change over time, having their own vogues, but one persists in believing in the ability to identify madness based on such visual clues. However, in the American context madness has always been identified

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with the eccentricities and the deviances of minds that emphasize unpredictability, invisibility and the disability of any powerless other. As a category of otherness, Donnelly argues that madness expresses disability felt as a threat to the social order. He says, “[madness] suggests that the cultural other lies dormant within the cultural self, threatening abrupt or gradual transformation from ‘man’ to ‘invalid’. The disabled figure is the stranger in our midst, within the family and potentially within the self” (2012, p. 9). Couser (1989) identifies three models for the narrative representation of madness:  the symbolic, the medical, and the social/​cultural/​political. With regard to the symbolic model “disability is a sign of a moral condition or divine disfavor;” in the medical model it is “a defect or deficit in the individual body that medicine attempts to fix or compensate for;” and in the social/​political/​ cultural model, “disability needs to be addressed not in the individual body but in the body politic, which may require rehabilitation in the form of legislation, modification of the physical environment, and so on, to ensure equality of access and opportunity” (Couser, 2009, p. 112). The medical model most presents itself as interested in objectivity. The symbolic model is widely present in literature; it is the most attached to metaphor and the least attached to neutrality. David Mitchell maintains that it is “a master metaphor for social ills,” and that “metaphors of disability serve to extrapolate the meaning of a bodily flaw into cosmological significance” (Mitchell & Snyder, 2000, p. 25). The social/​political/​cultural model of madness is more complicated as it is related to forms and epistemes of knowledge. The mad minor character is very significant in the symbolic and the social/​ cultural/​political models of madness. Narratologists such as Alex Woloch associate the importance of the mad minor character with the idea of narrative helpers in the process of storytelling. Woloch refers to Greimas’s actantial model, in which narratives are structured as “a network of relations between actants” (Greimas, 1971, p. 799). Actants interact with each other in certain prescribed functions, thus moving the narrative forward. A minor woman character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night in a psychiatric clinic tells her doctor, “I am here as a symbol of something. I thought perhaps you would know what it was” (p. 185). She helps the process of the development of storytelling. Woloch reveals in his study on minor characters, The One Vs. the Many, three major functions for the actants:  a plot-​helper, “who facilitates external developments within the story itself;” a psychological-​helper, “who more directly helps to elaborate the protagonist’s interiority within the story, often as a friend, interlocutor, or confidante;” or a thematic-​helper “who

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functions within the overall semantic field of the narrative discourse, as this discourse elaborates the symbolic identity (and centrality) of the protagonist” (2003, p. 92). Woloch further explains the manifestations of the minor character in terms of worker and eccentric, one engulfed and the other threatening to explode. He says: The flat character who is reduced to a single functional use within the narrative, and the fragmentary character who plays a disruptive, oppositional role in the plot… [who] grates against his or her position and is usually, as a consequence, wounded, exiled, expelled, ejected, imprisoned, or killed (within the discourse, if not the story). In both cases, the free relationship between surface and depth is negated; the actualization of a human being is denied. (2003, p. 25)

The flat character and the fragmentary character are consequently in service of the protagonists. Woloch continues, “Secondary characters representing delimited extremes become allegorical, and this allegory is directed toward a singular being, the protagonist, who stands at the center of the text’s symbolic structure” (2003, p. 18). The protagonists are central, while the mad minor characters are peripheral; they are plot helpers who contribute to the development of the work’s psychology and theme. Donnelly interestingly sketches the function of plot helpers: When mad minor characters serve to facilitate external story developments they tend to be metaphorically allied with a sense or fear of something unknown. Existing solely to move the plot along, these mad-​people are the most subsumed in their functionality, the least likely type of helper to gesture beyond the symbolic model. Instead, their role is to expose or be exposed. Mad plot helpers tend to either keep secrets or be secrets. When madness is engaged with the plot in a peripheral sense (that is, when it is not the central narrative concern in a work of fiction), it leads in the direction of finding or revealing something fearful. (2012, p. 35)

Researchers such as W. E. B Du Bois, Hilda. Doolittle and Julia. Eichelberger have associated madness in contemporary American African literature with resistance to all forms of conformity and despotism. They admit that madness reflects an inability, social or biological, to cope with the pressures of white modern life. Conformity and despotism are generally identified through white supremacy as well as the anxiety of modern life. In this context, the example of Morrison (1970) in her The Bluest Eye has portrayed black madness as scrupulously related to black resistance in the middle of the 20th century. The main characters in the novel, Pecola, Cholly and Pauline Breedlove, and Frieda and Claudia MacTeer, depict the two conflicting black and white

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worlds. The novel tells the story of indifference and anxiety these characters go through in a largely white world. Morrison also discusses the way madness and blackness are intertwined in America’s context. She firmly maintains that the literature of madness gives voice to those for whom speech is evasive. It provides a means to enable the subversion and deconstruction of white authority and oppression. Its not simply that human life originated in Africa in anthropological terms, but that modern life begins with slavery…These things had to be addressed by black people a long time ago. Certain kinds of madness, deliberately going mad in order, as one of the characters says in the book [Beloved] “… not to lose your mind.” These strategies for survival made the truly modern person. They‘re a response to predatory western phenomena…Slavery broke the world in half; it broke it in every way. It broke Europe. It made them into something else, it made them slave masters, it made them crazy…They had to dehumanize, not just the slaves but themselves, they have had to reconstruct everything in order to make that system appear true…Racism is the word that we use to encompass all this. The idea of scientific racism suggests some serious pathology. (Morrison, 1970, p. 37)

In America, modern life marks the beginning of madness, and significantly associates it with slavery and oppression. Morrison (1970) shows in her novels the way whites break the world, make slaves, and not only dehumanize them, but also dehumanize themselves. More interestingly, blacks, Morrison informs the reader, deliberately go out of their minds in order to survive in a context of white supremacy and domination. This strategy of survival epitomizes the modern person, and provides a response to “predatory western phenomena.” This racist system generates and aggravates black madness in modern America. In Invisible Man, Ellison (1959) crystallizes black madness in terms of schizophrenia. The issue of identity reverberates throughout the whole novel, while the protagonist is consistently being rocked by physical forces which coincide with psychological stressors. The Golden Day, the place where most of the events take place in the novel, represents a place of confronting identities. Although the name of the space hints at heaven and the promise of salvation, it is ironically rather a house of ill repute. “A gambling and whorehouse, it is full this day of cast-​aside members of society, individuals dismissed as irrelevant because of their psychic handicaps and damaged minds” (King, 2007, p. 51). The patients who patronize this space are participants in a bizarre psychoanalytic drama acted out within its walls; once a church, then a bank, later a restaurant, a fancy gambling house, and a jailhouse, it is now just

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a place to entertain the leavings of society. The Golden Day, Ellison maintains, serves as a place for metaphoric resistance against the usual oppression of a society dominated by the whites. Blacks express chaos and madness, and in that expression “exists an understandable reaction to the physical/​psychic oppression they have suffered; first as veterans of a war for democracy that offered them none in return, and, later as the detritus of a dominant society, represented by Mr. Norton, that diagnoses them as insane, deems them unusable and enforces their confinement through its control of the muscle and intimidation of their attendant, Supercargo” (Ellison, 1959, p. 52). In his The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois (1995) associates black madness with double consciousness at the nadir. Double consciousness, Du Bois admits, is the consciousness of the tragedy of black America in the white context. In fact, Black America has never been without rational skills or the ability to apply them; rather, it was limited and curtailed by plantation law and later black codes so that the irrationality of dominant culture structures and systems would not be found out. Black people thought too much about issues that could not be successfully untangled via rational thought because they were not rational issues. Double consciousness then is an example of thinking too much. This is consistently used as a bridge between the oppressed and the oppressor. It helps facilitate the dialogue between blacks and whites, and reduce the ideological, social, sexual, racial and political gaps between them. It helps the marginalized and excluded blacks to feel some connection, to become a part of the group and to belong to a multi-​cultural world dominated by the hegemony of the white (1978), “Double Consciousness today,” King affirms, “makes possible the inclusion of the oppressors with the oppressed, the ones marking margins with the marginalized; blurring lines of difference and distinction by negating any uniqueness of experience through the process of legitimizing any opinion; any position, by means of one of the great tools of the postmodern era, relativism” (2007, p. 75). Jones’s (1986) novel, Corregidora, serves to mark the ability to fold together forms of discourse that share black experience as preoccupied by sexuality and the development of an all inclusive language of black madness. The novel begins with the accident of the protagonist, Ursa, being pushed. Her fall results in her having womb removed, something disturbing for any woman, but of special concern for Ursa; first, because she was one month pregnant, and second because as one of the Corregidora women, she cannot “make generations.” Here starts the metaphorical story of exterminating the generations

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of blacks, the experience of black sexuality as well as the inclusive discourse of black madness. Ursa is the granddaughter of Simone Corregidora, a Portuguese seaman, who was responsible not only for the slaves, but also for the next generations of Corregidora women and children, his children, who he created by raping successive generations on his plantation, beginning with Ursa’s great grandmother. The reader gathers this information through Ursa’s memories which represent a living hunting burden that marks the family’s slave past. Corregidora is the root cause of the ladies madness and bad memories. He is responsible for Ursa’s instability with her husband, Mutt, which results in the removal of her womb. At the beginning, Mutt is upset with his wife as she continues to sing in a nightclub. He cannot understand her need to forget the bad memories of her sexual abuse by Corregidora, while she admits that she has to do it to overcome the madness and delirious memories generated by the horrors of sexual slavery. All records of births and deaths are burnt by Corregidora, in an attempt to cover his crimes of lust, but the story remains within the Corregidora women who are compelled to share it with each other because they have no other memories between them. With this remembered discourse and the myriad emotions and trauma that accompany such thoughts, madness develops, and the victims, basically women, are compelled to hold on to a memory and a practice of procreation that is at its core corrupting and dehumanizing. Relating their stories to each other, the surviving women are able to show their past of sexual and psychological submission. They have depicted the way sexual slavery and unrelenting abuse serve to blunt their sexual appetites and retard their normal desires for intimacy. This, in short, aggravates black madness. Ferit Guven (1999) has associated madness with death and philosophy. In fact, the question of madness is intimately related to the death of philosophy rather than being a simple topic of philosophical interest. As a result, the question of madness turns out to be a question of ethics. In both Derrida and Foucault, one observes that the problem of ethics has been deeply negotiated. Guven states that, “madness raises the ethical question in terms of the interaction between the rational person and the mad one. In this sense madness is an instance that represents a more general structure of the relationship between the Same and the Other” (1999, p. 277). The relationship between the mad and the rational introduces madness as a tendency that needs to be understood within a specific historical and cultural discourse.

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Derrida and Foucault crystalize madness as the possibility of ethics. As a matter of fact, madness epitomizes not only the ethical relationship between the same and the other, but also draws a relationship between peoples who have nothing in common. The mad man, to Derrida and Foucault, cannot be cured according to the standards established on the side of rationality, but demands the deconstruction of these standards and risks one’s rationality. This “seems to be the only way to displace the colonial element in Western philosophical thinking, which already assimilates the voice of the Other in advance, rather than being open to this voice” (Guven, 1999, p. 272). According to Foucault, madness manifests itself in history and through its epistemic caesuras. Mad figures are excluded when it is compared to the domination of the rational subject along with its philosophical discourse. For Derrida, madness conveys the exclusion of the Western logos itself. “To attribute the exclusion of the other to a specific period in history is to affirm the fundamental operation of the metaphysics of presence” (Guven, 1999, p. 273). The power of Western metaphysical thinking is not only that of exclusion, but also that of colonization. It is colonization of the self, the subject, the human thinking, and the metaphysics of presence. Madness is not excluded from metaphysics by silencing it, but rather by categorizing it with the voice of rationality. Derrida, in short, admits that this is “a structural necessity for rationality to constitute itself historically” (p. 273). Plato associates philosophy with madness and death. In fact, madness is an activity of philosophical thinking. This activity negates death. In his Phaedo and Phaedrus, madness and death are possibly meant to convey the deconstructive function of philosophy. While philosophy is all about life, happiness as well as rationality in a certain way, madness and death are to provide the background to this thinking, and legitimize the philosophical activity. In short, madness and death ground philosophy and philosophical activity. Hegel introduces a similar view. He includes and excludes madness and death in philosophy. They are both in the domain of dialectical thinking and they are out of it. Madness, according to Hegel, is interpreted in its relationship with the question of truth. The concept of truth stands for a content of negativity, which is always understood cognitively. This means that philosophy is in the final analysis of the question of knowing, of consciousness and of conceptual thinking. “Hegel understands madness and death from the perspective of philosophical (or systematic) knowing” (Guven, 1999, p. 275). Guven demonstrates that such an understanding is the result of a certain shape of Hegel’s dialectical thinking. In terms of this movement, Hegel understands

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the structure of thinking, reality and time. “Time in which thinking takes place is not a physical or objective time, but it nevertheless has a certain structure. It proceeds through the completion of the previous moment where this moment is not left behind, but preserved by being negated as a content of the next moment” (Guven, 1999, p. 275). In short, madness is necessary as an access to the suprasensuous world, and to the next stage of thinking. Thus, Hegel understands madness on the basis of the question of truth and error, albeit in different ways from Plato. Heidegger associates madness and death with the negation of the present. In fact, he assumes that madness has to be understood in the context of the role of negativity in his thinking. Guven maintains that In the context of Being and Time, death, or more specifically being-​toward-​death, in its relation to conscience, “represents” negativity. After Being and Time, Heidegger continues with his attempt to think the finitude of being, which is a negativity in and of being, a concealment in unconcealment, an absencing in presencing, an Enteignis in Ereignis. (1999, p. 88)

Being is in a constant confrontation with negativity. The movement into death is movement into madness and nothingness. This nothingness articulates the negativity of the present and the nihilism in philosophy. In Being and Time, this confrontation is reflected in terms of attunement and mood. Later in his career, Heidegger also characterized this confrontation in terms of madness (Wahnsinn, Verrücktheit). With this thought, Heidegger deracinates a traditional way of understanding madness by negotiating the concepts of truth and error. Throughout Western civilization, madness has been regarded to convey two paradoxical responses: one of a blessing and another of a curse. In ancient Greek philosophy and literature, Plato provided perhaps the best description of blessed mad poets: For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed. And as the Corybantian revellers when they dance are not in their right mind, so the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are composing their beautiful strains: but when falling under the power of music and metre they are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens when they draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysus but not when they are in their right mind. And the soul of the lyric poet does the same as they themselves say; for they tell us that they bring songs from honeyed fountains, culling them out of the gardens and dells of the Muses… For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired

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and is out of his senses, and reason is no longer in him: no man, while he retains that faculty, has the oracular gift of poetry. (Plato, 1953, pp. 107–​108)

This understanding of madness, as Plato tried to show us, finds its better way in Greek and Roman literature. In his Madness in Ancient Literature, Ainsworth O’ Brien-​Moore admits that Homer sets the structure of madness, while later writers change its function. To Homer, “madness is a sickness, sent, like other sicknesses, by an angry Olympian, cured by the appeasing of the sender or by the aid of another god” (1924, p. 72). Madness, accordingly, is a visitation sent by certain gods to convey punishment as well as insight. Homer mentions that madness “is caused by the gods, but with a purpose, which could be called broadly moral: that is, to enforce their will, which is usually considered in itself a moral end, to punish insolence against themselves, to punish wrong doing of men against men, or, in the case of mantic possession, generally considered a madness, to reveal their minds through prophecy” (O’Brien-​Moore, 1924, p. 73). It is essential to bear in mind that classical madness can generate morality and hope as well as pain and suffering. In English literature, King Lear gets insights from his madness only after he has suffered from it first. Blessing and curse or what one may call punishment and enlightenment are inherent in Lear’s experience. He deeply understands his tragedy only by the end of the play when he values the sacrifice of his daughter Cordelia more. Shakespeare’s tragedies, as well as those of his contemporaries and successors, mark the end of the classical madness that revolves around blessing and curse, punishment and insight. The 17th and 18th centuries mark a radical change in the understanding of madness. It is no longer the manifestation of a divine visitation, but a secular disease. Punishment and insight motifs are no longer apparent in literary works or in society. Madness is no longer a way to truth and morality, but a way into error and disease. With the Industrial Revolution and the major scientific inventions, the reasons for madness become tangible and apparent. They are no longer explained by metaphysical, divine and supernatural forces, but by certain economic, political and scientific factors. Scientific skepticism has made Man responsible for his own madness. However, men of the age of reason do not want to accept being mad and being seen as such by other members of society. Their obsessive fear of madness has become a fear of what they can do and become. Hence, although they cannot negate their own internal fear and push it away, they throw madmen out of society. With this line of

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argument, men of reason degrade and marginalize madmen, and treat them like animals. As a matter of fact, madmen found themselves in the hands of doctors whose knowledge about mental and physical madness amounted to nothing. Vagabonds, the poor, the unemployed and the mad were equally seen as responsible for their actions. Society rejected them, and did not recognize them as a social category that needed special care and treatment. Doctors tried medical treatments, but obviously the chances of curing those who were mentally disturbed to such treatments were not good. The alternative cure was confinement which meant control. Fear and punishment were also other treatments to subdue the unruly lunatic. Hospitals devoted to the care of the insane opened in 1770 in England for a few pennies every Sunday afternoon. The conditions were filthy and unhealthy, while the treatment was cruel and inhumane. During this era, madness in literature was deployed metaphorically. It was meant to convey darkness, squalor, idleness, excrement, bestiality and disorder. The image of madness was used to attack corrupt political leaders rather than insanity itself or insane people. Michael Arthur Shimer envisions this claim: In Pope’s satire of human error, two major figures embody willful folly: the religious enthusiast and the poet. Both have turned their backs on reason, and both have indulged their imaginations so long that they become swept up in their own delusions. Their folly has resulted in madness, but their madness brings no enlightenment. (1983, p. 11)

This madness challenges classical madness, which stresses punishment and insight. Jonathan Swift aggravates darkness and pessimism in the way he uses madness to attack supposedly sane people. In this line of thought, Swift’s version of madness makes it not only a simple metaphor for folly, but a mirror for our own sad, vicious, inescapable irrationality. In the middle of the 18th century, melancholy and sublimity helped foster a positive attitude toward madness. Byrd writes that we can see how the new age came to create literature deliberately out of the irrational parts of the human self that the Augustans had regarded as anarchic and insane, for melancholy and sublimity are two openly irrational experiences that transform men (temporarily) into good likenesses of madmen. (1974, p. 116)

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Melancholy was traditionally seen as the first stage of madness. British Romantic poets started to refer to melancholy as a strangely pleasurable motif, and turned it into a source of inspiration and an exciting new subject for verse. The Sublime “was a name given to almost any transcendent experience, any sight or sound that overwhelmed the spectator or gave, in Edmund Burke’s definition, a feeling of terror without real danger” (p. 136). The experience of sublimity is compared to a flight of madness and imagination which makes one lose control over his rationality. Outer contexts of nature and scenes of romance drive out innate powers of the human mind and trigger subliminal visions and feelings about the self and the world. In the second half of the 18th century, many poets were grievously affected by madness. For instance, Collins, Smart, Cowper, Blake, Chatterton, and Burns were all mad to one degree or another. In their poetry, autonomous voices appear to speak instead of the poets and require a dérèglement de tous les sens. By the end of the 18th century, attitudes toward mental disorder and madness changed. Many establishments were erected for the insane in different cities in England. In 1751, St. Luke’s Hospital was founded in London, Manchester Lunatic Hospital in Manchester in 1763, and finally the Retreat near York was founded by a small group of the Society of Friends (Quakers) in 1792. These establishments played a prominent role in establishing a new order concerning madness at the beginning of the 19th century. The 19th century was characterized by moral and physical madness. It was deeply believed by doctors that no one can escape the tyranny of his age or his physical shape with regard to whether men are responsible for their madness or not. The fundamental philosophical question lurking behind the importance of madness was: does a man go mad because he wills it, or because he physically cannot help it? The answer was mostly attributed to the rapid changes in civilization, industrialization, urbanization, crowding, alienation, sanitation and crime. These aspects of modern life as well as the luxury that civilization brought to England, invite excess, and excess itself summons insanity. In 1828, George Man Burrows explained the historical and political factors behind the overspread of madness: Insanity bears always a striking relation to public events. Great political or civil revolutions in state are always productive of great enthusiasm in the people, and correspondent vicissitudes in their moral condition; and as all extremes in society are exciting causes, it will occur, that in proportion as the feelings are acted upon, so will insanity be more or less frequent. (p. 38)

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In line with this thinking, most Englishmen who lived during this era considered the French Revolution a collective madness. Power fell into the hands of the angry mob, and the English considered it a direct threat to their collective peace and unity. The spirit of the French Revolution indirectly helped the English deeply examine the roots of madness and find out new moral ways to cure it. Concurrently, the individual insane was thought to have the moral and physical capacities to face their insanity. Additionally, it was equally thought that the mentally disordered person needed help to attain such self-​sufficiency and strength, and it is here that the role of the doctor, who should play an important and constructive part in the recovery of the patient, comes in. Literary views with regard to madness can be seen in the attitudes of Charles Lamb and Thomas Macaulay. In fact, they make the observation that madness does not make a poet, and that the poet is not necessarily different from ordinary people because he suffers from a mental illness. The point behind this is that we are all mad and different in a certain way. What makes the poet unique is the healthy use to which he puts his neurosis: the way he recognizes it, shapes it, and presents it in the form of art for the edification, or healing, of his fellow man (Shimer, 1983, pp. 46–​47). Lamb was the first who discussed the possible connection between madness, poetic creativity and imagination. He concedes that the creative and imaginative manifestations in any poetical work are the results of certain mental experiences which the poet has undergone. The dreams of the poet, the fables of the mythologist, and the fiction of the romancer may all be seen as features of the imagination of the artist. It is not very clear that poetic or imaginative writing involves a species of madness, but the implication is patently there. In his “Sanity of True Genius,” though he admits a certain unconscious and hidden connection between madness and imagination. Lamb refutes the fact that the exercise of imagination is insanity itself, or in other words, that poetic genius is allied with madness. In Shimer’s terms, Lamb stressed two facts: a) “the true or great poet is not mad, and b) the inspired imagination, which the layman often sees as madness, is actually a healthy mental activity that leads to a total and harmonious vision of reality” (1983, p. 49). Being ashamed of the overly simplistic nature of Milton, Macaulay redefined poetry and the poetic genius in relationship with madness. He singles out that, “perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind” (1879, pp. 4–​7). While Lamb exemplifies the Romantic spirit in many ways, Macaulay shows a completely paradoxical viewpoint. He believes that the writing and the reading of poetry, is in some

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sense a mental aberration. Macaulay defines poetry as the art of employing words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination. Truth, which is that of madness and of imagination, is essential to poetry. Macaulay did not intend to undermine Milton’s poetry, nor did he think to belittle the thoughts of the poet in the age of reason. However, he showed a different reading to the poetry of his age. In the age of reason, which he firmly admitted Victorian England to be, “there will be much intelligence, much science, much philosophy, abundance of just classification and subtle analysis, abundance of wit and eloquence, abundance of verses, and even of good ones; but little poetry” (1879, p. 7). He believed that poetry is most needed in the age of science and reason. In his view, poetry equals the supernatural, the irrational, the fantasy and the imagination of madness, while science equals the rational and the sane; therefore, the more science progresses, the more poetry will be needed. Taken together, Lamb and Macaulay develop a theory of madness in 19th-​ century English poetry. They ascribe it to the shift from optimism to pessimism about the way we control our powers. Early in the century, it was believed that madness was an act of will that could be cured by will, but later, in the second half of the century, it was thought that madness was something beyond our control, a metaphor that stands for incompleteness, fall and destruction. The sublime was related to the first part of the century and specifically to the early Romantic period, while the grotesque was associated with the second half of the century namely the Victorian period. Shimer associates madness with the sublime and grotesque as follows: Sublime is the poet’s use of the convention of madness to gain access to a vision of a whole and harmonious creation, like that Ruskin credits to the imagination when the wax is smooth and the strings true; grotesque is the poet’s use of the convention of madness to express a view of the world as chaotic, malevolent, and fragmented, as when the strings are strained and broken. The sublime leads to a state of ecstasy, the grotesque most often to disillusionment and depression. (1983, p. 58)

Bellow illustrates this reflection on madness in 20th-​century American literature. He fundamentally agrees with the conclusion that poetry and art in general decline as civilization develops. Interestingly enough, he maintains that as capitalism, industrialism, materialism, low culture and the masses dominate the modern cultural scene, this signifies the decline of values and ethics, the alienation of intellectuals, the impoverishment, not improvement, of civilization, its deepening sickness, not health. Bellow attributes unsoundness to

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modern American society as industrialization, urbanization and technological inventions determine its feelings and attitudes and help destroy religious faith, the sense of values, and the meaning of life itself, which Americans had hitherto accepted without question. Madness in Caribbean Anglophone literature written between 1959 and 1980 has been associated with independence and postcolonial subject formation. In his Defining Madnesses:  Representations of Insanity in Anglophone Caribbean Literature, Killy Baker Josephs (2006) argues that the theme of madness whether central, as in Jean Rhys, Derek Walcott and Erna Brodber, or seemingly supplemental, as in V.S. Naipaul and Sylvia Wynter permeates fiction from the Caribbean and provides a critique of the social and political conditions of colonization and postcolonial independence. Josephs writes that Caribbean writers were especially concerned with representing “the social and economic deprivation of the majority; the pervasive consciousness of race and color; the cynicism and uncertainty of the native bourgeoisie in power after independence; the lack of a history to be proud of; and the absence of traditional or settled values” (2006, p. 4). The interest of Caribbean writers in the second half of the 20th century focused on the social and economic deprivation of the majority, the marginalization of certain social classes, the emergence of the bourgeoisie after independence, race, the lack of identity and history to be proud of, and the absence of ethical norms that guided the newly independent societies. These interests summon the themes of madness and alienation. “During these politically turbulent years in the Anglophone Caribbean, writers in the region consciously attempted to make their literary tradition as independent from British literature as they hoped to be from England. One of the distinguishing features of this literature became the ubiquity of madmen and madwomen” (Josephs, 2006, p. 3). Subject formation ontology becomes an unfinished process, and writers depict the chaos of the moment and the challenges awaiting for their newly born nations in various forms. V.S. Naipaul perhaps provides a good example when his narrator protagonist, Ralph, accurately describes the ills of the moment: Given our situation, anarchy was endless, unless we acted right away. But on power and the consolidation of passing power we wasted our energies, until the bigger truth came: that in a society like ours, fragmented, inorganic, no link between man and the landscape, a society not held together by common interests, there was no true internal source of power, and that no power was real which did not come from the

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outside. Such was the controlled chaos we had, with such enthusiasm, brought upon ourselves. (1967, p. 206)

Anarchy is endless, everywhere, and no one can control anything. The protagonist admits that they are wasting their energies because there is no effective government or nation. Society cannot identify itself with its landscape; it is lost, fragmented, “not held together by common interests.” More sarcastically, Ralph admits that there is no identity, nor is there any spirit, any “internal source of power,” to unify the newly independent society. Josephs says, “Ralph describes the disparity as a ‘vision of hysteria’ and utilizes several terms of madness throughout his narrative” (2006, p. 7). The connections between mental disorder and the disorder surrounding the process of independence make the literature of that time use madness in literary critiques of colonialism and the project of nation-​making. Caribbean writers have sketched characters whose mental state is often, and for deeply complex reasons, just the wrong side of a thin dividing line from ‘normality’. As argued in the previous sections of this chapter, although the concept of madness has been addressed from historical, psychological, ontological, economic and political perspectives, such expositions remain unsatisfactory because they have failed to address the concept of madness in its relationship with subversion, intellectualism and wisdom. For instance, Foucault (1973) has exerted painstaking efforts to show the relationship between the economic developments in the 18th and 19th centuries, the marginalization of certain social categories and the response of medical treatments to such a condition. He has emphasized social, economic and medical factors to pinpoint the development of the concept of madness without referring to any literary work. Foucault’s insights remain limited to historical facts, and he was blind to applying them to literature and philosophy. His studies with regard to madness were more attached to sociology and science than to literature and philosophy, and, more significantly, though he was contemporaneous to Bellow, he failed to see his findings were related to Bellow’s later novels. Anderson’s (1998) reflections about madness as a retold trauma theory do not take account of the intellectual aspects of madness, nor does she focus on the deep ties between madness, subversion and deconstruction. Her analysis of 20th-​century American fiction proves trauma to be fundamental sign of madness. War atrocities, as fictionalized by American novelists, result in hysteria and schizophrenia. She has related the context of the modern era to modern American literature and concluded that madness is deeply associated

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with existential and psychological issues. However, much of her research up to now has been descriptive in nature and historical in design and the generalizability of her research on this issue is problematic. Her investigations have been mostly restricted to certain novelists and certain understandings to the concept of madness. Unlike Foucault, although she paves the way to addressing madness in a relationship with literature, still she also failed to see the manifestations of this concept in Bellow’s world of fiction. She rarely refers to him, and hardly makes the connection between madness, subversion and deconstruction. Taylor Donnelly’s “The Functions of Madness in Twentieth-​ Century American Literature,” (2012) attempted to trace the fictional techniques deployed by 20th-​century American novelists in dealing with the theme of madness, but it remains attached to psychoanalytical and historical views about madness. In his diagnosis to the concept, Donnelly deeply rested on Freud’s psychoanalysis and the process of telling stories. The manifestations of the madness of the heroes as well as the minor hero helpers can be seen, therefore, while telling their stories. However, the main failure of this study lies in its inability to address Bellow’s fictional world within this scope of its research. Donnelly remains blind to the promising insights that can be achieved by analyzing the theme of madness in Bellow’s later novels. Another weakness of Donnelly’s research exists in his focus on the medical, social and cultural aspects of madness without paying any attention to its symbolical, subversive and intellectual dimensions. Donnelly does not engage with the contemporary and current discourses of deconstruction that might possibly help unveil the blind spots behind the previously mentioned dimensions. And although it can be said he was the first who diagnosed the functions of madness; yet, it is remarkably clear that his research has undeliberately missed analyzing fundamental texts in American fiction as he makes no attempt to systematically review all the relevant literature as well as its contemporaneous theory, namely deconstructionism. Black madness, as studied by James Sterling King, has not contributed that much to highlighting the subversive and intellectual dimensions of madness. While King has focused on black American novelists, which is understandable for the methodology of his research, like W. E. B. Du Bois, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Gayl Jones, among others, he unexpectedly missed referring to Bellow’s insights in this regard. Additionally, King associates black madness with oppression and resistance. He thereby aggravates the political dimension of madness and fails to relate that to any

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theoretical platform. King has exerted painstaking efforts in looking for the manifestations of black madness in a society dominated by the hegemony and oppression of the whites without paying any attention to Foucault’s epistemic views with regard to the structure of thinking or Derrida’s premises of deconstructionism. Had he done that, he could have found clues to relate him to the Bellovian fictional world and, more interestingly, he could have approached his research in line with Bellow’s insights of madness in his later novels. In this work, madness as a concept is associated with subversion and intellectualism as fundamental themes of Bellow’s later novels. Strikingly, subversion is deployed interchangeably with the concept of deconstruction. It is not a separate theme in the research. In other words, deconstruction in theory is equated with subversion in text. Intellectualism, as shall be seen in the second part of this chapter, is related to the heroes’ overconsciousness about themselves and the world. Madness shall be understood as overconsciousness. It is not about social conflicts, nor is it a psychological or a pathological state of mind of the heroes. It is the wisdom of intellectuals in modern capitalistic America. Critics have commonly assumed that Bellow’s fictional world is scrupulously qualified by the themes of humanism and morality. Much of his writings, in this way, convey humanistic and moral issues which are related to humanity in general and the modern American figure in particular. For instance, Johnson, who was apparently the first to use the term humanism with regard to Bellow’s later writings, proposes that one needs to start thinking of Bellow as a “humanist reformer” (1982, p. 134). Glickman takes the idea further to suggest that Bellow’s takes on “the issues of man’s place in nature and society, the character of the [humanist] quest, the function of evil, and the roles of will and intellect make [him]… the Blake and Wordsworth of modern American letters” (p. 222). Admitting that Bellow’s defense of Man has been made in the confluence of three main streams (the Enlightenment experience, the Jewish experience and the American experience) Clayton proffers: … Bellow’s fiction in general is moral; it is not concerned with style … nor even with psychological revelation; it considers such moral-​metaphysical problems as the demarcation of human responsibility … it believes in man and in the potentiality of holiness and joy within the common life, the possibility of meaningful existence. (1979, p. 38)

These concerns are encompassed in the novelist’s preoccupation with the aspects of human experience and the qualities of human personality that lie

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beyond the subject of modernity. Bellow proposes that one should only act according to the truth of the heart and the benefit of community. Strikingly enough, Bellow fictionally discusses the themes of humanism and morality as philosophical issues. In his essays, he clearly referred to ancient and modern philosophy because they largely understood morality as human flourishing. Not surprisingly, then, Hume (1978) regards humanism as an activity in accordance with the best virtue: morality. In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel associates it with the absolute sense of unity/​knowing “spirit, reason, insight, faith, mind, God, conscience, consciousness, being at home and moral satisfaction …” (1977b, p. 45). In Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and the Principles of Morals, Hume (1978) again asserts that humanism is the passion that generates human activities and regulates moral ends. Being an influential example in this respect, Kant (1987) grants in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals that humanism is a moral end that all human beings seek to achieve. Viewing morality as a constraint on the pursuit of a happy life, he categorizes humanism in accordance with moral norms, categorical imperatives, good intentions and common wealth. In late modernity and the beginning of the era of modernism, happiness stood for temporary euphoria, mindless contentment, a warm glow, or pleasure without worry. By common opinion now, one can be happy for a few moments, then unhappy, then happy again, and so on. In Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision, Fuchs examines the novelist’s concern with humanism and morality by tracing the influence of writers like Joyce, Blake, Keats, Rousseau, Goethe, Dostoevsky, and the Jewish moralist writers on Bellow. He claims that “the central thrust of Bellow’s fiction is to deny immoralism … to make art possible for life, [to] present the growth of an inward moral necessity of man alone, but still definitely there and responsible for his being” (1984, p. 23). A large and growing body of literature such as Hassan (1973), Irving (1976), Oil (2015) has investigated the theme of faith as humanism in Bellow’s fictional world. For instance, Clayton (1979) strikingly admits that the happiness of Mankind is hinged on the presence of God, the maker of the universal law, and the reason of Man who is going to rationalize this faith. Reading Bellow’s later novels, he elaborates on this, quoting the English Philosopher John Locke: To establish morality therefore upon its proper basis and such foundations as may carry an obligation with them we must first prove a law which always supposes a law-​maker, one that has superiority and right to ordain and also a power to reward

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and punish according to the tenor of the law established by him. This sovereign law-​ maker who has set rules and bounds to the actions of men is God, their Maker, whose existence we have already proved. (Locke, 2002, p. 154)

Morality’s establishment depends on the law and the lawmaker. The law is religion which demands faith. The lawmaker is God himself. This God has the superiority, right, and power to “reward and punish according to the tenor of [his] law.” Man’s reason rationalizes faith and belief in God in order to be rewarded. Morality and humanism are hinged on this juxtaposition between reason and faith. This was considered in the Enlightenment as a natural law (Kant, 1987). Hume admits this thinking, though he acknowledges the primacy of passion over reason. He supports this argument by admitting that morality is created by God’s command, and therefore, there is no morality without obedience to its creator (Hume, 1978). Accordingly, “reason can only be the slave of passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” (Hume, 1978, p. 20). The impulse of human action does not rise from reason, but it is directed by it. Kant repeatedly emphasizes that one should act in accordance with moral ends and rational means. This “presupposes that the several formulas of the Categorical Imperative are morally fundamental, that rationality is not exclusively instrumental, and that moral agents are to be seen as legislators of moral laws as well as subject to them” (Kant, 1987, p. 7). Derrida (1990) posits the idea anew by introducing the metaphor of the book of God. He quotes a saying of Jasper (1989): “the world is the handwriting of another, never fully legible world.” This book, which is written in God’s handwriting, never existed. There are only traces of it which Derrida calls “the book of reason … [since] God is said to have given us the use of this pen” (1990, p. 10). This has been fictionally portrayed by Ravelstein, a professor of history and philosophy, who reflects on “antiquity, Machiavelli, Hobbes, the Enlightenment, and then by way of Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau onward to Nietzsche, Heidegger to the present moment, to corporate high tech America, its culture … its politics” (2000, p. 46). Conversely, the masses believe that in the modern age “no real education was possible in the [Western] universities except for aeronautical engineers, computerists, biology, physical science and the like” (Bellow, 2000, p. 47), and that God has already been decentralized, dehumanized and finally rejected from the focus of the intellectual circles. Ravelstein assuredly declares that in this somber age it is the duty of the intellectuals to guard Man’s essence, that happiness is still required, and that faith is again brought in to do the job. Moreover, The Adventures of

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Augie March represents another significant instance concerning the awareness of the scrupulous connections between faith and humanism. In fact, Daniel Fuchs, in Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision, has insightfully assessed them as the recreation of the philosophy of Judaism intertwined with the project of the Enlightenment. Additionally, Joseph in Dangling Man incarnates the problem of choice between reason and faith. Satirically, he is a war casualty who has not fought, not even enlisted to be a soldier in the war. Joseph begins to realize that his moral norms are highly dependent on his responsibility for choosing either to survive since “there is no dignity anywhere, nothing but absurd falsehood” (Bellow, 1944, p. 48), or to follow his faith and end up becoming a victim “It is our humanity that we are responsible for … our dignity, our [faith]” (p. 167). Finally, Asa Leventhal in The Victim begins where Joseph ends up. That he bears moral responsibility overtones a problem of conflicting concepts and ideals between egoism and altruism, Man and God, the ethics of the individual and the norms of society. Believing that “it’s bad to be less than human and it’s bad to be more than human” (Bellow, 1947, p. 20), Asa stresses the biblical narrative and the Enlightenment morality, which usually appear as covert metaphors in Bellow’s narratives. Bellow’s autobiographical account in To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (1976) draws the consistency between faith and humanism. Although the book sketches the personal journey of the author by describing his real trip from Chicago to Jerusalem with a political and economic reflection on the context of the Middle East in the seventies, Bellow says in the opening that “it is my childhood revisited” (1976, p. 2). The preposition “back” offers three different meanings: a) Returning to Chicago at the level of the story; b) Recollecting Bellow’s childhood at the level of memory; c) Highlighting reciprocal and metaphorical movements from faith to humanism and in time from adulthood to childhood. Interestingly, Clayton regards the journey as a never-​ending movement from Man to God and from faith to humanism: In the world of distraction, the world in which the ego, the social self, moves, man cannot be saved. But there is always another world in a Bellow novel: it is a world of love, of search for the light of God and the will of God, a world in which the person is no fool, or is a holy fool, in which the soul … is worthy of salvation. (1991, p. 287)

Clayton’s claim presupposes that Chicago stands for reason, rationality, modernity, materialism, utilitarianism, lights, power and money, whereas Jerusalem represents faith, God, soul, salvation and purity. Like Joyce’s Dublin

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and Blake’s London, Chicago, to Bellow’s mind, is a modern metropolis where Man is always ‘other’, alienated, degraded, humiliated, and eventually rejected. Jerusalem, however, becomes a metaphor for a spiritual faith and eternal unity with God. It is in this way that memory, recollection and childhood become a second metaphor for Man’s moral worth since the novelist sought to unite the further connotations of space, as highlighted in Jerusalem and represents faith, with memory, as epitomized in recollections and remembrances and reflects humanism. Man’s essence and humanism become highly dependent on the connections between reason and rationality in Chicago, faith and purity in Jerusalem, and Bellow’s recollections. Awareness of the theme of agony in Bellow’s fictional world is not recent, having possibly first been described in the nineties by critics like Christopher Lasch. Agony in this respect, Lasch (1999) maintains, is deeply related to American culture and philosophy rather than to the physical or even mental suffering of Bellow’s heroes. The construct of the theme of agony in American culture was first articulated by de Tocqueville (1988) in the 19th century and popularized by other figures like Zygmunt Bauman, Bernard-​Henri Levy and Walter Benjamin among many others. In line with this, the concept of agony shall be addressed at two fundamental levels: American culture Bellow’s fictional heroes

Agony in American culture was first investigated by scholars like Alexis de Tocqueville in the 19th century. De Tocqueville predicted this moral decline in American capitalistic democracy, and his claim is worth being quoted in length: Most of the people in these nations (democratic nations) are extremely eager in the pursuit of immediate material pleasures and are always discontented with the position they occupy and always free to leave it. They think about nothing but ways of changing their lot and bettering it. For people in this frame of mind every new way of getting wealth more quickly, every machine which lessens work, every means of diminishing the costs of production, every invention which makes pleasures easier or greater, seems the most magnificent accomplishment of the human mind. (1988, p. 462)

De Tocqueville builds his predictions about America on expectation and worry. He expects capitalistic democracy, but he worries about its practice

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in American society. He is afraid that materialism will dominate American lives, and they will “think about nothing but ways of changing their lot and bettering it,” and will be interested “in every new way of getting wealth more quickly.” In brief, it will be a systemized and mechanized society. Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism, justifies de Tocqueville’s argument: “We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future” (1991, p. 5). He also says in his Democracy in America that “there is nothing more petty, insipid, crowded with paltry interests in one word, antipoetic than the daily life of an American” (Lasch, 1999, p. 485). This has been illustrated by the lack of harmony and trust in the postmodern age, the multiplicity of roles, players, settings, the moral and ethical uncertainty, and the moral duty of the elites and philosophers (Bauman, 1987). In The Human Condition, Arendt diagnoses the issue asserting that “modern man, when he lost the certainty of the world to come, was thrown back upon himself and not upon this world; far from believing that the world might be potentially immortal, he was not even sure that it was real” (1991, p. 254). Levy also attacks the horror of the industrialized age and foretells the agony of culture in capitalistic America. If the good society is a pious fraud, hell may very well be a possibility and a reality. And this is indeed the century’s great lesson. The horror is here, close to us: the daily spectacle of industrial desolation; the memory of the Nazi holocaust and the fantastic death instinct whose madness shattered the world. … Yes, capitalism is the end of history, and to this end, unfortunately, we are experiencing and will continue to experience only bloody and barbarous resolutions. (1979, pp. 109–​110)

In around the late 1970s and the early 1980s, small-​scale research and case studies began to emerge linking the agony in American culture to the sufferings of Bellow’s fictional world in general and his later novels in particular. One aspect of this suffering is the dehumanization of intellectuals, which deepens the alienation and anxiety of Bellow’s heroes, and crystallizes the radical change that has occurred in American society. Rho reflects on this change: “when the characters have spiritual anxiety they go to a psychiatrist instead of church, when they have a physical problem they go to a medical doctor, when they have a legal one, they see a lawyer. And the experts are subdivided into more specified ones” (1999, p. 37). Later, he describes the way these heroes suffer and the way they are alienated in their societies: [They] make [their] associates and [their] acquaintances uncomfortable. [They] can’t have a permanent relationship with anybody. [They evade] responsibility. [They]

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want to be visitors, strangers, to keep a distance from the outer world. [They don’t] know how to talk to anyone, how to speak, how to lead a conversation, rather [they] always speak as if giving a lecture. (1999, p. 117)

Bellow’s fictional heroes are alienated in their societies. More sarcastically, they are ignored and rejected within their families. Family ties have been dispersed. “Allan Bloom, Christopher Lasch, and David Riesman all have in common the idea that child-​parent relations have been tuned incorrectly or broken incurably” (Rho, 1999, p. 74). Riesman, Glazer, and Denney believe that “the tradition-​directed child propitiates his parents; the inner-​directed child fights or succumbs to them; the other-​directed child manipulates them and is in turn manipulated” (1989, p. 52), while Bloom proffers that “parents do not have the legal or moral authority they had in the Old World. They lack self-​confidence as educators of their children” (1988, p. 58). Their agony is deepened when their suffering is aggravated by the cultural context around them. Auden (1948) proves this when he claims in his essay “Henry James and the Artist in America,” that Europeans pay respect to intellectuals and writers and help them so that they do not have to worry about their worldly concerns, whereas in America they are disregarded by the public unless they prove their fame and creativity. It is perhaps harder for an American writer than for a European to resist the temptation to cheapen his product, to make it more salable, because he suffers from a lack of popular success in a way that the latter does not. Growing up in a society where the business ethos is dominant, it is difficult for him not to believe that art is a commodity like a motor car whose sales and profits are an accurate indication of value. Whereas a European, brought up in a culture which inherited the medieval conception of the clerk and the social value of the contemplative life, is spared this doubt and is indeed more likely to be guilty of unjustified arrogance toward those in “trade.” (Auden, 1948, p. 39)

Critics have debated for the last fifty years about both the very quality of Bellow and the originality of his writings (Bradbury, 1982). The background for these debates is often called the ‘unexpected’ overlap between the uncategorical mind of the author and the sophisticated findings of contemporary criticism in the second half of the 20th century. The guiding assumption in this respect is how it is possible for a critic to rethink the novelist from a new perspective. The following sections revise the classical readings of Bellow and the way he was first introduced to the academic circles. They also examine the

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ideological assumptions upon which many of their views and interpretations were hinged. Reflecting upon Bellow’s position in academic circles, one can remark that he has commanded attention from a wide range of reviewers and critics, and generated three waves of scholarly interest that focused on the realistic features in his writings. The first major wave was epitomized by Irving Malin (1967), Robert Detweiler (1967), John J. Clayton (1968), David D. Galloway (1966), Nathan Scott (1973), and Earl Rovit (1975), which introduced him as a humanist and neo-​transcendentalist novelist by distinguishing the stylistic, thematic and ideological concerns in his writings. Tony Tanner (1978), Edmund Schraepen (1978), and Stanley Trachtenberg (1979), representing the second wave, developed many avenues of thought by modifying and amplifying the earlier works. With the advent of the 1980s, in the critical third wave of Bellow, Joseph McCadden (1981) explored realism in Bellow’s novels, Malcolm Bradbury adopted a historical approach,, Goldman (1980), an orthodox American Jew, traced Bellow’s philosophical debt to Judaism, Jan Bakker, a Dutch critic, introduced an exhaustive comparative approach between Bellow and Hemingway, Judie Newman, a British scholar, questioned his responses to 20th-​century history and historiography, and Daniel Fuchs and Jonathan Wilson, two American scholars (1984–​1985) showed their frustration with the orthodox image of Bellow the humanist by attempting to prove his realism through a full-​length textual study of his novels (Cronin, 2000). What is remarkable is that these critics meticulously surveyed every known document dealing with the life of the author, the ideological assumptions behind his writings, and the main ideas that marked the age. Devoting themselves to patient, painstaking scholarship and a careful interest in the development of Bellow’s career, they paid no attention to the rapid changes which were taking place in literary criticism and philosophy at the time when he was writing his novels. Josephine Hendin, in the light of this, has managed to explore Bellow’s the historical context of Bellow’s writing, the postwar era, thereby neglecting thereby the possible meanings the narratives might suggest. Investigating the vulnerability of the author’s fictional subjects, she, in a typically and unconsciously new historical gesture (Hendin, 1978, p. 1), acquaints his novels with history, everyday life, memory, experience and adventure stating that “[his] fiction treats history and memory as a series of disconnected episodes … to step into the mind of [Bellow’s] hero was to find either a celebration of memory or a vision of memory as the open wound of the human race, a gateway to the vast history of human loss” (p. 9). Arguably,

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Hendin strives to unravel the meaning of the text by sketching the contour of its context, the cognitive and the abstract by the concrete and the historical, history by memory, which is, in Faulkner’s words, that rush of recalled images across the individual mind. It is in this way, to her mind, that Bellow’s fictional world shows how a model of life can cohere, and how heroes acquire a sense of life within it. Bellow, in Hendin’s view, is a culture hero. The novelist’s message is to enhance the reciprocal movement from history to fiction and from word to world. Within this dialectical exchange, “culture creates its heroes [in the same way] as its heroes create novels. Bellow is the hero of culture heroes because he celebrates standard American vulnerability” (Hendin, 1978, p. 50). Referring to the way that Bellow himself has coined history with “strange incomprehensible tales” (Hendin, 1978, p. 9), Hendin responds that, “history has given Bellow his best subjects, but history has also taken them away,” admitting that, like John Barth’s characters (p. 75), ordinariness, sameness, and the sheer mindlessness of heroes who belong to everyday life like the rest of us is one category of his fictional subjects. In Mailer’s own way, Hendin eventually acknowledges, Bellow’s figures are intellectual victims who are prisoners of intellectual, historical and feminized worlds. The sense of war, by this token, as shifting from its ordinary function becomes an allegory for the world as a combat. Hendin’s blindness to the insights of Bellow’s texts stems from her classical and thematic interpretation that undermines culture and history theorists. In this line of thought, she introduced a textual analysis based upon a comparative approach with other American novelists on the one hand and a scrupulous exploitation of modern historical events on the other. Hendin failed to exploit modern insights with regard to the concept of heroism. ‘Distancing herself’ from these critical stances, Hendin, thus, reduced Bellow to the mere position of a writer who is relating stories of ordinary people, unable to achieve a unified view of life, a writer who is simply documenting social, political and cultural phenomena in modern American history. Frank McConnell’s critique of Bellow is another sort of ‘intellectual censorship’. Repeating the same ‘failings’ of Josephine Hendin, the critic ironically proceeds in the same line of thought by examining the writer’s moral and humanistic views, without referring to any theoretical framework that justifies his arguments. McConnell believes that Bellow’s concept of heroism “achieves, in his most recent books, a level of originality, complexity, and strangeness which is one of the most remarkable events of recent American

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writing” (1985, p. 11). Bellow is clearly seen a as seeker of high qualities who is fighting for the lost cause of humanism in a world in which “intellect and knowledge are not enough [and] without conscience, man is merely an intellectual animal” (Rovit, 1975, p. 128). Adopting Frank Kermode’s enterprise in categorizing modern fiction (1966, p. 1), McConnell identifies Bellow’s reflection on heroism interchangeably with James Joyce, Norman Mailer, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon and the British Romantic poets. Like his contemporaries among Jewish American novelists, the world Bellow’s characters inhabit is a strange one of half-​light and, half-​truths, where moral and ethical choices continue to be made; a world, of all European fiction from the pilgrim’s progress to the plague, that is highlighted by daily attempts to lead a human life. McConnell interestingly confirms that Saul Bellow, Barth, Pynchon, Mailer and many others were to define effectively a new mode in American writing by creating novels whose content was largely a self-​conscious commentary on their own form … which included their own critical commentary. Mailer foreshadows the fictive self-​consciousness of these writers just as Bellow foreshadows their concern with the inheritance of the Western culture … the burden of making that culture a moral force in contemporary urban reality. (1985, p. 63)

In the same context, Fiedler (1967) says that we must begin to think about Bellow as the inheritor of a long tradition of false starts, ‘wrong turns’, abject retreats and ‘gray inclusions’ of figures like Isaac Rosenfeld, H. J. Kaplan, Oscar Tarcov, Delmore Schwartz and Lionel Trilling. Arguably, on the other hand, Levenson has quite rightly declared in the same line of thought that Whitman, J. D. Salinger, Irwin Shaw, Bernard Malamud and Mark Twain “stand benevolently looking over Bellow’s shoulder as he writes his novels: their energy, exuberance, and wonder are continued in him, and so their determination to extricate their freedom whenever they may be caught ‘on the verge of a usual mistake’” (1967, p. 40). Bellow, being the product of this intellectual context, emblematically epitomizes Twain’s mythical figure, Finn (2005, p. 9), through his writing about the moral and ethical sense of life, the weariness of life, the search of a ‘lost identity’, the signs of common humanity, Jewishness and exile, anti-​Semitism and the future of the Jewish community. Consequently, Bellow was initially assessed in his relationship with the Jewish intellectual context, the long European tradition in fiction, the age in which he lived and the most sublime ideals and values the writer espoused (Hassan, 1961).

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The weakness of the former critics is that they make no real effort to read the heroes in line with deconstruction. Although McConnell has attempted to explore themes like morality and humanism in a relationship with the contemporary Jewish American novelists, he surprisingly did not notice the ‘possible encounters’ between Bellow’s texts and Derrida’s and Foucault’s deconstruction. It might be argued that critics like McConnell, Earl Rovit, Irving Malin, Richard Chase, Maxwell Geismar, J.C. Levenson, Daniel Weiss and Ihab Hassan successfully posed numerous problematical issues in the Bellovian text and that they can perhaps be forgiven for neglecting this perspective. However, this should not hide the fact that, in the context of their call for greater intellectual integrity and a deeper investigation of the novelist, their ignorance of Derrida’s (1990) findings concerning deconstruction is less understandable. Another counter-​argument which might possibly be raised is that McConnell insightfully attempted to refer to Thomas Hobbes in his analysis of the theme of fear in Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King and Claude Levi-​Strauss in his reflections on the kinship ties, totemism, family and patterns of myth in the same novel (Malin, 1969, p. 108), while Daniel Weiss and Marcus Klein carefully exploited Freud’s and Lacan’s concepts of psychoanalysis in a ‘deep’ reading of Seize the Day. Nevertheless, what they tended to do, is introduce general ideas without clear and detailed footnotes to the theoretical frameworks they are using. The use of words like ‘prove’, ‘demonstrate’, ‘precisely’ suggests that their work is performed with scientific rigor and patience in a way that no reader could fail to be convinced. Throughout their works, there is very little detailed commentary and no attempt to understand or explain the Bellovian text in the light of the deconstructive theory. The unqualified reader, therefore, would simply accept their assertions and findings as true (Tanner, 1978). Highlighting these blind spots serves as an excuse to ignore any presumption that their interpretations of Bellow may contain anything worth saying. Given that literary theory and criticism help unveil the secrets of a text, that the text itself cannot be trusted to speak for itself, and that it “requires supplements and commentaries which [destroy] it at the very moment they endeavor to shore up its unity” (Davis, 2004, p. 29), these critics repeatedly insinuate general conclusions, opaque and hazy interpretations of Bellow’s novels. The last instance of Bellow’s classical readings goes with the findings of the third wave of scholarly interest in him. This includes critics like Daniel Fuchs, Malcolm Bradbury, Jeannette Laillou Savona and Harold Bloom. The intention is to explain how their attempts, referring to new criticism in the

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case of Fuchs, poetical rhetoric in the case of Bloom, and new historicism in the case of Bradbury and Savona, paved the way for new avenues of research and legitimize the deconstructive approach. Fuchs (1984) reads Bellow in the light of an ‘unexpected’ juxtaposition between the modernist and postmodernist tools of criticism. He explains this fact by the contradiction between “alienation, break with tradition, isolation and magnification of the subject, threat of the void … and the hatred of civilization” (1984, pp. 9–​10), which are the central thrusts of Bellow’s fiction and the ethics of morality and humanism. Moving from marginality to centrality, Fuchs argues that Bellow is an intellect who is dangling between magic and morality, or, in Judeo-​Christian terms, between war and peace, greatness and goodness, sanity and madness, or what Bradbury (1982) calls modernity and postmodernity. Like the postmodern Jewish writers, the novelist has brought to American literature a ‘dramatics of the mind’ which recalls the Russian and Slavic traditions of writing fiction with their “sense of looseness, timelessness and space” (Fuchs, 1984, p. 29). Fuchs advocates here that Bellow’s position is to be addressed in line with Philip Roth’s paradoxical term that if there is no God everything is permitted. Fyodor Dostoevsky, to Fuchs’s mind, is an emblematic instance that illustrates Bellow’s fictional world. At one point, Fuchs asserts that “Dostoevsky, like Bellow, is attacking the utopia of Chernyshevsky, Fourier, and Saint-​ Simon, which tried to reconcile Hegel and Rousseau, the world historic process and the man of feeling, historical determinism and individual will” (1984, p. 31). This fact suggests that in Bellow and Dostoevsky, the world that we know is in good measure a world of suffering and pleasure, reason and madness, utopia and ideology which, in Bellow’s terms, “commend [a moral] end, impose a law, speak the first and the last words and abolish confusion” (Fuchs, 1984, p. 154). Fuchs admits that Bellow’s early works with their Marxist heritage (The Victim, Dangling Man, The Adventures of Augie March and to an extent Seize The Day), and his later writings under the influence of Hegel’s notions of the unhappy consciousness, the world, home, Heidegger’s views of time and being (Heidegger, 1962) and the poststructuralist ethics of negativity and absurdity “[have] resisted various temptations to dehumanization, to a wasteland identity, affirming what remains of a moral view” (Fuchs, 1984, p. 154). Fuchs’s chapter “Herzog, the intellectual milieu” (1984) is a clear indication that translates Bellow’s uncategorical intellectual position in relationship with modern and postmodern criticism. The novelist’s exploitation of

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the findings of paradoxical schools of thought like William James’s ontological sickness, Sartre’s theory of existentialism as humanism (1969), Hegel’s unhappy consciousness and Esslin’s absurdity makes it daunting for the reader to come out with a final conclusion concerning the novelist’s fictional wor(l) d. What is more striking, as becomes clear by the end of the chapter, is that Fuchs has sought to investigate Bellow’s intellectual ‘milieu’ with reference to Dostoevsky, thereby stressing an anxiety of influence which highlights the growth of the mind of the author. In contemporary critical terms, Fuchs unconsciously grounds himself in a deconstructive tradition that has always sought to establish a multiperspectivist strategy to unravel the blind spots in Bellow’s texts. Jeannette Laillou Savona, in Hutcheon’s (1988) manner, advocates Fuchs’s enterprise by showing the scrupulous interplay between history and fiction, identity and writing, utopia and ideology, assuming that “historians, like novelists, are said to be interested not in ‘recounting the facts, but [in] recounting that they are recounting them’” (Hutcheon, 1988, p. 45). Ihab Hassan and Malcolm Bradbury stress the new and original findings of Fuchs by introducing a different angle of view in dealing with the novelist. Hassan referred to figures like Paul de Man, Samuel Beckett, George Bataille, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Max Weber and terms like Dadaism and the philosophy of silence to make sure that he benefited from the contemporary theories of texts to re-​evaluate the early critiques of Bellow. Bradbury, following him, has moved down the same path infuriated by the rapidly emerging contemporary theories of negativity, while Harold Bloom has kept the same perspective initiated by Fuchs but changed the method by addressing Bellow as a poet and a philosopher. Consequently, one can say that in their attempts to introduce Bellow anew in academic circles and bypass the early scholarly interest in his works, Fuchs, Bloom, Bradbury and to an extent Savona have established a position which coincides with the major theories of their time. Nevertheless, in spite of these promising efforts, this path of thought remains immature and incomplete for three different reasons. First, Fuchs plainly adopted a utopian Marxist stance at beginning of his book Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision, but he never referred to Marxist theory in detail. He attempted to exploit the Enlightenment’s findings concerning morality and the ethics of humanism, but his efforts remained thematic and very general. He kept an inexplicable blindness to what Habermas (1989) calls the late supporters of the Enlightenment project. He showed a remarkable awareness of the poststructuralist premises by the end of his book, but never referred

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in his footnotes or even his bibliography to figures like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who might be of great use in developing his approach. Thus, Fuchs shows more readiness to admit the weaknesses of Bellow’s early critiques, but less maturity to take his project of criticism further. The second reason is that Savona, Bradbury and Hassan concentrated their efforts upon the Jewish intellectual context and the politics of writing postmodern fiction without showing good knowledge or even serious interest in the emerging poststructuralist theorists. Savona sought to examine the historical context of writing, but she neglected Linda Hutcheon’s approach concerning the affinities between history, fiction, theory, ideology, Jewishness, representation and identity. She referred to the Holocaust as an assumption that framed Bellow’s writings, but never made an effort to discuss the extent to which her statement is true in light of the findings of the poststructuralist theorists (Savona, 1974, p. 4). One counter-​argument which can be raised in this respect is that the works of Savona, Bradbury and Hassan were introduced to readers before the publications of Hartman (1996), Lyotard (1984), Emmanuel (2001), LaCapra (1987), and that is perhaps why they could not benefit from the results of their research. However, it should also be said, first, that they showed no serious interest in theory and criticism and, second, they could have referred to early poststructuralists like Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault since they were contemporaneous to each other. This claim is further justified by Bloom’s (1986) failure to consider the premises of New Criticism in his reading of Saul Bellow as a poet. He strived to trace the aesthetic peculiarities which highly qualified the author, but found himself entrapped within the same habits of thought he initially wanted to abandon since he kept referring to the same classical references used by Fuchs, Savona, Bradbury, Hassan and others. The present book is essentially trying to expose the aforesaid critics’ logic and methods of argumentation, discuss the ideological motives behind their neglect (and sometimes rejection) of contemporary theory, and eventually introduce and focus on the deconstructive approach. Grix aptly declares that one should familiarize themselves with a sort of literary review in order to have “a mental logic of the research” (2004, p. 36). Such a statement would serve to orient the critical animus against the early readings of Bellow. Thus, the relevance of the deconstructive approach will be focused on in the next part of this chapter. Having been trained in the habits and the methods of Bellow’s critics for more than thirty years, it is quite safe now to embark upon the novelist’s strategies of subversion in line with deconstruction.

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More recent attention has focused on the themes of madness and illusion in Bellow’s fictional world. In fact, there is a large volume of published studies by Bellow and other contemporaneous critics describing the way the madness and illusion are portrayed. Starting with Bellow himself, he advocates that madness and illusion of his heroes can only tell stories of marginalized and disregarded intellectuals and predict histories of nations and ideas. Madness as wisdom and illusion as overconsciousness trigger off deconstruction. Madness as wisdom and overconsciousness reveals the disillusionment of Bellow’s protagonists and their struggle to deconstruct the ethics of crowd and low culture. Echoing Althusser’s (1993) definition of madness in his The Future Lasts a Long Time, Bellow sets out the links between madness, illusion and amorality. Eichelberger (1999) has elaborated on this fact by admitting that Bellow’s typical beginnings in his novels are scrupulously associated with mad intellectuals. She offers that Herzog, Henderson, Sammler, Benn Crater, Humboldt and Mr. Corde, respectively professor, philosopher, historian, poet and dean, begin their stories with a sense of madness and moral solitude already. More strikingly, she believes that the protagonists’ sense of their own stories is contaminated from the outset by their nonsense of stories in general. Stories are lies we tell ourselves about our lives. The heroes have ceaselessly strived to escape the fate of writing down their own stories: “If I had died I would naturally have been released from the promise I had made years ago to write a short description of Ravelstein and to give an account of his life” (Bellow, 2000, p. 230); “I have always a weakness for footnotes. For me a clever or a wicked footnote has redeemed many a text. And I see that I am now using a long footnote to open a serious subject” (Bellow, 2000, p. 2). Asa Leventhal in The Victim sketches his madness by overemphasizing his guilt in matters for which he is not responsible. Joseph in Dangling Man assumes that he is “alienated, distrustful, find[s] in [his] purpose not an open world, but a closed, hopeless jail,” and continues: “My perspectives end in the walls. Nothing of the future comes to me” (Bellow, 1944, p. 92). Like Althusser, Joseph acquaints madness with his being enrolled in military services and his sacrifice for his Jewish ideals. Death, for Joseph, becomes a sort of noble madness that provides him with a high purpose and a sense in life to think with Carl Jaspers. Billy Rose largely advocates that his madness stems from his inability to “forget about remembering” (Bellow, 1989, p. 2). The reader, in light of this, is endlessly reminded of a rhythm of madness that keeps reverberating throughout Bellow’s later novels.

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In his essay “Herzog, or, Bellow in Trouble,” (1975), Richard Poirier redefines Bellow’s madness in tune with the wasteland and absurd literature. Mental trouble, to his mind, becomes a key concept that allows having free access to the subject’s psyche. Poirier demystifies that Bellow’s theory of madness is to be investigated in its relationship with the bankruptcy of contemporary American culture. Located within the Jewish intellectual context, Bellow, Poirier argues, is far more alienated than Mailer, Malamud, Roth, and the others as he strived to relate his writings to amorality, madness, boredom, weariness, alienation, exile, risk, disorder and uncertainty. In his preface to The Last Analysis, Bellow informs the reader that his “real subject is the mind’s comical struggle for survival in an environment of Ideas-​ its fascination with metaphors, and the peculiarly literal and solemn manner in which Americans dedicate themselves to programs, fancies, or brainstorms” (1965a, p. 18). This, according to Irving (1967), suggests a sense of mental illness since madness surprisingly stems from intellectualism and sanity. The play, he admits, introduces a sharp attack on all sorts of theoreticians and becomes an epitome of the literature of absurdity. The playwright turns to be an “amateur philosopher” (Bellow, 1965a, p. 115), his clownish subject, Bummy, performs a mental comedy; in a typically Shakespearian manner, a play within the play, he suffers from an odd disorder that he calls “humanitis”: “Suddenly being human is too much for me” (Bellow, 1965a, p. 21). He faints, staggers with emotion. He alternately loves and hates the others (and his own reflection in them). He becomes serious: “I don’t have the strength to bear my feelings” (Bellow, 1965a, p. 33). He leaves the stage; he “dies” (Bellow, 1965a, p. 34). In the same play, Bummy addresses the closed-​circuit audience of analysts and agents “Sixty one years ago I was literally nothing. I was merely possible. Then I was conceived, and became inevitable. When I die I, I shall be impossible. Meanwhile between two voids, past and future, I exist” (Bellow, 1965a, p. 7). These words are grand, sublime; they denote Bellow’s “dangling men” existing between two voids, Herzog procrastinating the act of killing his wife, Augie’s ceaseless Crusoe-​like journeys in the cities of America and Wilhelm’s mental paralysis. Bummy, akin to other Bellovian subjects, is suggesting that the sense of life stems only from void and madness. Adopting a Foucauldian archeological strategy and a Derridean deconstructive method, Bummy creates meaning through the past and the present, self and non self, the marginal and the essential, madness and reason. It is, as he says, “my personality, my mind! My mind has a will of its own” (Bellow, 1965a, p. 12). Summoning

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death, Bellow’s mental comedy is linked to death and madness “Organisms without death have no true identity” (Bellow, 1965a, p. 12). Hattie, in Bellow’s short story, “Leaving the Yellow House,” furthers the link between death, madness and intellectualism “To lie awake and think such thoughts was the worst thing in the world. Better death than insomnia. Hattie not only loved sleep, she believed in it” (Bellow, 1965b, p. 12). She continues to think, “I used to wish for death more than I do now. Because I did not have anything at all … God! What shall I do? I have taken life. I have lied. I have born false witness. I have stalled. And now what shall I do? Nobody will help me.” By laughing at their small and unnatural roles, one discovers that there is no last analysis by the end of the play and no final truth by the end of Hattie’s story. Henderson visualizes his intellectual madness as a way of sacrifice, a movement toward death and resurrection: “[Y]our majesty move over and I’ll die beside you. Or else be me and live; I never knew what to do with life anyway, and I’ll die instead.” Tommy Wilhelm in Seize the Day overtones his madness by reflecting on his never-​ending conflicts and misunderstanding with his father and society around him. Uncle Benn and Humboldt dramatize madness, in a typically Althusserian gesture, by examining the evolution of knowledge throughout history. In short, one can safely venture to say that Bellow’s madness has two fundamental aspects: one is related to the subjects’ deconstruction, while the other has to do with the historical, social and political context that frames the novelist’s thought. Hassan (1961) analyzes Bellow’s ‘theory’ of madness in its relationship with the major characteristics of modernity and postmodernity. He emphatically enumerates the common traits between madness and postmodernity as follows: Dadaism, antiform (disjunctive, open), play, chance, anarchy, exhaustion/​silence, recreation, deconstruction, subversion, antithesis, absence, dispersal, text/​intertexts, combination, surface, misreading, difference, trace, irony, immanence (Hassan, 1961, p. 71). Even though one may venture to add some other features, the list would only be more unsettled and incomplete than ever. In tune with this, Hassan acknowledges that what we cannot speak about, we consign to madness, the assault on reason, absurdity, disorder and silence. Silence, to his sense, “implies alienation from reason, society and history... requires the periodic subversion of forms... creates anti-​languages... fills the extreme states of the mind-​void, madness, outrage... and presupposes apocalypse” (Hassan, 1961, p. 13). Most of these strategic features inform the

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quality of Bellow’s madness, and Hassan’s list works only to deepen the novelist’s view of madness further. Humboldt, a poet and a thinker, presents a faithful image for this claim: “He was a manic depressive (his own diagnosis). He owned a set of Freud’s works and read psychiatric journals... he stressed that ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves.” Again, he interestingly admits that “history was a nightmare during which he was trying to get a good night’s rest. Insomnia made him more learned. In the small hours he read thick books-​Marks and Sombart, Toynbee, Rostovtzeff, Freud... Hegel, Kant, and Heidegger.” Humboldt is a great entertainer but tragically is going insane. Like Hassan’s long list that fuses madness with postmodernity, Humboldt has his own list that includes alienation, depression, madness, beauty, love, waste land, history, the unconscious, silence, boredom, the sublime and death. Sanity becomes a moment of illusion and uncertainty; rather, it is the wisdom of disregarded intellectuals. This interestingly fits with the other heroes, including Herzog, Henderson, Corde, Sammler, and even Ravelstein. Bellow’s subversion to the previously outlined moral ideals is in line with subverting the Enlightenment ideals, thereby stressing the principles of recuperation, recycling, remotivation, erasure, revision, signature and parody as being fundamental items that qualify the novelist’s definition of subversion and deconstruction. It is perhaps this sort of subversion that lies at the root of the ambivalent position that Bellow holds in critical circles. The issue, according to Hassan (1973), is whether the novelist acknowledges more modern utopian ideals than postmodern principles and/​or whether Bellow’s strategies of subversion are of no crucial value, since postmodernity can only be seen as a masquerade which attempts to make things ever and even newer than they are. If the second thesis is right, then it intensifies the novelist’s strategy to subvert the utopias of the past and live with the fictions of the future. Advocating that Bellow is an early postmodern practitioner further evolves his theories of art, life, subversion and deconstruction. This, as this author sees it, endorses the assumption that one should not impose a specific method of reading onto the work of a writer who has perhaps never been aware of any theoretical input of the sort described by Hassan, Derrida, Foucault and others. Among contemporary American writers, Bellow has insisted on the image and the integrity of his intellectual heroes in the face of the deconstructive forces of mass society, the ‘new elites’ and the low culture by which it is threatened. In fact, Bellow is most compelling in his investigations into the craters of the spirit from which he emerges with hope and affirmation. His concern

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with addressing the dimensions of his intellectual heroes in their relationship with the masses appears to be fundamental in understanding his problematical issue with regards to madness, subversion and deconstruction. Closer scrutiny of his later novels reveals the way Bellow categorizes his heroes into three groups:



1) Intellectuals who are possessors of European high culture and are immersed deeply in European humanistic liberal education, “the Western Canon,” in Harold Bloom’s term. 2) Members of the common people, the masses, businessmen, gangsters, as well as maternal, castrator and exotic female figures. 3) The ‘new elites’ including doctors, lawyers, psychotherapists and experts in general.

The intellectual characters in the five novels investigated in this work—​ Moses Herzog, Artur Sammler, Von Humboldt Fleisher, Charles Citrine, and Albert Corde and Eugene Henderson—​are disregarded in their societies and marginalized amidst the American cultural and intellectual scene. They are considered bookish, utopian, impractical, idealist, ignorant, and incapable of understanding the rapidly changing ethics in the postwar American era. They are trained only with the ethics of the grand books of European classical humanism, and they concentrate on teaching their ethics and morals to university students and young men and women in order to prepare them to become future sophisticated scholars. The masses, the new elites, and the different categories of female characters in Bellow’s later novels criticize the intellectuals’ conservative ideas as constituting a noble lie in an aristocracy of everyone (Barber, 1994). They accuse these intellectuals of being anachronistic. They are like Socrate’s philosopher, who is always aloof and does not belong to reality. In his The Revolt of the Masses, Ortega resentfully introduces the masses and the new elites, the enemies of Bellow’s intellectuals, as follows: The most important fact in the public life of the West in modem times, for good or ill, is the appearance of the masses in the seats of highest social power. Since the masses, by definition, neither can nor should direct their own existence, let alone that of society as a whole, this new development means that we are now undergoing the most profound crisis which can afflict peoples, nations, or cultures. (1985, p. 3)

It is clear that the masses in Bellow’s later novels have taken “the seats of highest social power,” and have dominated “the public life of the West in

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modem times.” They cannot direct their own lives, nor can they theorize the moral and ethical values of their society and humanism. This engenders “the most profound crisis which can afflict peoples, nations, or cultures.” The intellectuals are undeniably forgotten, faded away from the cultural scene and the public’s attention. They are increasingly losing their moral and ethical authority as men of culture who are capable of bringing a certain change to American society. Differently put, the masses have turned America into a society where intellectuals in humanism have little meaning for Americans in general. One interpretation of this situation is that Americans are not taught the classical works, and another might be that Americans are closing their minds to men of classical culture like Bellow. The masses, Bellow reveals, focus on the momentary present and worldly desires rather than on grand and sublime issues. Due to liberal democracy that equates them with intellectuals, scientific experimentation, and industrialization, they lead a common life rather than a noble life. Characters like Madeleine and Gersbach in Herzog, the pickpocket in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Cantabile and other gangsters in Humboldt’s Gift, the Colonel in The Dean’s December, Lily and Henderson’s other wives and relatives in Henderson the Rain King pursue materialist interests and go after practical aims. They seek their joy and ontological sense in life in the practice of business, money and sex, in short, in the possession of material advantages. Their culture, in Macdonald’s (1960) terms, is called “mass culture.” He confesses that it: “offers its customers neither an emotional catharsis nor an esthetic experience, for these demand effort,” and it is just “distraction,” “stimulating or narcotic” (Macdonald, 1960, p. 205). It is “a vulgarized reflection of High Culture and at worst a cultural nightmare” (Macdonald, 1960, p. 589). This junk culture or kingdom of frivolity, as Bellow predicted, would dominate the American society in the 1950s and 1960s, qualify its features, and bring back vulgarity and barbarism to modern American culture. The last category of Bellow’s heroes in his later novels is that of doctors, lawyers, psychotherapists and experts in general. They are not so very different from the masses as they share the same pursuits of material and worldly desires. Bellow depicts them in It All Adds Up as “[pseudo]-​intellectuals, refined specialists in a hundred fields, who are often as philistine as the masses from which they emerged” (1995, p. 75). Capitalistic democracy and the American educational system, to Bellow’s mind, create intellectuals who are not what they are supposed to be. They are not the ones Bellow expected. Rho maintains that “they are the same as the products in a factory. They are

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standardized goods, cut round and flat, without creative minds or flexibility. They don’t learn how to think and decide. They learn skills, instead, and how to operate their segmented knowledge. They are not men of ideas but men of action” (1999, p. 8). They are experts, specialists rather than philosophers, artists, and poets. They are lawyers, journalists, scientists, psychologists, contractors, doctors, businessmen; they admit that they are the only leaders of modern America, and all that governs their life is sex and money. A wide range of literary reviews such as Scott (1973), Zaritt (2015) and Morrison (2017) of Bellow’s central figures has been carried out without paying much attention to the female characters and their function in his novels. Louana L. Peontek (1980) has pointed to the need for such an examination as it helps gain a better insight into the female experience and the craters of her spirit, from which emerge hope and affirmation. In most of Bellow’s novels, the main character is a male. All his narratives develop through the third personal pronoun, that is, through the central character’s perceiving consciousness. All secondary characters, women, are portrayed from the male protagonist’s perspective. Female figures, accordingly, appear only in relation to the protagonist and function primarily to define him. Peontek reveals three predominant images of women:  the maternal woman, the castrator woman and the exotic woman. In fact, the woman as mother crystalizes several characteristics which many of Bellow’s female figures exhibit. The female figures incarnate the ideas of love and family. One significant example is Sarah Herzog in Herzog. She survives in Moses’s memory at the center of his childhood. Her love sustains the family, saves it from collapse when the father fails as a businessman. The four kids in the family enjoy the mother’s warmth and affection. Herzog remembers her:  “Mother Herzog, large-​eyed, sat with the children in the primitive kitchen which the sun never entered. It was like a cave” (Bellow, 1964, pp. 138–​139). Sarah is a metaphor that represents nurture and life in the darkness of the kitchen. She epitomizes self-​sacrifice as she is reduced to “cook, washerwoman, seamstress in Napoleon Street in the slum” (p. 142), though she belongs to a wealthy Petersburg family. Peontek says, “Clearly, Sarah Herzog personifies the maternal ideal as protector, nurturer and life-​giver. And equally clear is the association of pure love with drudgery, domesticity and self-​sacrifice” (1980, p. 10). In Dangling Man (1944), Joseph’s mother, like Sarah Herzog, survives only in his memory. She provides Joseph with a self-​positive image as he develops his story through this perspective. She protects the family from the harsh reality of the Montreal slum. Iva, Joseph’s wife, illustrates classical maternal

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protectiveness as she functions as a nurturer and security provider. She supports him without resentment: “She claims that it is no burden and that she wants me to enjoy this liberty, to read and to do all the delightful things I will be unable to do in the Army” (Bellow, 1944, p. 9). Asa Leventhal in The Victim (1947) can faintly remember the features of his dead mother, her large eyes and her black hair, and her remembrance triggers off confusing feelings of sadness and insanity. Early in the story we are told that his mother died in an insane asylum when he was eight years old. This deepens the feelings of insecurity and loss. He understands what happened to him and to his mother only when he has grown up. When he marries, he finds what he has lost; a woman whose love and affection fill his need for maternal protection. Asa, “who feels that the harshness of his life had disfigured him, is surprised that Mary, his wife, finds him attractive. As for her attractiveness to him, we learn that Mary evokes tenderness in Asa” (Peontek, 1980, p. 29) because “she was still not accustomed to thinking of herself as a woman” (Bellow, 1947, p. 22). The protective and nurturing mother reappears again in Seize the Day through the hero’s memories. Echoing Herzog and Joseph, Tommy Wilhelm believes that he inherits from his mother “sensitive feelings, a soft heart, a brooding nature, a tendency to be confused under pressure” (1956, p. 25). Her sensitive feminine traits weaken him and affect his future decisions. Tommy remembers his mother’s death as “the beginning of the end” and embodies his nostalgia for her in the sensation of “a great pull at the very center of his soul” when he utters her name (p. 9). Finally, Charlie Citrine in Humboldt’s Gift shows a striking attachment to his past when he recollects his memories with his mother. At the request of his daughter Mary, he recalls his mother: “I think she was very pretty. I don’t look like her. And she did cooking, baking, laundry and ironing…she could tell fortunes with cards…at home when I lost a tooth, she would throw it behind the stove and ask the little mouse to bring the better one” (1975, pp. 70–​71). His mother shapes his intense need for love and represents the epitome of togetherness and unity. Citrine, in short, recognizes her as the source of an original and primitive love which he hopes to recapture, and he often links her with occult and mystical wisdom. The second recurring female image is the castrator. This female figure is strong, resourceful, and intelligent, and who exists solely to emasculate the hero. This category of women is depicted primarily through the filtering consciousness of the protagonist. Peontek says, “Bellow’s castrating women are all remarkably similar…they tend to be pale-​eyed bitches whose icy looks emanate from beneath dark bangs” (1980, p. 70). Madeleine Pontritter is a

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pertinent example in Herzog. In spite of her intelligence, ambition and beauty, she is Bellow’s most incorrigible bitch. Herzog calls her his “enemy and bitch,” and loves to see her as a corpse without pity. He is intimidated by her intelligence and her keenness for being an intellectual through her cultural discussions with Shapiro. Herzog informs the reader, “I understood that Madeleine’s ambition was to take my place in the learned world. To overcome me. She was reaching her final elevation, as queen of the intellectuals…. And your friend Herzog writing under this sharp elegant heel” (Bellow 1964, p. 76). Her intellectual commitment is responsible for her chaotic method of housekeeping. More dangerously, she deploys her brilliant mind to plot against her naïve husband. Her manipulation and victimization of Herzog continue when she asks him to fix a new bathroom in their house for her lover, when she insists that they move to Chicago and Gersbash moves with them, and when she plans to divorce him. Finally, even though Herzog believes that Madeleine’s beauty is her most effective weapon to destroy him, he continues to be charmed by her beauty. This image reappears in The Adventures of Augie March. In fact, the protagonist has several experiences with strong and assertive women, such as Grandma Lausch and Anna Coblin. Thea Fenchel is to Augie what Madeleine is to Herzog. Ambitious and castrating, Thea is a reckless consumer of both people and things. Her duplicity and ability to manipulate Augie stem from his vulnerability and readiness to be controlled. He says, “She assumed she understood everything about me, and it was astonishing to assume how much she did know; the remainder she made up with confidence and trusted to closed eyes and fast strokes” (1953, p. 353). In sexual intercourse, she exemplifies another aspect of the stereotype of the castrator. She represents the male role herself and turns into a hunting snake, and her relationship with Augie deteriorates. This is also illustrated in Seize the Day as the protagonist’s wife, Margaret Wilhelm, displays many similar characteristics to Madeleine and Thea. Tommy Wilhelm describes his feelings that Margaret is suffocating him. He informs his father about his sufferings because of her: “Well, Dad, she hates me. I feel that she is strangling me. I can’t catch my breath. She has just fixed herself on me to kill me” (1959, p. 48). Tommy admits to being enslaved by her brilliant mind and her readiness to act savagely. The third female image which occurs in Bellow’s novels is that of the exotic woman. Herzog twice marries Jewish women only to retreat in disillusion to pursue the erotic allure of the exotic woman. He is shacked up with Sono Oguki while he is waiting for his divorce from Daisy. Exoticism qualifies

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their relationship and shows the mysterious atmosphere of the Far East. She communicates with him in French, telling dirty jokes in a rather different and broken language. Herzog finds her different from Madeleine and Daisy, belonging to a different species. As an Oriental, she embodies submissiveness; she resembles the maternal woman, bathing, dressing, messaging, entertaining Herzog, and relating exotic stories of sex from Japan. She devotes herself to providing Herzog with a pleasurable retreat from his problems. She sexually satisfies him with her intention to be better than Madeleine. When her mother dies, she does not reveal the news for several weeks so that she does not impose her grief on him. To please him, she declares that she will change her faith, believe in God, if he likes, be Leftist, and act better than Madeleine. Ironically, he leaves her by the end of their affair for another exotic lady, Ramona Donsell. This figure is also illustrated in Dangling Man through the image of Kitty Daumler, a lady with whom Joseph has an affair when he has trouble with his wife. In many ways, she shares numerous exotic characteristics with Herzog’s ladies, particularly Sono. She lives in an exotic place, like Sono’s apartment, and, “Kitty’s rooms comprise a den of seduction that is fairly drenched in feminine sexuality” (Peontek, 1980, p. 137). They represent a feminine refuge to Joseph from the harsh treatment of his wife Iva. After their first sexual encounter, Joseph describes the seductive exoticism of the place, which is threatening and alluring, sympathizing and pampering. He is initially attracted to her not because she is “an intelligent or even clever girl,”… for she is not, but because she is “simple, warm, uncomplicated, and matter-​of-​ fact” (Bellow, 1944, p. 64). By the end of their affair, Joseph recognizes that “a compact with one woman puts beyond reach what others might give us to enjoy; the soft blondes and the dark, aphrodisiacal women of our imaginations are set aside. Shall we leave life not knowing them? Must we?” (p. 67). He concludes that all women have a primary function which is their capacity to produce erotic pleasure for men, and therefore, they have no real existential being. In The Victim, Elena, Asa Leventhal’s sister-​in-​law, is another example of the exotic woman. Like Thea Fenchel in The Adventure of Audie March, she creates exotic dimensions wherever she goes. In Seize the Day, Olive serves as the other woman in the life of Tommy Wilhelm. She exists only to embody Tommy’s longing for a fresh start in life. What is remarkable from this brief review is that while Bellow’s female figures tend to identify the heroes of the novels, they are hardly related to subversion and deconstruction. As a matter of fact, Bellow embodies a scrupulous interplay between the central figures of his novels and the three types of

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women: the mother, the castrator and the exotic woman. In many cases, they reveal the protagonists’ emotional maturity and moral integrity. If the maternal woman incorporates nurture, self-​sacrifice and protection, the castrator woman epitomizes strength and threat. The exotic woman comes to substitute the lost one, the maternal woman, and to represent a refuge from the threatening one, the castrator. One common point which these women share is that they never show rebelliousness against the male protagonists and appear only to redefine the thoughts and feelings of the male heroes. In the work at hand, this relationship is going to be revised, and more stress shall be put on the aspects of madness, subversion and deconstruction of male domination. A large body of literature including the works of Schwartz (1970), Workman (2016) and Hamner (2016) has investigated the theme of humanism in Bellow’s novels and showed the extent to which it helps develop the maturity of the author. In The Humanism of Saul Bellow, Donald William Markos (1966) analyzes the theme of humanism in Bellow’s world of fiction and concludes that all of Bellow’s works might be regarded as an effort to regain idealism, to reconstitute the norms which can make modern American society humane and moral. Herzog exemplifies the intensity of Bellow’s humanism, declaring that Man must “live in an inspired condition, to know the truth, to be free, to love another, to consummate existence, to abide with death in clarity of consciousness” (Bellow, 1964, p. 165). Humanism turns into an ideology itself as America gets more industrialized and as the values of capitalism increasingly dominate American society. Herzog traces the negative aftermath of this position, pointing out the way good and evil have penetrated into modern societies: “Annihilation is no longer a metaphor. Good and Evil are rea1. The inspired condition is therefore no visionary matter” (Bellow, 1964, p. 165). Religion, to Bellow’s mind, can help redeem what science and technology have spoilt since “secular or scientific humanisms have shown little respect for the mystery of human experience; they tend to ignore the deeper longings of the human spirit” (Markos, 1966, p. 195). Joseph’s quest for identity in Dangling Man testifies his longing for individual and humanistic values. In fact, he hopes to vindicate the value of the individual and sustain the independence of the human mind. He is the first protagonist in Bellow’s novels to face existential trouble, and admits that Man is to be a loving creature, generous, creative, responsive to experience, and true to his given self. He brings shape, continuity and independence to his life as he makes a painful assessment of himself and his society. The novel, as Markos claims, “can be read as the experience of a young man’s disillusionment with

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his American heritage of an enlightened humanism. [It] is both a criticism of American culture and modern civilization and an ironic examination of a ‘victim’ of that culture” (1966, p. 33). Asa Leventhal typifies another voice of humanism in The Victim. Leventhal’s hope for a better world is drawn in the metaphor of the theater, where people are randomly given tickets for the front or back seats, denoting their position in society, and where many must wait out in the cold without hope of ever getting a seat at all, denoting the marginalized people in their society. Leventhal admits that there is “a general wrong” (Bellow, 1947, p. 80) in the distribution of the comfort of life. When Leventhal offers Albee the hospitality of a place to sleep and food to eat, he falls asleep and dreams that he is in a crowded railway station carrying a heavy bag, signifying his real problems in life, fighting with others for a place on the next train. Bellow’s humanism stems from his strong belief in the dignity of human being and the greatness of Man. This belief is charged with a sense of struggle and responsibility for humanism. It is for this reason that Bellow’s characters keep oscillating between humane powers on the one hand and dark visions of human life which are completely indifferent to human aspirations on the other. But usually, in the end, it is the sense of good and trust in life that prevails. Henderson translates this image by saying, “I am a true adorer of life, and if I can’t reach as high as the face of it, I plant my kiss somewhere lower down” (Bellow, 1959, p. 150), and “If I couldn’t have my soul it would cost the earth a catastrophe” (p. 282). He faces the nihilistic powers of death, “The biggest problem of all, which was to encounter death” (p. 276) and implicitly confirms this to be the symbol for America itself, an America in need of change. He escapes the complications of life in America for simplicity and innocent nature in Africa, dreaming of seeing “essentials, only essentials, nothing but essentials” (p. 161). He faces death “Death will annihilate you… and there will be nothing left but junk. Because nothing will have been and so nothing will be left. While something still is now! For the sake of all, get out” (p. 40), and wants temporarily “The conditions of life simplified so [he] could deal with them” (p. 246). His object in coming to Africa “was to leave certain things behind” (p. 45). By the end of his journey, Bellow informs the reader that Henderson has discovered his own depths that leave him a more loving person than he was before his journey began. Bellow deploys the Judeo-​Christian tradition to portray the nature of humanistic experience. Henderson believes that the forgiveness of sins is perpetual and that one should refer to the book of God to achieve that spiritual

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purification. Similarly, Allbee, in The Victim, interprets John the Baptist’s “Repent!” in the Thoreauvian sense of “Change yourself…be another man” (Bellow, 1944, p. 227). The main idea behind this is the theme of regeneration and the tension in Christianity between faith and works. Bellow does not seek to establish new values but to ensure the old ones which are fundamentally based on love, humanism, faith and morality. One can see this when Augie March says, “I mean all the forms of love, eros, agape, libido, philia, and ecstasy” (Bellow, 1944, p. 450). This generates Man’s self-​regeneration and the discovery of his essential goodness and the huge capacity for “Truth, love, peace, bounty, usefulness, harmony!” (p. 454). To accomplish this, Augie has become aware of the danger that threatens his inner harmony when he realizes his ambition to be “something special and outstanding…is only a boast that distorts this knowledge [of the axial lines] from its origin” (p. 454). Later, as the story develops, his friend Mintouchlan tries to give Augie a more complex view of human nature by assuming that Man’s secret inner life is filled with “Complications, lies, lies, and lies!... Disguises, vaudevilles, multiple personalities, diseases, conversations” (p. 484). Herzog has gone through hard times to achieve such a mature faith. Like Bellow’s other protagonists, he looks for certain reliable norms upon which to ground his self and the better future he imagines for humanity and the world. As a humanist who is seeking high qualities, he refuses the disorder existing in the universe to move to man. He describes himself as “resisting the argument that scientific thought has put into disorder all considerations based on value…Convinced that the extent of universal space does not destroy human value, that the realm of facts and that of values are not eternally separated” (Bellow, 1964, p. 106), which suggests that “he mechanistic view of the universe is possibly not the correct one and that man cannot get off the moral hook by pleading determinism” (Markos, 1966, p. 200). By the end of the novel, he becomes capable of changing his heart. Thanks to his friends, to his recollections, to the ladies he loved once, and to the influence of nature, he has achieved a mysterious rebirth. He believes that Man must develop a proper relationship with his community—​“Subjective monstrosity must…be corrected by community” (Bellow, 1964, p. 219)—​and that “brotherhood is what makes a man human” (p. 272). Bellow believes that self-​reformation comes first and community reformation is next in establishing a solid ground for humanism. One, accordingly, would have to be optimistic to raise the standard of pure affirmation against the wasteland outlook. Bellow is aware of the obstacles that prevent

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the individual and community from achieving such affirmation: the ideology of capitalism, the problem of urbanization, the governments’ interference in the freedom of individuals, the hegemony of the masses and the new elites, or what Bellow generally calls experts, and the diminishing status of values and ethics in a world dominated by science and industrialization. For this reason, there are no evil characters in Bellow’s fiction, and that is done on purpose in order for them to endure, defy, resist and love. Joseph embodies the possibility of a future rebirth: “Perhaps the war could teach me, by violence, what I had been unable to learn during those months in the room. Perhaps I could sound creation by other means” (Bellow, 1944, p. 191). Asa Leventhal achieves some inner peace as he realizes a possible hope and promise for humanity, and Tommy Wilhelm experiences a compassion that brings him closer to humanity. Bellow informs the reader that though evil and vulgarity are facts, modern America should be a society of compassion, generosity, beauty, nobility and love. Bellow is aware of the fact that the more American society is trapped within ugliness, the more morality, beauty and humanism become essentials. Therefore, his fictional world is a denial of the wasteland outlook and an affirmation of the dignity of human being. Bellow refuses to regard human nature as a thing that can be described by terms like ‘evil’, ‘broken’ and defeated, and believes in the meantime that there is always a possibility for a good future and a change of heart. His protagonists attempt to avoid the alienation outlook and turn it to a heroic style, while Bellow suggests that his heroes have decided not to dangle any more. Critics in the eighties of the 20th century consistently recognized the prominent role the city plays in Bellow’s fiction. One significant example is Francis Patrick Fox in his “Saul Bellow’s City Fiction” (1983), which focuses on the challenges the city and city experience posed to Bellow throughout his career. In fact, Bellow’s earliest efforts to meet the challenges of the city and the city experience can be seen in his first novel Dangling Man (1944). It tells the story of Joseph, the protagonist, trying explore his city, Chicago. He is portrayed as a creature of an urban world, alienated from it, divided against himself and incapable of any kind of action. As the story begins, he finds himself alone in the city where he has spent all his life. Joseph explores the characteristics of modern life while he is isolated in his room, and participating in the war makes him dangle, torn between the public life of the city and his private life. His search for goodness and morality in the urban world turns out to be disappointing. He says:

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The giants of the last century had their Liverpools and Londons, their Lilles and Hamburgs to contend against, as we have our Chicagos and Detroits. And there might be a chance that I was misled, even with these ruins before my eyes....The worlds we sought were never those we saw; the worlds we bargained for were never the worlds we got. (Bellow, 1944, pp. 17–​18)

He looks pessimistic when he ponders on passers-​by in Chicago and feels disappointed when he reflects on the kind of people the modern city has offered. Joseph believes that Chicago does not offer a humanistic model for how a good man should live, rather it aggravates his isolation: “I, in this room, separate, alienated, distrustful, find in my purpose not an open world, but a closed, hopeless jail.... Some men seem to know exactly where their opportunities lie; they break prisons and cross whole Siberias to pursue them. One room holds me” (Bellow, 1944, p. 61). Joseph realizes that he and Chicagoans are the victims of the modern city which is characterized by “ideal constructions, obsessive devices” (p. 93). Asa Leventhal in The Victim illustrates this image when he portrays New York as the exemplar of modern urban civilization. Asa, like Joseph, is a city struggler attempting to discover the sense of his life. He struggles to bypass the fears and grievances of his daily life and give sense to the nonsense existing in the city. Asa is embodied as a victim of the urban world with its realistic and materialistic details. He uses the social milieu of the topographical features of the city he describes to explore the relationship between his inner thoughts, his future hopes for New York, and its reality. Fox sums up the relationship between Asa’s quest in the city and Bellow’s vision by saying that “Asa’s quest through that world to discover his true ‘self’ reflects Bellow’s quest to discover his role as an artist in an urban world” (1983, p. 52). Unlike Joseph, who is isolated in a closed room, Asa is evicted onto the streets and into the life of the city, which allows Bellow to present more vividly the inter-​relatedness of city man and city world. The Adventures of Augie March measures Bellow’s skills as a city author. As the story begins, Augie recollects the details of Chicago, unlike Joseph who informs about New York from his closed room. Augie tells the reader about the possibilities of life and satisfaction, the energy and grandeur that a great city may offer to a boy like him. In Chicago, he recalls his mysterious experience when he visits the whorehouse, and that takes him from Joseph’s role as a spectator in Dangling Man his own role as a participant city boy and from Joseph’s bitterness to his own feelings of pride of his belonging to the city and affection for the kindness of his whore. This sustains him through all his

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adventures and makes his quest for how man should live in an urban world very promising. Mr. Sammler shares most of Augie’s experiences as a city man in Mr. Sammler’s Panet. Bellow presents him as a city Jew at the heart of New York. Sammler has pondered on the social, economic, cultural and political features that shape his city in particular and urban America in general. Sammler composes his thoughts amid the pandemonium of New York City in the sixties: What one sees on Broadway while bound for the bus. All human types reproduced, the barbarian, redskin or Fiji, the dandy, the buffalo hunter, the desperado, the queer, the sexual fantasist, the squaw;…. Just look (Sammler looked) at this imitative anarchy of the streets these Chinese revolutionary tunics, these babes in unisex toyland, these surrealist warchiefs..., Acting mythic. (Bellow, 1970, p. 135)

Here, Sammler informs the reader about the social classes that characterize New York streets, including “the barbarian, redskin or Fiji, the dandy, the buffalo hunter, the desperado, the queer, the sexual fantasist, the squaw.” Sammler reveals that the city contains striking antagonisms between different social categories and that results in his suffering and alienation amidst this context. Sammler suffers because he cannot cope with the rapidly changing ethics and values of modern urban America. He attempts to transcend his sufferings when he recalls his childhood world with a sterner, historical vision. His recollections of the past and meditations of the present are shaped by the sardonic perspective New York offers. As a retired journalist, Sammler’s philosophical reflections are shaped by his experience of Bloomsbury in the twenties and thirties, war-​torn Europe in the forties and New York City in the sixties. They are marked by the memories of hopes of the generation that came after the First World War and the fears of the generation that was contemporaneous to the rise of the totalitarian regimes immediately before the Second World War. Sammler has been portrayed as the victim of the urban world and is depicted as the symbol of sacrifice in New York. Bellow says: He, personally, was a symbol. His friends and family had made him a judge and a priest. And of what was he a symbol? He didn’t even know. Was it because he had survived? He hadn’t even done that, since so much of the earlier person had disappeared. It wasn’t surviving, it was only lasting. He had lasted.... When Antonina was murdered. When he himself underwent murder beside her. When he and sixty or seventy others, all stripped naked and having dug their own grave, were fired upon and fell in. Bodies upon his own body. Crushing. His dead wife nearby somewhere.

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Struggling out much later from the weight of corpses, crawling out of the loose soil. Scraping on his belly. Hiding in a shed. Finding a rag to wear. Lying in the woods many days. (1970, pp. 86–​87)

Here, Sammler is seen as both priest and judge because he manages to survive in the war. He is regarded as the symbol of the hero in New York. The murder of his wife Antonina reflects the extent to which savagery has dominated the city. More tragically, corruption in the urban zone is intensified by the mass murder of stripped and naked people. Sammler’s life, as Bellow informs the reader, has become a testament to what has gone wrong with humanism in New York. In short, Bellow places in Mr. Sammler’s Planet a hero who embodies the features of modern urban America. Starting with his early novels, Bellow has chosen the urban experience of modern life in most of his fictional world. He concludes that the fundamental problems that face man in the big cities of America are the competing claims of science and ethics, materialism and humanism, and the dramatic and rapid increase of the role of capitalistic values in their relationship with highly educated protagonists. Bellow admits that these issues are to be addressed in the consciousness of modern man while he is experiencing the challenges of the city. Joseph’s quest as a city man in Dangling Man, the quest of a city intellectual for the answer to how a good man should live, triggers off Bellow’s own search for city protagonists who unravel the challenges that characterize the urban experience in modern America. In his later novels, Bellow enlarges his scope concerning city experience and city challenges. He explores with integrity of thought and originality of style the ambiguous experience of modern urban life in America. Echoing Dostoevsky’s deep reflections on St. Petersburg in the 19th century, Bellow makes Chicago and New York the main settings of all his novels. As a matter of fact, starting with Dangling Man and The Victim and going through Augie March, Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, The Dean’s December and Humboldt’s Gift demonstrates Bellow’s vision about contemporary life in Chicago and New York as rich in imagination and as distinctive in expression. In short, Bellow’s contribution in the investigation of the American urban world is well summed up by Fox, who says, “Bellow’s thinly veiled memoir of the progress of his generation of city Jews and intellectuals from interlopers on the American scene to media celebrities and culture heroes confirms the critical role the development of urban American culture during the decades of the forties, fifties and sixties had in shaping Bellow’s career as a writer” (1983, p. 253).

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Crystallizing the features of Bellow’s intellectual heroes in his later novels, Rho demystifies their antagonistic relationship with the masses as follows: Bellovian intellectuals read Plato, Shakespeare, Dante, and the European classics, and listen to Mozart and Beethoven. The other characters are occupied with worldly desires, and are busy attempting to fulfill them, which will never happen. They have no time for the classics, and even if they had, they will not glance at them. The classics have no relation to money and pleasure, the final objects to the masses, but they are fundamental to the cultivation of their mind, filled with anxiety, self-​indulgence, vulgarity and impatience. (1999, p. 15)

This shows the connection between Bellow’s intellectuals, sanity and alienation on the one hand and the masses on the other. Being marginalized in their societies, families and themselves, Bellow’s intellectuals “decide to be alienated from their society of their own will, but presuppose that they will come back to the place. They deny being adjusted to society so as to keep their inner freedom” (1975, p. 16). The intellectual characters become bookish and aloof. In Bellow’s words, “The more isolated you are, the more you develop a terrible book-​dependency; you begin to see you how you protected yourself from what you thought to be brutal, vulgar, and squalid. Building a fortress of high-​mindedness” (1995, p. 273). Alienation as choice sketches a high level of consciousness, and tells the difference between the elite and common people. They reject the American culture because it is a ‘junk culture’, a ‘kingdom of frivolity’ an entertainment society that reads junk magazines on sex and commercial goods, and watches TV for gags, talk shows, violence, and pornographic movies. The culture Bellow seeks has disappeared in history. It is the culture in which intellectuals are trained in European liberal education. This paradigm is unrealizable in a society where democracy and capitalism are the dominant ideologies. Accordingly, Bellow sought to subvert and deconstruct these norms of what he calls ‘low culture’ in postmodern American society. In short, madness becomes wisdom. Intellectualism turns out to be the means to achieve this wisdom. The radical change that has occurred in modern and postmodern culture appears to be the main reason, to Bellow’s mind, behind the madness and the alienation of his intellectual heroes. In Foucault’s terms, a change has happened in both the center and the periphery in society. It was art, the humanities, classical books, and religion that were at the center in the past, but they have been replaced by science, technology, sports, TV and psychiatry. The center has been marginalized in our modern age, while the margin has been

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centralized. In his essay “A World Too Much with Us,” Bellow confesses, “It is true that the writer no longer holds the important position he held in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. He has lost out. He is not at the center of things” (1975c, p. 5). Then, who takes the reins of modern society? Bellow says that it is scientists. By ‘the scientists’ he means the opposite of men steeped in humanities. He refers not only to men of science in the narrow sense but also to lawyers, business men, and journalists in a broad sense. They are “makers of the culture industry,” to recall Adorno (2001, p. 22). They produce a culture based on “analysis, systemization, standardization, not on imagination and creativity” (Rho, 1999, p. 10). Historically, this change started with the Great Depression in the late twenties. The early failures of capitalism with its major economic problems qualified an age with darkness, fear and pessimism. The bitterness and the mass killing of the two World Wars accelerated the level of madness, subversion and alienation and the feeling of the absurdity of life. In comparison with the previous decades, America was more pragmatic, more industrialized and more materialistic at that time. It was a time of mass productive systems, risk, commodity, efficiency, investment. What was desired in the society was not men of abstraction, men of imagination, but profitable and marketable men, those who like to show off and to demonstrate themselves. Thinkers who influenced this path of thought were Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche and others. They are known for their madness, alienation and absurdity, and they influenced Western writers, including Bellow himself. Bellow’s mad intellectuals are aware of this dramatic change in culture and humanities. In Benda’s terms, they admit the huge gap between “the laymen” and “the clerks” (1969, p. 43). The laymen are those “whose full function consists of essentially in the pursuit of material interests,” and the clerks are all those “whose activity essentially is not the pursuit of practical aims, all those who seek their joy in the practice of an art or a science or a metaphysical speculation, in short in the possession of non-​material advantages” (Benda, 1969, p. 43). Bellow’s intellectual heroes belong to the second category. In Macdonald’s words, “They belong to high culture” (1960, p. 20). Rho interestingly describes them as follows: They are totally opposite to those types of physical workers. They are passive, effeminate, self-​analytical, secluded, aloof, eccentric … facially yellowish, hard to please, and uprooted. They are erudite, a walking dictionary, ready to be consulted. But they don’t know how to talk: once they start a conversation, it soon turns into a lecture

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Madness and Subversion in Saul Bellow’s Later like a tape-​recorded program. They are awkward at everyday life: they are credulous, and become easy prey for the masses; they earn a lot, spending little for themselves, or depend completely on their patrons. When they need help, they resort to a bookshelf first, finding no answer there. (1999, pp. 13–​14)

Bellow’s fierce attack and subversion to the “mass culture” in America is associated with the sanity of his intellectuals. When they observe the mass culture in America in terms of “junk culture,” a “kingdom of frivolity,” an entertainment society, and a pleasure society throughout their philosophical meditations (Bellow, 1964), they reveal how desperate their resentment is, how uprooted and alienated from society they are. They become “prey to the masses, eccentric, awkward at everyday life, credulous” (Rho, 1999, p. 55), and, by the end, mad intellectuals who ceaselessly seek to deconstruct the norms of the masses that represent a great threat to humanism, intellectualism, wisdom and civilization. In the masses’ eyes, they are only mad, ignorant and lost figures; however, in their minds’ eyes, they are the unrecognized legislators of the world. It is in line with this that the concept of madness shall be understood and related to the strategies of subversion and the deconstructive approach. Clinical definitions are not applicable in the scope of this research. Mental illness, physical sufferings, delirium and hallucinations are only aspects of the physical agony of the body and have nothing to do with intellectualism and wisdom. Foucault’s depiction of mad figures in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment eras can only be seen as a historical, political and economic reading of the major changes society has undergone. It is only an archeological investigation of the anthropology of European society. The way Bellow’s intellectual heroes in his later novels show their excess of consciousness, the way they criticize the norms of the mass, the popular, the way they subvert and deconstruct the ethics of the modern and the postmodern can only be acquainted with their own ‘madness’. It is the sanity of the intellectual who seeks to bring some change to the world, and be satisfied with it. Madness, therefore, can only be understood in terms of wisdom, subversion and deconstruction. Madness, intellectuals and their alienation have long been discussed in America, and more seriously in Europe. In this study, the questions are: why are Bellow’s intellectuals marginalized, and moved out from the center of society? Are they doomed to disappear in a society where equality and capitalism are omnipotent?

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Bellow’s fictional discourse has been identified with other types of discourses. The more ambiguous and open he Bellovian text is, the more its assumptions become hidden, and therefore the more liable it is to be subjected to a deconstructive analysis. In fact, Bellow must be seen not only as a novelist but also as a poet, philosopher, playwright, theorist, politician, humanist, rebel, dreamer, lover, victim and, above all, Man. Nevertheless, there is one question which crops up in one’s mind: can one arguably say that intertextuality and the refusal of disciplinary boundaries are behind this subversive position of the novelist? Only a deconstructive reading of the writer’s mind and wor(l)d could possibly provide a thorough answer to the logic that governs Bellow’s later writings. It discusses the intellectual, literary, historical and political background within which the writer first introduced his novels. Literary critics, following this claim, should be familiar not only with the deconstructive means of criticism, but also with the plethora of historical, cultural, intellectual, political and philosophical factors responsible for the production of Bellow’s novels. The absence of literariness in Bellow’s texts is to be interchangeably understood with the death and the resurrection of theory. In other words, the absence of the category of literature in Bellow is a reflection of the amalgamation of the various types of discourses which include the biographies, letters, scholarships, philosophy and politics of the age and the major critical theories produced during and after his life. It is in this way that literariness in Bellow’s texts, like the death and the resurrection of critical theories, disappears, only to come back in the ghostly form of a new theory or a new philosophy announcing that “it has not yet finished [its own] dying” (Davis, 2004, p. 173). Deconstruction helps demystify this play, to cite Derrida (1990), of presence and absence, death and resurrection, literature and other types of discourse. It reveals, by the same token, the ideological motives that govern Bellow’s views of literature, theory, politics, history, philosophy and life in general. Being subversive, Bellow, as shall be demonstrated in the forthcoming chapters, has proved striking affinities between his literature and the trajectory of the development of Western intellectual thinking. His most radical contribution to postmodern Jewish American fiction is his perpetual attempts to introduce it anew. This simply means that the novelist attempted to benefit from both the intellectual heritage and the various emerging forms of knowledge and philosophy. In this respect, this study is going to show the difference of Bellow not for the simple reason that he is a fervent believer in Man’s moral

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and ethical value, as the Enlightenment and modernity wanted us to believe, not because he is different from other Jewish American novelists, not even because of his attempts to sum up the Western intellectual, cultural, philosophical and political heritage, but simply because he sought to overcome all the norms and codes existing around him in order to foreground himself against the traditional background. What follows is that subversion becomes a key term in Bellow’s writings. In fact, he wrenched himself from the poetics of the established order of writing fiction. He subverted the poetics of Romanticism (namely of the French and the Russian novelists) in his early novels. During the fifties and the early sixties, he bypassed the habits of existentialism, surrealism and even structuralism. In the late sixties and the early seventies, he showed an awareness of the traditions of New Historicism and even deconstruction in his late novels including those he wrote immediately before his death (Bloom, 1986). The growth of the mind of the writer stems not only from the skills of the imagination but also from the types of philosophical discourses available at the hand of the novelist (Novitz, 1987). In his early career, for instance, Bellow transcended the theme of war, to cite Karl Yespers, and gave it a specific connotation. War in Dangling Man, The Victim, and Mr. Sammler’s Planet shifts from being a gesture of death to being an act of life and honor. Madness in Herzog turns out to be the wisdom of the intellect. The journey in Henderson the Rain King becomes a memory, to cite Harold Bloom. The poet in Humboldt’s Gift and the historian in Ravelstein take the position of “the unrecognized philosopher,” to borrow a term from Bauman (1987). Yet one objection that might be raised is that these issues are not new since they were conveyed by other novelists before him. Therefore, Bellow remains a classical writer who kept following the path of his predecessors. The response to this objection is that although Bellow rewrote the same old themes of madness, sanity, alienation, war, morality, ethics and values, he ‘clothed’ them with philosophical dimensions which further reinforced subversion and deconstruction. One point that should not go unmentioned is that the present book is not concerned, at least at this stage, with a textual analysis of the writer’s novels, nor is it required methodologically to do that. One reason behind this claim is that the study is still attempting to ground itself in the deconstructive approach. The other reason, which is methodological, is that it aims to present results with regard to the relationships between Bellow’s strategies of subversion and the recent critical theories of text, and particularly

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deconstructionism. This chapter therefore seeks to end up with some logical results that pave the way for the deconstructive approach. The last argument for the difference of Bellow refers to his use of the concept of the sublime. In fact, the idea of the sublime runs throughout most of his works. Although it was introduced in ways by different other writers, Bellow recycled it and gave it ontological connotations. This gesture implies that all his works are concerned with the ontology of human being. The writer has benefited from the sublime ideals of the Enlightenment, the ethics of Romanticism in Britain and the poetics of modern fiction in France, Russia and the United States (Fuchs, 1984, p. 1). Unfortunately, by enumerating his enemies in Herzog, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Humboldt’s Gift and Ravelstein, Bellow sought to subvert their findings concerning the sublime, conceding, therefore, that they partially understood the ontology of Mankind. The sublime shifts from an idea in society and ordinary life to an ideal in the mind of the novelist, and once again shifts from a ‘movement in the spirit to a movement in the text’. In his early career, Bellow acquainted the idea of the sublime, in an Aristotelian manner, with virtues and utopian ideals that regulate human relationships. However, at the end of his career, he identified the sublime with madness, alienation, boredom and grief. In his early writings, the novelist was committed to the problems of the Jewish community, but, in his late writings, he showed a great interest in the ethical and moral problems of Mankind that gives a further connotation to the idea of the sublime. Meaning in Bellow’s novels has become problematic. Reading his works is a matter of interpretation, which highly depends on the perspective of the reader and the context of the writing. The political traces in his novels lie in the history of exile and deterritorialization, the theories of politics in the Enlightenment and postmodern thoughts, tackling the paradoxical concepts of love and hatred, life and death, sanity and madness, torture and freedom. However, the philosophical connotations are conveyed through the spiritual meditations, the metaphorical shifts, recollections, childhood, memories and the theoretical speculations carried out by Bellow’s subjects. This, indeed, complicates the function of the reader in deciphering the codes that govern the secretes of his works. The meaning, in this line of thought, is epitomized through metaphors, symbolism, exaggeration and other poetical devices, stressing thereby one of the most famous mottoes of New Criticism that “a text/​a poem should not mean … but be” (Brooks, 1980, p. 402). The reader should only have a deconstructive mind to bring all the contradictions and varieties together in a unified work.

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If one turns the argument around to see if Bellow has constructed a world of his own in which the meaning has become problematic, one would certainly discover that the novelist has a rationale that governs his thought. This chapter has tried to show some of the subversive strategies deployed by the novelist in the previous sections in their relationship with Derrida’s deconstructionism. In the next chapter, Bellow’s novels shall be addressed in detail. A textual analysis shall be considered in line with the findings of deconstructionism. So, the assumption is that since the meaning in Bellow’s narratives has become problematic, unmasking its secretes would highly depend on the deconstructive approach adopted in the next four chapters. Since the Bellovian fictional world is an amalgamation of literature, philosophy, history, culture, politics, ideology and theory, it becomes clear that only a deconstructive approach could aptly establish a new reading of the writer and justify his different intellectual position to his contemporaries. Implicit in what has been said concerning the efforts to define the concept of modernity is a latent desire to assess Bellow as a modern novelist, considering the influence of modernity on his world of fiction. Perhaps, the researcher observes the influence of Dostoevsky, Joyce, the 19th-​century French fiction tradition, and others (Fuchs, 1984). The importance of Jewish novelists such as Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller and others can also be highlighted for their significant influence on Bellow. More strikingly, modern philosophy has shaped his views concerning art, life and the world. This dialectical interaction with other texts strengthens Bellow’s subversion in modernity. It can be seen that Bellow deployed modern philosophical findings in the most scrupulous way to deepen, first, the affinities between his fictional world and the project of modernity, and second, to unravel the symmetry between the nature of the Enlightenment ideals and the subversive nature of his mind. That was neither achieved through his faithful exploitation of Jewish American fiction nor through his remarkable referring to the modern traditions of fiction in France and Russia, but through use of the major concepts of the Enlightenment philosophy. Again, it is not that Bellow reacted to the classical traditions of fiction through the use of logical arguments based on the mind, but simply that his writings in a typically Nietzschean manner used the philosophical themes and arguments only to subvert the classical traditions of fiction by showing how they are incompatible with the very beliefs they seem to uphold. These are fundamental premises upon which the following chapters shall elaborate, Bellow as a modernist intellect par excellence.

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The postmodern theory becomes significant in arguing for Bellow’s subversion since it combines the postmodern artistic representation and the major philosophical issues of the age. In other words, the novelist’s subversive gestures aptly revolve around the literary and the philosophical, the particular and the general, the theoretical and the practical, the worldly and the sublime, the aesthetic and the ideological. In light of this, Bellow develops Robert Siegle’s politics of reflexivity by referring to certain codes by which we organize reality and establish a meaning in the text. He also exploits Barthes’s assumption concerning the unmasterable nature of reality as he contests the notions of mastery and totalization thereby endorsing new techniques in relating stories. Other recurrent instances are the extensive references to the themes of madness, the crisis of knowledge, moral uncertainty, the Holocaust, exile, risk, fear, marginalization and the illusions of intellectuals as highlighted by Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser and Immanuel Levinas, the reconstruction of the female body, the debunking of the history of Man’s desire and the construction of the female knowledge as envisioned by Julia Kristeva (1987) in particular and the French feminist theorists in general. True to this faith, the writer, driven by a fervent desire to eradicate the past, to renovate and wake up from the metaphysical sleep, proceeds in this way assuming that forgetting the past becomes a necessity. For Bellow, as for Nietzsche who markedly inspired him, it is “[only] upon moments of radical forgetting, when life can be experienced in a non-​historical way, that anything ‘truly great and human’ can be erected” (Brooks, 1980, p. 124). In short, the novelist seems: “to have explored new ways of both fully embodying traditional/​formal representational values [and] confronting their experience of the present with their understanding of the past … [and they] bring modern life onto the page while remembering tradition; the paradox is novelty with tradition” (Brooks, 1980, p. 2). In this chapter, the researcher has been concerned with two fundamental issues: sketching a literature review of the concept of madness, and thematically tracing the past criticisms of Bellow’s fictional world.

For this purpose, the concept of madness has been addressed thematically and archeologically in its relationship with 20th-​century American literature in general and Bellow’s later novels in particular. Foucault, as argued, defined madness as a mental illness from the Renaissance until the Enlightenment. In the 19th century, trauma was regarded as a sign of madness, while in the

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20th century, madness was deeply related to schizophrenia. Black American madness depicts resistance to all forms of hegemony in a white culture. The relevance of this literature review exists in highlighting the different aspects of the concept of madness:  historical, mental, physical, political, economic and literary. Although this brief investigation of madness has provided a better understanding of the concept, more efforts have to be exerted to relate it to intellectualism, subversion and deconstruction in Bellow’s later novels. The past criticisms of Bellow’s world of fiction have ranged from addressing the themes of morality, humanism, faith, madness and illusion to the classical readings which focused on motifs like realism, heroism and intellectualism. The significance of this analysis lies in epitomizing the trajectory of the intellectual maturity of the author throughout time and ideas. In light of this analysis, madness in Bellow’s later novels can be said to be closely associated with marginalized intellectuals who seek to subvert and deconstruct the ethics of the masses. Madness triggers off the concept of deconstruction, which represents the method upon which the whole of the present work is hinged.

·3· THE DECONSTRUCTIVIST PERSPECTIVE Every profound new movement makes a great swing also backwards to some older, half-​forgotten way of consciousness. D. H. Lawrence, “Apocalypse”

Deconstructionism gives an opportunity for a better understanding of Bellow’s later novels from different points of view and helps obtain a more nuanced view of the connections between the different themes and concepts investigated. From a research perspective, deconstructionism is very useful for finding intersections between the themes of madness and subversion as wisdom and intellectualism on the one hand and the concept of deconstruction on the other. This necessitates a textual analysis of Bellow’s later novels, with special attention given to their intellectual protagonists, namely Herzog, Humboldt, Henderson, Corde and Mr. Sammler, in line with the findings of deconstructionism. Accordingly, the present chapter will sketch the background of the deconstructivist approach as well as its fundamental premises. Deconstruction in philosophy and literature, the boundaries between discourses and deconstruction, and ultimately deconstruction in logocentrism also need to be investigated carefully as they clarify the mechanisms and the main principles that govern the deconstructivist approach. Secondarily, the concepts of modernity and postmodernity shall be addressed as they illustrate the trajectory and development of deconstructionism. One assumption behind this is that one cannot have a deep insight into the deconstructive approach without

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contextualizing it in modernity and postmodernity. This will be followed by a discussion of their ability to produce valid results. Jacques Derrida became synonymous with deconstructionism because he surprisingly and unexpectedly revised the methodology, the design and the findings of metaphysical and logocentric thinking. Derrida considers classical philosophy as a grand, authoritarian and totalitarian narrative. Its meaning stems from outside of its text. Derrida’s most famous words that “there is nothing outside the text” (1976, p. 51) become highly significant in unraveling the ‘blind spots’ which metaphysics neglected, unnoticed and eventually abandoned. In this sense, he relates the meaning and the interpretation of any text to its language, signs and writing. Derrida states “from the moment that there is a meaning there is nothing but signs. We think only in signs” (p. 50). Stocker emphasizes this claim, admitting that “there is nothing to say about the [text] from outside it in a preface or an introduction” (2006, p. 101). Adopting an archeological method and a genealogical design, Foucault (1973) in The Archeology of Knowledge advocates that the history of philosophy is the history of epistemological cuts, caesuras, épistèmes and structures of thinking. Referring to Foucault’s views of the structures of thought or episteme throughout history, White writes, “In any event, according to [Foucault], we are at the end of one epistemic configuration and at the beginning of another. We exist in the gap between two épistèmes, one dying, the other not yet born of which, however, the ‘mad’ poets and the artists of the last century and a half were the heralds” (1978, p. 92). Paul de Man tackled the issue from another perspective. He strikingly explains his position by referring to the unreadability in the literary text. He assumes, in Derrida’s manner, that great works whether literary, philosophical, or otherwise deconstruct themselves, that is, they build upon the insights and the blindness of each other. What follows from de Man’s (1993) insights, then, is that the whole history of philosophy and criticism is nothing other than a history of its own errors and blindness. Martin Heidegger, who was seen to have a decisive impact on Derrida, was the first to attack and refute the rationale of metaphysics. In his Being and Time, he deploys the concepts of being and becoming to envision the concepts of trembling and reflexivity. Clark explains this by asserting that: The text can be read as embodying a structure of potentially endless reflection/​repletion in which it encompasses any response to it as already part of what it is about. The distinction between the [text] ‘itself’ and the response to it becomes now an unstable one … the [text] becomes a paradigm of what a [text] should be according to a new-​ critical criteria. (1992, p. 92)

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In line with this thinking, deconstructionism did not emerge in the 20th century on the spur of the moment. It was conceived at least a century earlier ahead of its time and proved to be a forward-​looking thought even a century later. Therefore, it is methodologically necessary to explain the origins of Derrida’s deconstructionism by referring to two fundamental lines of thinking:  first, deconstruction in its relationship with philosophy, discourse boundaries and logocentrism, and second, deconstruction in modernity and postmodernity. It is fundamental to grasp deconstructionism within the theoretical contexts of modernity and postmodernity in order to understand where it comes from, and how its basic ideas and concepts have developed and altered over time. Derrida (1990) defined deconstructionism by referring to its origin in philosophy and its relationship with literary discourse. Accordingly, this means that deconstruction has its roots in philosophy, and it is in this way a category of philosophy. To cite Derrida, literature overlaps with philosophy. The literary discourse has many similarities with the philosophical one. Literature is a discourse that has lost its logic, according to Derrida, and philosophy, in contrast, is a discourse that has lost its metaphoricity. These ‘striking overlaps’ are better illustrated by referring to certain philosophers who influenced Derrida. In fact, Derrida, under the influence of Nietzsche, sought to revise Husserl’s reflections on phenomenology. Though he started his intellectual career with strong support for Husserl’s ideas, with the publication of La Voix et le Phenomene (1990), Derrida asserts that Husserl, throughout his writings, perpetually invokes the conventional concepts of metaphysical thinking. This idealism in Husserl, to Derrida’s mind, arises not so much from its reduction to a particular doctrine, but rather from the demands of a unitary conception, especially from the demands imposed by the metaphysical determinations of presence (Derrida, 1990). Hegel and Heidegger do as much as Nietzsche’s and Husserl’s influence. Hegel admits, “… Philosophy is the child of its own age. This knowledge comes only after the happenings of the day, that is, philosophy, like the owl of Minerva, comes as a product of the dominant culture or the emergent cultural paradigm to assess it” (1977b, p. 1). Likewise, deconstruction has come by the end of the capitalistic age to question the trembling state of metaphysical reason. The concepts of being and becoming, to recall Heidegger (1962), become fundamental methods to assess the totalitarian and authoritarian reason of metaphysics. Contrary to philosophers like Husserl, who remained entrapped within the classical thinking based on binary oppositions, Derrida deconstructs the authority of the past. He denounces the hegemony of reason and considers it illusive and misleading. He thereby generates

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the concept of deconstruction from this intellectual debate and takes it to the extreme. Derrida was perhaps the first who markedly blurred the distinction between literature, other types of discourse and deconstruction. Philosophy has been defined with metaphor, literature and aesthetics. Philosophical discourse in this way cannot escape the rhetorical, the literary, the linguistic, the metaphorical, and therefore cannot eliminate its status as literature, as another “fiction in a certain way” (Derrida, 2002, p. 269). Philosophical language has always depended in its existence on a notion of literary discourse, a system of metaphors and rhetorical structures positing thereby an oblique and problematical relationship with certain philosophical fields of inquiry like truth and logic. Conversely, texts usually epitomized as literary endorse powerful philosophical deconstructions [and specific philosophical themes] once the importance of their special logics, like the logic of their supplementarity, is recognized. The literary text, according to this enterprise, might possibly become a philosophical text or a cultural text or a political text or even a religious text with one privilege: its ability to decipher all codes and resist all forms of logocentric closures at the levels of both form and content. Derrida’s theory of deconstruction lurks behind this juxtaposition between the literary discourse and the philosophical one. The interpretation of a literary text involves a double reading, suggesting thereby the ways in which the blind spots in the analyzing texts call their premises into question through “using the system of concepts within which a text works to produce constructs, such as difference and supplement, which challenge the consistency of that system” (Sturrock, 1981, p. 172). Derrida (1990) legitimizes his approach by stating that disciplines do, indeed, overlap through showing how the Saussurian findings of structural linguistics proved to be significant strategies and methods to deal with “myths, kinship rules and totemism in Levi-​ Strauss, the unconscious in Lacan, the grammar of narrative or the literary work in Barthes, and the episteme of a given historical period as a grammar generating possibilities of discourse in Foucault” (Sturrock, 1981, p. 174). In The Archeology of Knowledge (1973), Foucault supports Derrida’s deconstruction, hypertext, and the absence of boundaries between discourses by assuming that the subject has been decentered in its relationship with the laws of its desire, the different forms of its language, and the rules and plays of its mythical and imaginative discourse. Derrida’s promising strategy of deconstruction conveys that meaning is to be explained in terms of an underlying system of difference and displacement since there is no one myth in the case of Strauss,

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no one history in Foucault, no one consciousness in Lacan and, therefore, no one discourse in Derrida. In his article, “Jacques Derrida,” Culler explains the affinity between philosophical discourse and literary language in Derrida’s view as follows: Philosophy … [as] a system of metaphors whose metaphoricity had been forgotten forever … constituted itself as in a direct relation to the logos by identifying as its Other a fictional and rhetorical mode of discourse, and the demonstration, carried out for example in some of Nietzsche’s texts, that philosophy too is a rhetorical structure, based on fictions generated by tropes, leads one to posit what one call an archi-​or proto-​literature which would be the common condition of both literature and philosophy. Philosophy cannot escape the rhetorical, the literary, the linguistic. (1979, p. 178)

Sim sheds light on deconstruction by focusing on intertextuality, the unfinished meanings inherent in the text, the hypertext, etc. He defines deconstruction in the following way: … a deconstructive reading displays just how much textuality is always a network of unfinished meanings, with ‘each’ text differing from itself, for which [Derrida] coins the term ‘difference’, and ‘each’ text a trace of, and endlessly referring to, other texts, which invokes Barthes’ term intertextuality, while arguing that a text is ‘no longer a finished corpus of writing, some content enclosed in a book or its margin’, Derrida’s writings also, however, performs what it states. The arguments in Of Grammatology … are brought into a more productive frame in a later more ‘synthetic’ work as such as Glas which, by knitting together commentary and citations from Hegel’s and Genette’s writings not only blurs the boundaries between philosophy and literature, but also creates a new kind of textuality. As if anticipating hypertext, Glas’s typography undoes the linearity of writing, transgresses the borders of text and puts into question the very form of the book. (2001, p. 197)

In Derrida’s view, this other interpretation, this gap or lack of identity in the literary text, is more easily defined by what it is not. Disproving Lacan’s famous statement that “a letter always arrives at its destination,” Derrida answers “it always might not” (Sturrock, 1981, p. 176), revealing in this way how it becomes impossible for a text to say what it initially intends to achieve, a gesture which by no means generates irresolvable moments of undecidability between conflicting or contradictory readings. Derrida asserts once again that the paradoxical relationship between the meaning and its opposite, the origin and the trace, or rather the origin and the repetition or supplement of that

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origin, can only pinpoint a sense of play. In Derrida’s Writing and Difference, one reads: Play is the disruption of presence. The presence of an element is always a signifying and substitutive reference inscribed in a system of differences and the movement of a chain. Play is always a play of absence and presence, but if it is to be thought radically, play must be conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence. Being must be conceived as presence or absence of play and not the other way round. (2002, p. 292)

The play in a literary text, to Derrida’s mind, is to be understood interchangeably with terms like ‘rupture’, ‘gap’, ‘lacunae’, ‘lack of identity’, lack of boundaries between discourses, or what Paul de Man calls the impossibility or the unreadability of the literary text. That loss of an absolute origin and a final reading of the literary text is where deconstruction arises, where the critic makes sure that he is continually introducing new interpretations, displacing the old ones in order to prevent any of them from becoming the central concepts of a final truth/​origin. Derrida in his Margins of Philosophy arguably pointed out that the structure of being itself should revolve around the dual movements of presence and absence, theory and practice, being and becoming, “the saddened, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauistic side of the thinking of play whose other side would be the Nietzschean affirmation” (1982, p. 292), that is, the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth and without origin which is offered into an active interpretation. Much of Derrida’s theory of deconstruction in literature is derived from his philosophical background. What language represents to Derrida is what existence is to Heidegger, and if meaning to the former is demystified through the gestures of deferring, erasing, tracing, retracing, deconstructing and perpetual deciphering, it is to the latter epitomized through the processes of being and becoming. What deconstruction is to Derrida is what ‘trembling’, or what Culler (1979) calls reflexivity, is to Heidegger. Heidegger (1962), unconsciously shaping the thinking of Derrida, assumes that we are living in a world of equipment and that the meaning we are acquiring is a matter of experience, being and existence. It is perhaps for this reason that Heidegger overtones that existence precedes essence and that the world does not appear to us as an objective reality. It comes, however, into being by a process of abstraction (and becoming) from ordinary everydayness. The world shows itself around us

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as a field of practical involvement within which human concerns are already implicated. Thinking differently, Nietzsche (1969) believes in a superman, with a high power, who is capable of overcoming metaphysics and the classical philosophies of consciousness by using terms like deconstruction, revolution, will to power, etc. Derrida confirms his being faithful to both Heidegger and Nietzsche and summons their postulates with regard to existence, being, time, the world, Man, essence, deconstruction, the superman and the will to power. Logocentrism has etymological roots in ancient Greek philosophy. It consists of two words: logos and center. It means that logic is at the center of the world. Differently put, reason is the center of philosophy. Deconstructionism seeks to deconstruct and subvert this classical equation. It accuses it of being grand, totalitarian and authoritarian. Postmodernism is introduced as the historical background that embraces deconstruction as well as the late age of modernity. It is in this way that these concepts are deeply related to each other. In Nietzsche’s (1969) terms, logocentrism, reason and metaphysics are the great danger which is displaced everywhere. He calls this mother-​morality danger. It is a grand thought that should melt into the air. Marx, putting it differently, assumes that these concepts belong to a unified historical era, which is pregnant with its own contradictions. Lyotard (1984) sketches the relationship between these concepts in terms of core, fragment and illusion. Contradicting Marx, he views postmodernity as the main and philosophical mode of thinking. Logocentrism is illusive. Modernity is fragmentary. And it is because of the vehement impact of the illusive and the fragmentary on postmodernity that Lyotard (1984) announces a “war on totality,” modernity, in order “to save the honor of postmodernity.” The apparent discrepancy between these concepts hides behind it deep connections in terms of periodization as well as concepts. In fact, they are intellectually introduced throughout a continuous historical period of time that runs over more than three centuries. In terms of a conceptual framework, these concepts, though pregnant with various contradictions, epitomize what Habermas would call the unfinished project of modernity. Their being introduced in this form can only reiterate the process of time consciousness. Researchers such as Habermas (1987) and Foucault (1973) have utilized the concept of modernity to measure the way it affects the emergence and the development of deconstructionism. Previous studies have assumed that raising the problem of defining modernity serves to clarify its connections with deconstruction. Rather than considering a single coherent account of modernity, however, the present work offers a series of different approaches

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and definitions which tackle the issue from different perspectives, and clarify thereby the way it is related to deconstructionism. It would be easy to take Hegel’s views concerning the main concepts of modernity as evidence of its main characteristics. However, this is not by any means ‘safe’ enough as the project of modernity has run through more than four hundred years starting with the French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596–​1650) up to 20th-​century German philosophy. Additionally, this project is to be understood as a cultural, philosophical, political and aesthetic enterprise that has no final point. Attempting to answer the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Kant offers a clear, simple and authoritative definition: Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-​incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-​incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Spare aude! Have courage to use your own understanding! (1997, p. 54)

Philosophically, modernity is understood interchangeably with enlightenment. Kant underlines four areas of investigation—​reason, morality, will and authority—​which affect the social, political, philosophical and aesthetic existence of all humanity. Being both a process which is under way, and a duty of the individual requiring intellectual courage to emerge from their ‘self-​ incurred immaturity’, Kant insists upon the existence of a certain faculty in Man, reason, which is responsible for fulfilling his progress at all levels. In his essay “Qu’est-​ce que les Lumières?” Michel Foucault supports Kant’s celebration of reason and logic as cultural phenomena “which [have] determined, at least in part, what we are, what we think, and what we do today” (1984, p. 562). Norris defines modernity as “a break with [the metaphysical] tradition, [a gesture] that releases us from the status of immaturity … Its motto is ‘dare to know!’ and it must be therefore construed ‘both as a process in which man participates collectively and as an act of courage to be accomplished personally’” (2000, pp. 54–​55). Defining reason and knowledge, in this respect, appears to be a matter of dispute and of the utmost importance, to the extent that Kant significantly endeavored to limit the scope of knowledge and the function of the mind by suggesting four questions: “What can I know? What ought I do? What may I hope? What is the human being?” (Kant, 1997, p. 7). It is faith and religion, to Kant’s mind, that should provide an answer to the first question, ethics to the second, morality and humanism to the third, and finally reason and philosophy to the fourth. Man, Kant concedes, is the

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ultimate purpose of his moral philosophy, a figure that “is no mere flaneur, no spellbound gazer at the frivolous distractions of life, but a figure embarked upon the quest for truth as that quest inescapably presents itself … under the aspect of a ceaseless transformation in the styles and modalities of ‘authentic’ self-​knowledge” (Norris, 2000, p. 63). This massive project of rationalization in modernity marks not only the establishment of reason, as the governing faculty in Man, but also the emergence of the ethics of humanism and the philosophy of morality as a cult of belief in modern Man. In line with this thought, Hume insightfully depicted modernity in terms of the juxtaposition between reason and passion. He asserted that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” (1978, p. 5), supporting the hypothesis that the original drive of all human actions comes from “some desire, or passion or sentiment as the governing element, with belief or knowledge or calculation playing a subordinate role, merely helping the passion to achieve satisfaction” (Mackie, 1980, p. 2). Hill acknowledges that Kant inaugurated concepts like “categorical imperatives, moral duty, autonomy of moral agents, good will, virtues, hypothetical consent, beneficence and self-​love, benevolence, compassion, happiness and human welfare, conscience and the moral worth” (2000, p. 13), which he concedes represent the moral reasons that should guide us rather than goad us. It is not surprising, therefore, that reason and morality become the only repositories of truth and modernity, that the enlightened mind established the court to judge the metaphysical mind, and that reason strove to bring the world to its home and be satisfied with it. The project of modernity is so dynamic and subversive that it becomes an unfinished project. Accordingly, Hegel (1977a) structures the world and ascribes to it a logical and formal unity, which he calls “the absolute knowledge or the absolute spirit.” In a memorable passage in his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel writes: What [the modern] man seeks in this situation … is the region of a higher, more substantial, truth, in which all oppositions and contradictions in the finite can find their final resolution, and freedom its full satisfaction. This is the region of absolute, not finite, truth… [P]hilosophy enters into the heart of the self-​contradictory characteristics, knows them in their essential nature, and it sets them in the harmony and unity which is truth. (1977a, p. 442)

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Oppositions and contradictions form the unfinished project of modernity and further its dynamicity. Hegel’s concepts of unity and order that structure all the oppositions inherent in the modern age are justified by Habermas’s analysis of modernity’s consciousness of time. Habermas asserts that, “the concept of modernity expresses the conviction that the future has already begun: it is the epoch that lives for the future; that opens itself up to the novelty of the future. In this way, the caesura defined by the new beginning has been shifted into the past, precisely to the start of modern times” (1987, p. 7). Hegel and Habermas proposed that it is only the Enlightenment’s reason that can enable us to feel ‘at home in the world’ by freeing us from the apparent opposition between freedom and necessity, past and present, ‘spirit and nature’, knowledge and its object, reason and faith. In other words, it is only the ‘active reason/​mind’ that can explain and unify the contradictions existing within the project of modernity. Munslow (1997) suggests that de Man’s and Derrida’s deconstruction is the means that helps unmask these ambiguities, and deconstructing modernity would surprisingly unravel the missed ‘gaps’, or the unenlightened aspects of modernity itself. Postmodernity has always been a problematic concept in relation to modernity and the Enlightenment. In the philosophical circles, a lot of serious scholarly work has been done on the ambiguous relationship between modernity, postmodernity and deconstructionism. According to Jean-​François Lyotard, postmodernism represents the tragic paradigm of a modernity that could not separate itself from the notions of unity, universality, totalitarian, grand narratives or what he dubbed metanarratives. Habermas responds that modernity, being an unfinished project starting from the Enlightenment ethos, was tragically cut short by Nazism, the Holocaust, and “an increasing dehumanization of life” in Newman’s (1985, p. 1) words. In Habermas’s logic, since “the paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness is exhausted, [since] the symptoms of exhaustion should dissolve with the transition to the paradigm of mutual understanding, [and since we need] the gaze of a third person [and] … a reflectively objectified knowledge” (1987, pp. 296–​297), then the project of modernity should be moving at this stage from pure reason to communicative reason, from subject-​centered reason to community-​centered reason, and from the modern to postmodern. (Habermas, 1987). Jameson offers a different understanding of the issue. He suggests that we are living in the late era of capitalism which he interestingly defines through its “utopian compensation [and] commitments to radical change” (1991, p. 42). The radical change is that kind of switch from modernity to

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postmodernity that is carried out by deconstructionism. Jameson explains the opposition between Habermas and Lyotard by the absence of a common intellectual ground on which their minds can meet: “One [is] French and (1789) Revolutionary in inspiration and the other Germanic and Hegelian; one valuing commitment, the other consensus” (1991, p. 24). Interestingly enough, he maintains that the apparent opposition can only sketch a deep historical consciousness about the shift from the modern to the postmodern and the role Derrida’s deconstruction has played in that change. Postmodernity has launched a radical break with tradition. It assumed that new ideas as well as new structures had to be implemented to replace the foundations of the past, which had brought only ruin and disaster to the present age. Adopting a genealogical design and an archeological method, Foucault revises Kant’s maturity of reason with its shining slogans, his view of modernity and the Enlightenment “dare to think, have the courage to know, have the audacity to use your own understanding” (Kant, 1965, p. 54). According to Foucault (1990, pp. 43–​44), Kant’s norm of modernity entails two problems:

1) It is imposed on the individual since one is not invited to think freely, but to follow, to obey the maxim, the universal law. 2) Modernity, following this, becomes a political problem.

Based on the épistème theory, Foucault points out that we may still believe in modernity, but we have not yet reached that stage of maturity. This is perhaps what makes Derrida undermine Foucault himself under the pretext that he could not carry the project of deconstruction further. In Derrida’s view, Foucault is still imprisoned within the structural patterns of the cogito-​ philosophical heritage. He describes a history of thought, of decision, of division, of difference. He does not take a position, does not show his eagerness to change and subvert; he acknowledges the critical and archaeological reading and unexpectedly remains neutral (Derrida, 1997, p. 1). Exploiting Nietzsche’s (1969) assumption that reason is a fiction that keeps deceiving us, Derrida sees the logocentric heritage as dogmatic, absolutist, a heavy burden that needs to be radically changed. Baudrillard (1993) believes that modernity reached its speculative limit and extrapolated all its virtual developments. For this reason, everything needs to be changed in order to escape the collective panic, the apocalypse of the rituals. To Baudrillard, modernity and the classical philosophy of reason and consciousness have lost their norms, the century itself is escaping its end, the running of history is like a film played backward.

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Satirically, history has got lost along the way and revolves around us like an artificial satellite. Berman moderates these radical views by suggesting that modernity is pregnant with its contrary and that “all that is solid melts into the air” (1983, p. 15). Like Habermas, Berman offers that the modernist and the postmodernist principles should be re-​negotiated in their relationship with the findings of the Enlightenment/​modernity. Modernity, to his mind, has been split up into different stages. The project of postmodernism is unexpectedly misunderstood since it is separated from the original problem:  the crisis of modernity or what Burrow calls “the crisis of reason” (2000. p. 170). Deconstructionism is to be better understood within this intellectual debate and dialogue between modernity and postmodernity. When Derrida first published his books Writing and Difference and The Margins of Philosophy, one could easily assert that he was developing a theory of deconstruction and thereby moving far away from the heavy burden of metaphysical thought. Derrida’s manner of practicing philosophy and undermining metaphysics shows close affinities with the way postmodernity re-​evaluates the insights of modernity. According to him, metaphysics has been telling things that are obviously false, fallacies that could never be accepted. These grand narratives, in Lyotard’s terms, cannot be serious as they are fictive, deceitful, authoritarian, and there is no sense of seriousness in their findings. The deconstructive approach has a tendency to put literary discourse under perpetual inquiry. Its meaning is always under erasure. Haar calls this “the liberation of the signifier from its dependence or derivation with respect to the logos and the related concept of truth” (1992, p. 53). Haar explains deconstruction with specific terminology that is characteristic of Derrida’s philosophy like “the double truth of the signifier, the primitive world of metaphor, the original truth of language, the inversion and the defocalization of the whole system of metaphysics and logocentrism, and the metaphor of play which implies the non‘originary’ origin, the erased origin of conceptual differences in general” (1992, p. 54). Derrida, the founder of deconstructionism, rightly declared that “Deconstruction … must by means of a double gesture, a double science, a double writing, practice a reversal of the classical opposition and general displacement of the system” (2002, p. 329). This gesture seeks to negate the metaphysical concepts of order, unity and truth. It makes meaning depends on the perspective(s) of the reader. Derrida put it clearly as follows: “there is no such thing as a ‘metaphysical concept’. There is no such thing as a ‘metaphysical name’. The metaphysical is a certain determination or a direction taken

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by a chain. One cannot oppose it to a concept, but to a process of textual labor and another enchaining” (1982, p. 6). Revising the metaphysical assumptions was meant to be the first target of Derrida’s deconstructive theory. Deleuze (1994), like Derrida, a French poststructuralist critic who was committed to metaphysical/​ logocentric-​ oriented criticism, acknowledged that there is no final truth, no final interpretation of the literary discourse. He stressed, therefore, the concepts of difference and multiplicity rather than unity and truth. May interestingly explains this by asserting that, “for Deleuze, to conceive living is to conceive both what is and what might be … the world is more than we may realize. It is rich with difference. And in this more, in this difference, in the world’s ontological constitution, lie responses to the question of how one might live” (2005, p. 114). By this token, it is clear that a deconstructive criticism would strive to establish a multiperspectivist strategy which not only deploys the deconstructive tools of criticism but would also try to go beyond its premises. The advantage of the deconstructive approach saves the researcher from falling into the classical readings of Bellow. Deconstruction, the epitome of poststructuralist thought, does not aim to negate other interpretations and show their complete futility, nor does it strive to force its own premises. Instead, it envisions that criticism is not a single identifiable gesture, but an open-​ended process of assessment which, to borrow a term from Habermas, has no “final point or destination” (1973, p. 1). It is perhaps for this reason that the major flaw in previous studies of Bellow was due to the absence of a critical theory that helps study the novelist from different perspectives. The deconstructive perspective offers such a critical standpoint, throughout which it incorporates several prominent readings and gives them the chance to operate on the text as long as they contribute to the creation of a logical and convincing meaning. In line with this, a new account of the peculiarities in the Bellovian fictional world will only take place when the compatibility between the novelist’s narratives on the one hand and the deconstructive prisms on the other is recognized. In other words, it is fundamental to trace the ‘missed encounters’ between the themes conveyed in Bellow’s writings (madness, intellectualism, morality, politics, humanism, philosophy etc…) and the major premises of deconstructive thought. The point behind this is that due to writing his novels for more than half a century, Bellow was unconsciously influenced by different critical theories that have crystallized his views, style and philosophy. Bellow’s writings, to think in Hegelian terms, are the ultimate product of the age in which he lived.

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The purpose of the present work is, therefore, to demystify Bellow’s strategies of subversion and reconstruct them in their relationship with Derrida’s deconstructive premises. Yet would it be illogical and contradictory to deploy a deconstructive enterprise, which is by definition against all sorts of unity, to give Bellow’s later novels unity and meaning? The answer seems to be affirmative for the simple reason that Bellow’s narratives sought to blur distances between discourses, to cross boundaries of ideas in a way that a literary text can turn out to be philosophical, cultural, political and even ideological. In short, one turn safely point out that because of the nature of the Bellovian literary discourse that aimed to resist all forms of definition and classification, it becomes quite logical and understandable to account the novelist from a deconstructive perspective.

·4· MADNESS AS THE WISDOM OF INTELLECTUALS “Bellovian intellectuals read Plato, Shakespeare, Dante, and the European classics, and listen to Mozart and Beethoven. The other characters are occupied with worldly desires, and are busy attempting to fulfill them, which will never happen. They have no time for the classics, and even if they had, they will not glance at them. The classics have no relation to money and pleasure, the final objects of the masses, but they are fundamental to the cultivation of their mind, filled with anxiety, self-​indulgence, vulgarity, and impatience. American universities stopped teaching Western Civilization one after another after the Second World War, and Hutchins has faded out of American history.” Rho, H. 1999. 15. “Egghead: A person of spurious intellectual pretensions, often a professor or the protege of a professor. Fundamentally superficial. Over-​emotional and feminine in reactions to any problem. Supercilious and surfeited with conceit and contempt for the experience of more sound and able men. Essentially confused in thought and immersed in mixture of sentimentality and violent evangelism. A doctrinaire supporter of Middle-​European socialism as opposed to Greco-​French-​American ideas of democracy and liberalism. Subject to the old-​fashioned philosophical morality of Nietzsche which frequently leads him into jail or disgrace. A self-​conscious prig, so given to examining all sides of a question that he becomes thoroughly addled while remaining always in the same spot. An anemic bleeding heart.” Hofstadter, R. 1966. 66.

The previous chapters of this book attempted to show how the classical and thematic readings of Bellow effectively, albeit undeliberately, ‘destroy’ the grounds of any theoretical or philosophical enquiry or action which might help unveil the intellectual peculiarities of the writer. In line with this thought, critics have suggested that Bellow’s wor(l)d of fiction should be investigated in the light of the 20th-​century Jewish and American intellectual milieu. Contrary to this, theorists like Derrida, Foucault and de Man have vehemently supported the importance of deconstruction in deciphering the codes of literary texts. They showed how the absence of the insights

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of theories of texts and philosophy has disastrous intellectual consequences when assessing literary products. In Bellow’s case, the answer to the question of what one can know about the themes of madness and subversion summons the deconstructive perspective. The current chapter shows that madness is the wisdom of Bellow’s intellectual heroes. Accordingly, madness is the overconsciousness about their alienation and suffering in their milieu and, therefore, their attempts to deconstruct the norms of mass people and low culture. There are four manifestations of wisdom and madness in Bellow’s later novels, which are morality, wisdom, reason as faith, peace and gift, and happiness. Thus, these manifestations shall be investigated with special attention to the way morality, reason as faith and happiness engender their wisdom and trigger off their attempts to deconstruct the norms of their society. Herzog, Sammler, Henderson, Humboldt and Corde epitomize morality as a manifestation of their wisdom. Their madness, as seen by common figures in the novels, is only a manifestation of their deep consciousness about the huge and striking differences between themselves, as intellectuals, and the others, as masses. In Herzog, Herzog envisions his wisdom by reflecting on his moral principles. He undermines “the enemies of life,” and celebrates morality and humanism. He asserts: The point was that there were people who could destroy mankind and that they were foolish and arrogant, crazy, and must be begged not to do it. Let the enemies of life step down. Let each man now examine his heart. Without a great change of heart, I would not trust myself in a position to authority. Do I love mankind? Enough to spare it, if I should be in a position to blow it to hell? … Let us lie down, men, women, and children, and cry, “let life continue we may not deserve it but let it continue.” (Bellow, 1964, p. 67)

Herzog admits that mass people who belong to low culture “can destroy mankind” because “they are foolish, arrogant and crazy.” He calls them “the enemies of life.” While Herzog regards them ignorant and dangerous to morality and mankind, they, on the contrary, accuse him of being mad. He admits that he is wise with high morals. He is the savior of humanity. He is a university professor, a man of great ideas, a student of such great philosophers as Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Tocqueville, Rousseau, Spinoza, Kierkegaard and Spencer, among others. He reads Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind, a book on “‘law of the heart’ in Western traditions” (1977a, p. 119), and he assumes that “Without a great change of heart, I would not trust myself in a

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position to authority.” His two books:  Romanticism and Christianity and The State of Nature in 17th and 18th Century English and French Political Philosophy, epitomize him as an intellectual humanist who “love[s] mankind, [and cries to] let life continue.” In a rebellious gesture to the conformity of his society, Herzog divorces his wife Daisy because she represents a stable, familial, faithful, traditional Jewish woman and because he wants to give up “the shelter of an orderly, purposeful, lawful existence … it bored me, and I felt it was a slacker’s life” (Bellow, 1964, p. 103). Herzog’s wisdom and morality are reflected in his roaming in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Vineyard Haven, Europe and Ludeyville. He talks about the right lady who deepens his sense of love and wisdom. In his journeys, his quest for a dream wife crystallizes the worth of life and his deep wisdom. In fact, he tries every type of woman he can: his first wife Daisy is of a traditional style; his second wife Madeleine, a modem beauty; Ramona, a mixture of both sexual satisfaction and intellectual delicacy; Sono Oguki, an exotic woman; and many others. His desire for the infinite tends more toward romantic philosophers, intellectuals, and poets like William Blake than toward God and systematic theorists of the human mind like Freud and other psychologists. In Herzog’s thinking, women have three predominant images that frequently occur in society: the maternal woman, the castrator and the exotic woman. His wisdom leads him to have that modern, mad, intellectual and exotic one. Daisy is of a traditional style. Madeleine and Ramona are exotic, modern and rebellious, and that is why they satisfy his sexual and intellectual thirst. His desire for women is sexual, romantic, intellectual and rational at the same time. Deeply behind this, Bellow shows the protagonist as a wise intellectual immured in Rousseauian romanticism, not in Aristotelian and Descartesian rationalism. He deconstructs classicism, especially its uncompromising view of human beings and the supremacy of reason. Herzog subverts and excoriates modem culture, its standardized mass culture which produces the vulgar, common man who dominates modem society. To Bellow’s mind, one should act in accordance with mankind’s morals; one should suppose, in Herzog’s manner, that a love of life is a basic feature of human nature, and, on this assumption, one’s moral duty is to count each other person’s right to deserve life and happiness. In this respect, Bellow is in line with Herzog’s ethics of morality to bring the world home and to be satisfied with it. Satisfaction, to Herzog, is related to morality, humanism, true spirit, reason or pure insight, intellectualism and ethical life. This constructs and unifies both a moral and a rational world which is capable of providing Man with hope and meaning.

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Artur Sammler addresses wisdom and morality from a different point of view. His philosophical meditations juxtapose the moral with the political, the human with the rational: …[He] saw the increasing triumph of Enlightenment-​Liberty, Fraternity, Equality … Enlightenment, universal education, universal suffrage, the rights of the majority acknowledged by all governments, the rights of women, the rights of children, the rights of criminals, the unity of different races affirmed, social security, public health, the dignity of [Man]. (Bellow, 1970, p. 55)

Being utopian, Sammler acknowledges a just system of global democracy, human rights, and Man’s dignity. Morality, to Sammler’s mind, can be translated in the Enlightenment values of liberty, fraternity, equality, the universality of education, suffrage and human rights. He offers that only the Enlightenment mind, with its pure insight and rational faith can establish such a ‘happy state’ and reinforce Man’s moral worth. Assuring the values of freedom and necessity, right and obligation as a moral and ethical duty, Sammler is presented in the novel as a culture collector, a gatherer of civilizations and a wise politician. Sammler was brought up in the European culture of the Enlightenment and the Holocaust and then immigrated to America, spending the rest of his life there theorizing for humanism and life. Therefore, Sammler is not completely immersed in either the European or the American culture. He knows both. Named Sammler, which means “a collector” in German, he figuratively plays the role of the historical collector his name represents. Bellow concedes that Sammler almost becomes a modem-​day Alexis de Tocqueville, in so far as he is a student of democracy in America, and documents the decline of civility, the degradation of culture, and the alienation of the intellectual that emerges in the democratized [and capitalized] society. Sammler furthers the moral lessons of the Holocaust. He admits that human beings [must] be capable of telling right from wrong, even when all that they have to guide them is their own judgment (Bellow, 1970). By the same token, Bellow acquaints Asa Leventhal in Dangling Man with Nietzsche’s ideals of the ‘superman’ and the will to power as he decides to go to war for moral and ethical ends. Moral worth and human welfare are justified in these instances as a matter of intellectual emotion, passion and humanism rather than as a matter of rationality and materialism. In short, one can admit that the theory of morality, in Bellow’s view, is akin to the sense of time, being and consciousness in which it is strikingly identified with the wisdom of

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intellectuals, and their ceaseless attempts to deconstruct the existing norms of their society. In Henderson the Rain King, Henderson sketches his view of wisdom and morality through his mythical and imaginary journeys. Unlike Sammler, who immigrated to America, and theorized for a moral and human world, Henderson escapes it. He runs away from New York and Chicago to the wilderness of Africa. There, his moral and philosophical meditations qualify him as a wise and humane hero: When I think of my condition at the age of fifty-​five when I bought the ticket, all is grief. … A disorderly rush begins my parents, my wives, my girls, … my habits, my money, my music lessons, my drunkenness …. I have to cry, “No, no, get back, curse you, let me alone!”… But if I am to make sense to you people and explain why I went to Africa … I might as well start with the money. I am rich. … I inherited three million dollars after taxes, but I thought myself a bum…, I behaved like a bum. I looked into books to see whether I could find some helpful words … I have already mentioned that there was a disturbance in my heart, a voice that spoke there and said, I want, I want, I want!—​It happened every afternoon, and when I tried to suppress it, it got even stronger. (Bellow, 1959, p. 25)

Henderson escapes materialism in New York. He does not acknowledge the American dream. He rejects the modern habits of life “my parents, my wives, my girls, my habits, my money, my music lessons, my drunkenness” and looks for redemption and salvation in books and his journey. According to Henderson, money and material life cause his grief, alienation and loneliness; and it is because of this that “a voice that spoke there [in his heart] and said, I want, I want, I want! It happened every afternoon, and when [he] tried to suppress it, it got even stronger.” Henderson gives his search for wisdom and morality existential tones as he escapes from the world of materialism and capitalism to that of romance and peace. Albert Corde is an intellectual like Herzog, Sammler and Henderson. He started his career as a journalist, then became a professor and eventually a dean at a Chicago college. Echoing Henderson and Herzog, he cannot escape the power of ideas, nor can he get rid of the duty of thinking. He assumes that “if he didn’t pull himself together he’d suffer from random thoughts. Those were the worst they ate you up” (Bellow, 1982, p. 135). He reads great works of Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Plato, the Romantic poets, the logic and morality of the Enlightenment, Hegel and Kant, among others. He identifies himself with the poet: “When Rilke had complained about his inability to find an adequate attitude to the things and people around him, Corde had thought,

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Yes, that’s very common that’s me, too.” Unlike Herzog’s speculations about logic, he is emotional, intellectually balanced and a faithful and lovable husband: he was also misleadingly domestic. “She (his wife) had never noticed how many household duties he took on the groceries, cooking, vacuuming, washing windows, making beds.” Throughout his trip to Bucharest, Romania, it does not take him longer than two weeks to understand the authoritarian nature of communism and its illusive and grand discourse, while it took longer periods for other intellectuals as Richard Wright in Chicago, Arthur Koestler in Germany, Louis Fischer in Russia, Andre Gide in France, and Stephen Spender in England to reach the same conclusion. After his escape from Romania, he realized that “the communist machine has winnowed out the grain and retained only the chaff of Western culture” (Bellow, 1982, p. 9) and that “the same old capitalist society has been re­established, a new and terrible despotism crushing and exploiting man, with all the abject and servile mentality of serfdom” (p. 176). In their attempts to free themselves from the different sorts of dictatorships of mass people and low culture, these subjects are more in accordance with the ethics of wisdom and morality. In fact, Sammler strives to bring together peace and war, science and humanism, life and death, virtue/​the sublime and materialism, history and fiction, loss and morality. Herzog depicts wisdom and madness, reason and faith, love and death, revenge and sacrifice, literature and philosophy. Henderson traces family and society, freedom and necessity, hope and fate. On this point, Bellow admittedly endorses that only a sense of unity and absolute knowledge can reinforce Man’s morality and wisdom in the face of the deconstructive forces of mass people and low culture. Von Humboldt and Charles Citrine in Humboldt’s Gift reiterate morality and wisdom by reflecting upon Kantian categorical imperatives or maxims that regulate Man’s moral worth. They say that “money wasn’t what [they] had in mind. Oh God, no, what [we] wanted was to do good. [We were] dying to do something good. And this feeling for good went back to [our] early and peculiar sense of existence—​sunk in the glassy depths of life and groping … for sense” (Bellow, 1975, p. 3). They both, in their different ways, experience the fate of the intellectual in the America of the mid-​20th century. Humboldt has in mind the idea of converting America from a materialistic land to a new Athens, a country of Platonic concepts of truth and beauty, transforming Greenwich Village from a province into a cultural capital, importing ideas from the European tradition and adapting them to the sprawl and chaos of contemporary America. Citrine is supposed to be a culture-​maker, insisting

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in the novel that “everything possible must be done to restore the credit and authority of art, the seriousness of thought, the integrity of culture, the dignity of style” (Bellow, 1975, p. 249). Citrine and Humboldt are men of letters, utopians, theorists and revolutionists of the age. They are marginalized, degraded, humiliated and forgotten in spite of their celebrity and their contributions to American culture, partly due to their romantic, unrealistic and anachronistic characteristics, but mainly because of the fundamentally barren American cultural soil. Bellow (1975) proposes that only intellectuals, thinkers, theorists and philosophers can promote human welfare and keep Man’s moral worth. However, he paradoxically subverts this idea by denying them, his intellectual heroes, the ability to ensure genuine respect for their moral theories. This gesture makes Man a victim of his own rational faculties. Humboldt, for instance, sketches this paradox by tracing both the moral duty of intellectuals and the inability to safeguard their moral legislation in practice: There came a time when, apparently, life lost the ability to arrange itself. It had to be arranged. Intellectuals took this as their job. From, say, Machiavelli’s time to our own this arranging has been one great gorgeous tantalizing misleading disastrous project. A man like Humboldt, inspired … was brimming over with discovery that the human enterprise, so grand and infinitely varied, had now to be managed by great persons. (Bellow, 1975, p. 29)

Humboldt underlines the moral responsibilities of intellectuals by stressing their mental faculties and wisdom to arrange modern life. Interestingly enough, he also displays a sharp skepticism about their capacity to put their moral theory into practice. Arranging modern life has become “one great gorgeous tantalizing misleading disastrous project.” Humboldt, the inspired poet and thinker, is acknowledged by great persons, yet, ironically enough he “lost the ability to arrange life” his life. He is only a victim of his genius and intellectual reflections. Bellow points out: Poet, thinker, problem drinker, pill-​taker, man of genius, manic depressive, intricate schemer, success story, he once wrote poems of great wit and beauty, but what had he done lately? Had he uttered the great words and songs he had in him? He had not. Unwritten poems were killing him. (1975, p. 25)

Humboldt “wrote poems of great wit and beauty” that depict life, beauty and wisdom. They theorize for a moral world where human beings keep their dignity. He is a man of genius and ideas. He is a good storyteller. The chance of

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uttering his “great words and songs” entails his intellectual insights against the power and the dictatorship of the masses. Unfortunately, his “unwritten poems were killing him.” Differently put, his unpublished views about life and humanism, the unlegislated moral laws and wisdom in the unpublished poems were “tantalizing” him. He sarcastically admits that he cannot bring a real change to the world. Herzog’s imaginary and philosophical letters underpin that morality is a matter of consciousness of time, that existence must be lived, experienced to the end since, it is “only at the end of its journey [that] consciousness is ready to understand what has happened to it and why … to think reflectively and self-​consciously about the categorical shifts that have led it forward from one problematic position to the next” (Bellow, 1964, p. 112) and eventually to legislate for its moral and ethical norms. Henderson, through his imaginary journey to the wilderness of Africa, mirrors a quest for morality through the journey of the spirit that “may purify itself for the life of the spirit, and achieve finally, through a completed experience of itself, the awareness of what it really is in itself” (Bellow, 1964, p. 60). Bellovian heroes admittedly advocate the Enlightenment philosophy of morality initiated by the early Greek philosophers, yet they fail to find a way to apply it to reality. The novelist sharply depends upon the hierarchy that is based on the binary oppositions of good and bad, moral and rational, high thinking and low thinking, intellectualism and mass society, and ultimately high culture and low culture to build his stories in his later novels. Bellow’s reading of madness as reason and faith offers three different viewpoints. First, it highlights the symmetries between the themes of wisdom, intellectualism, reason and faith inherent in his later novels. Second, it unravels how Bellow believes that reason and faith, rationality and religion should not contradict each other. Third, it outlines the heroes’ madness as overconsciousness about the negativity of the masses and low culture. Reason and faith operate as traits that qualify Herzog, Henderson, Sammler, Humboldt and Corde with intellectualism and wisdom. These concepts are deployed at this level to unravel the way the heroes’ deep insight about materialism and rationality, on the one hand, and God and humanism, on the other, develop the statement that madness is a reflection of reason and faith. Bellow’s awareness of this background has left its imprints on the way he perceives reason and faith in accordance with the heroes’ deconstruction of the norms of their society. Herzog is emblematic in this case. He shows a careful awareness of the connections between madness, reason, faith and morality. He builds his thinking on the assumption that “God may well be the pure

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idea of reason” (Kant, 1998, p. 35). He endorses that only reason and faith can guarantee Man’s moral worth against the nihilism of the low culture of his society, and ensure the “steady progress” of human civilization (Bellow, 1964, p. 225). However, such a belief should be regarded as the outcome of long skeptical meditations over the nature and the function of God. Herzog begins narrating his story, in a typically positivist move, by questioning the belief of his generation: “What is the philosophy of this generation? Not God is dead, that point was passed long ago. Perhaps it should be stated Death is God … if the old God exists he must be a murderer. But one true god is Death” (Bellow, 1964, p. 353), and again, “God is the evil” (Bellow, 1964, p. 354), and he unexpectedly ends up with all that which the Enlightenment believes: “The victory of [God], not of rationality … our own murdering imagination, our human imagination which starts by accusing God of murder … turns out to be the great power” (Bellow, 1964, p. 354), and eventually, “Dear God! Mercy! My God … Thou King of Death and Life!” (Bellow, 1964, p. 370), “Thou movest me” (Bellow, 1964, p. 414). Herzog’s reflections on God shift from suspicion and death to acknowledgment and life. His generations confess that “the old God is death; the true God is a murderer” (Bellow, 1964, p. 372). God is equated with negativity and nihilism. Later, he enigmatically acknowledges the power, rationality and victory of God. God is the king of life and death, the source of morality and happiness “Dear God! Mercy! My God … Thou King of Death and Life!” Herzog is morally moved by the miraculous power of God. He confirms that God is, in a Cartesian sense, naturally innate in the human mind. Faith, he maintains, is a clear idea of thinking, an object of a rational and spiritual knowledge. Bellow’s sense of subversion, from negating the presence of God to asserting ‘his’ being the stream of life and the pure reason, stems from the postulate that God a unifying idea in the order of speculative reason and a postulate in the moral order of practical reason. Bellow’s later novels are replete with such instances of searches for harmony between reason and faith, rationality and religion, mind and God. Throughout his journeys, when Henderson faces death in the jungles of Africa, when he fights against the savage warriors of the Wariri tribe, when a lion attacks him in the forest, a celestial light of God, the savior from death, appears to his spirit. He bitterly prays: Oh my God, whatever you think of me, let me not fall under this butcher shop. Take care of the king. “King for God’s sake!” I wanted to cry. “What have we got into?” … God curse all veins and creepers … “Your Highness,” I said, and raised my weeping

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The idea might seem contradictory in Henderson’s prayers for life in the beginning and his longing for death in the end; however, the storyteller is assuredly suggesting that death becomes a metaphor of unity with God, a moment of reason and wisdom. When Henderson faces the lion and death in Africa, he prays for life: “Oh my God… let me not fall under this butcher shop. Take care of the king.” While facing his finitude, death, faith seems that all Henderson has. At the moments of weakness, “wanted to cry” and “raised [his] weeping voice” to pray for mercy and life for himself and the king of the tribe. The metaphor of unity with God appears through his readiness to sacrifice instead of the king “Your Majesty, move over and I’ll die beside you. Or else be me and live; I never knew what to do with life, and I’ll die instead.” Henderson’s escapism from the material context of New York and the habits of mass society marks the beginning of the juxtaposition between faith and reason, God and Man, feeling and intellect, religion and philosophy. Henderson loses faith in his “money, factories, power, habits, New York, wives,” in other words, rationality and science in America, and regains a spiritual release with Romilayu, his guide in Africa. He loses faith in materialism and regains it in God and reason. He rejects the world of the masses, materialism, and the lights of New York, and welcomes God, faith and intellectual tranquility in the wilderness of Africa. More strikingly, the wilderness, Romilayu, the tribes in Africa, the dying king of the Wariri tribe, Henderson and all other elements that shape the story of the journey acquire a symbolic dimension as they ultimately stand for Jesus’s dramatic trip to spread his mission. Behind this, Bellow overcomes the polarity of reason and faith and shows how religion and faith should express an intellectual and philosophical outlook, albeit in a non-​philosophical form. He, by the same token, proposes that any religious consciousness should adopt the faith that upholds a rational view of the world. In other words, Bellow hopes to show that any faith should be incorporated with reason and not rejected from it, and that Man’s

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moral worth should be converging on rather than departing from the rational insights of reason. Sammler, Corde and Humboldt are outspoken expressions of the harmony between reason and faith, intellectualism and God, which generates Bellow’s attempt to develop Man’s moral worth. Bellow views his subjects as heroes, intellectuals, sufferers, strugglers, survivors, philosophers, and believers. They are humanists; they are all concerned with dignity, theirs and others’, humanity or the lack of it, and faith in relationship with reason. Sammler offers a utopian homeland where both reason and faith can ensure Man’s dignity and freedom “on the moon, people would have to work hard simply to stay alive, to breathe, [to think, to pray]” (Bellow, 1970, p. 64). Assuming that “sexual madness was overwhelming the Western World” (Bellow, 1970, p. 63), that “money, power, [science], do drive people crazy” (Bellow, 1970, p. 62), that the modern world has become a spectacle, that life is dominated by the habits of the masses, the features of low culture, that God is already dead and will remain as such forever, and that the Enlightenment reason gives rise to the century’s greatest crimes and atrocities, Sammler interestingly confirms that there should be a moral revolution in line with the Kantian legacy which admits that reason is blind without faith and faith in its turn is crippled without reason. Sammler’s intellectual speculations over God and reason, spirit and civilization can only epitomize the overconsciousness of an alienated intellectual. The death of God entails disillusionment and the tragic fate of both the capitalist and the communist regimes. He points out that “both the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. were…utopian projects. There, in the East, the emphasis was on low-​level goods, on shoes, caps, toilet-​plungers, and tin basins for peasants and laborers. Here it fell upon certain privileges and joys. Here wading naked into the waters of paradise, etcetera” (Bellow, 1970, p. 158). Faith in the case of Corde metaphorically meant communism, socialism, and whatever ideology the Left tradition promises. Faith and reason are combined to result in such a historical consciousness about modern civilization. Before unfolding The Dean’s December, Bellow starts with the following introductory remark: “Although portions of this novel are derived from real events, each character in it is fictional, a composite drawn from several individuals and from imagination. No reference to any living person is intended or should be inferred.” Bellow not only evades all the expected polemics of the Left, but also awakens its attention as to the illusive promises of the utopian ideology communism. Lasch, in his The Agony of the American Left in the 1950s declared, “the end of deep political conflict in the West (1996), the end of utopian

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attempts to reconstruct society” (1969, p. 171). Corde examines Romania with curiosity at first, but as his story develops, he becomes “a hungry observer of the communist society” (Bellow, 1982, p. 8). The first impression he gets in Bucharest is a feeling “like tying a plastic bag over your face and telling you to breathe deep,” which is the same feeling he had as when he escaped Chicago (Bellow, 1982, p. 6). The metaphorical death of God summons the unbearable conditions of life in Romania. Bucharest is cold. It is no longer a Paris city in December. The streets are full of beggars, and the cemeteries are full of crazy people and strangers. Intellectuals are rejected. Police officers, colonels and dictators are considered the real leaders and saviors of the country. The dean cannot bear this kind of life. The ideology of communism fails as it increases the suffering of people. Vlada, Minna’s friend and a Romanian-​American scientist in Chicago, reminds Corde of the characteristics of Romania: “It’s nothing to them that you’re a dean, but it counts that you’re a journalist. Also that you’re connected with the Ambassador and with the famous columnist Mr. Spangler” (Bellow, 1982, p. 282). The ruler, dictator, like the one Corde tried to escape from in Chicago, plans to rule Romania under the name of communism and systematization; in other words, Romania is a machine to him. And it turns out to be a huge cage or a prison. All the means to strip individuality comprise one device. Censorship and bugs control the characters like prisoners. Bellow maintains the primary importance of his intellectuals as moral agents seeking to promote human welfare in ways which accord with reason and faith, rationality and religion, Man and God. Although his heroes start to reflect on reason and faith by referring back to metaphysical issues, they deliberately mock its being satirized and ridiculed in modern American cultural life. Their being intellectuals trained in the European tradition and Enlightenment thinking valorizes their overconsciousness about the problems of the age or what Bellow himself calls their high culture and, ironically decenters them from the heart of the American intellectual scene. Bellow takes two contradictory positions: he sympathetically satirizes them as men of only ideas and letters and simultaneously censures American mass society and low culture as the primary cause of their problems and alienation. Herzog reflects this intellectual speculation on the concept of madness as he starts narrating his story. His first words in the story “If I am out of my mind, it’s alright with me” (Bellow, 1964, p. 7) overtone his high and lofty thinking. In a Derridian tone, they implicitly underpin the kind of low thinking of the

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masses which he undermines and ignores. He continues narrating his story as follows: Some people thought he was cracked and for a time he himself had doubted that he was all there. But now, though he still behaved oddly, he felt confident, cheerful, clairvoyant, and strong. He had fallen under a spell and was writing letters to everyone under the sun. He was so stirred by these letters that from the end of June he moved from place to place with a valise full of papers. He had carried this valise from New York to Martha’s Vineyard, but returned from the Vineyard immediately, two days later, he flew to Chicago, and from Chicago he went to a village in western Massachusetts. Hidden in the country, he wrote endlessly, fanatically, to the newspapers, to people in public life, to friends and relatives and at last to the dead, his own obscure dead, and finally the famous dead. (Bellow, 1964, p. 7)

Herzog is present through the pronoun “he,” through what others think about him, and through what the storyteller tells the readers about him. He is present in his absence, and absent in the minds’ eyes of the others, the masses. He is torn between what the masses think about him “some people thought he was cracked”—​and what he is—​“he had doubted he was all there.” He is dangling between nihilism and existence, his being out of his mind and his being intellectual. His madness is seemingly deepened when he asks for help from his old friends “Dear Wanda, Dear Zinka, Dear Libbie, Dear Ramona, Dear Sono, I need help in the worst way. I am afraid of falling apart. Dear Edvig, the fact is that madness has been denied me. I do not know why I should write to you at all” (Bellow, 1964, p. 19). The exotic female figure attracts him and helps show what kind of protagonist he is. Wanda, Zinka, Libbie, Ramona and Sono offer release and a kind of psycho-​sexual sanctuary for the doubly victimized hero, Herzog. Ramona remains at the center of Herzog’s intellectual commitment, “Dear Ramona, I think your wisdom gets me, you are a great comfort to me. We are dealing with elements more or less stable, more or less controllable, more or less mad” (Bellow, 1964, pp. 25–​26), residing as a pre-​marital or extra-​marital love object. In spite of his odd behavior, he wins the struggle against the deconstructive forces of society. He “felt confident, cheerful, clairvoyant, and strong.” His madness, as it may appear, lies in his failure to cope with space. He cannot settle in any place as he kept ceaselessly moving from one city to another. He travels from “New York to Martha’s Vineyard, but returned from the Vineyard immediately; two days later he flew to Chicago, and from Chicago he went to a village in western Massachusetts.” This fidgetiness reiterates his endless search for hope and life, which is metaphorically translated into his letters to everyone under the sun. Hidden in

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the country, he writes letters to poets, philosophers, politicians, theorists; he writes “endlessly and fanatically to the newspapers, to people in public life, to friends and relatives and at last to the dead, his own obscure dead, and finally the famous dead.” When the masses think that he is mad and dangerous, he can only think that he is a wise intellectual in a rotten context. Bellow admits that Herzog’s wisdom exists in transcending his failure to communicate with the masses, and to address intellectuals. His letters to famous intellectuals epitomize what Bellow calls the high culture to which Herzog belongs. He investigates the history of madness archeologically “In my review I tried to suggest that clinical psychologists might write fascinating histories. Megalomania for the Pharaohs and Caesars. Melancholia in the Middle Ages. Schizophrenia in the eighteenth century…” (Bellow, 1964, p. 99), and confesses that “madness always rules the world” (Bellow, 1964, p. 99). Historically and clinically, madness has appeared in the different guises of megalomania, melancholia and schizophrenia. For Herzog, madness is overconsciousness and subversion; it is the deconstruction of nihilism and death. He “could not allow himself to die yet. The children needed him. His duty was to live. To be sane, and to live, and to look after the kids. This was why he was running from the city now, overheated, eyes smarting” (Bellow, 1964, p. 38). In short, Herzog informs that madness is no longer a state of mind throughout which one loses his rational faculties; rather, it is a moment of consciousness and deconstruction which he adopts to become a moral legislator and bring some change to the world. Humboldt is the representative of madness as wisdom and peace. He is a famous American poet of the 1930s and 1940s, praised by T.S. Eliot and Conrad Aiken, spotlighted in major newspaper book reviews and critiques. Charles Citrine, Humboldt’s friend, takes Humboldt’s place after Humboldt declines in the 1950s. In his poems, Humboldt reflects on “history, poetry, philosophy, beauty, love, waste land, alienation, politics, the unconscious, then, now, birth, death, … William Blake, Proust, Milton, Virgil, Marvell, Balzac, Marx, Freud, Hegel” (Bellow, 1975, p. 6). Being manic depressive, he praises madness by celebrating sublime, silence; he writes poetry and quotes Shakespeare. Citrine interestingly describes Humboldt as the unrecognized poet and philosopher. He dies reading the poems of Yeats and Hegel’s Phenomenology. The two characters are men of ideas. They are almost forgotten at the end of their lives. They are becoming lunatic; they are exploited by a non-​artist crowd. They tell the story of a whole generation of intellectuals.

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In his essay “The Isolation of Modem Poetry,” Delmore Schwartz traces the cause of Humboldt’s lunacy: The fundamental isolation of the modem poet began not with the poet and his way of life; but rather with the whole way of life of modem society. It was not so much the poet as it was poetry, culture, sensibility, imagination, that were isolated. On the one hand, there was no room in the increasing industrialization of society for such a monster as the cultivated man; a man’s taste for literature had at best nothing to do with most of the activities which constituted daily life in an industrial society. (1970, p. 7)

Bellow ascribes Humboldt’s lunacy to the isolation of the poet in modern life and even more strikingly to “the whole way of life in modern society.” With the massive industrialization and mass factory production system in America, Bellow confesses that only men of letters are destined to suffer. Humboldt informs Citrine that “monopoly capitalism has treated creative men like rats” (Bellow, 1975, p. 135). Men of letters have nothing to do with “the increasing industrialization of society,” their intellectual, utopian and imaginary visions do not find any place in “the activities which constituted daily life in an industrial society.” Poetry becomes a dangerous occupation in America as it makes poets strange and alienated beggars. This business spirit is the root of American culture. Humboldt’s deep awareness about the radical economic, political and social changes alienates him in the academic community as well as non-​academic society. An example of this is his failure to get a permanent chair at Princeton University after his temporary period of teaching there. Bellow summons Harold Rosenberg’s saying that “Marx...conceives the artist as the model man of the future” and Hegel’s “Historical Men or World-​ Historical Individuals, those persons through whom truth operates and who have an insight into the requirement of the time, who divine what is ripe for development, the nascent principle, the next necessary thing” in his essays “A World Too Much with Us” and “Machines and Storybooks: Literature in the Age of Technology” (Bellow, 1975, p. 1). He agrees with both Hegel’s and Marx’s claims that artists should not be alienated in their field, that no one can replace their work as they depend on their imagination and inspiration. Now, if Bellow’s, Marx’s and Hegel’s theory is reasonable, then Humboldt should have been accepted at Princeton University. More bitterly, he cannot find a stable job at any university, which added further anxiety to his innate anxiety. Orlando Huggins illustrates Humboldt’s story. He is another intellectual in the novel who is destined to suffer, a leftist intellectual who discusses Marxism, Stalinism and capitalism. He is:

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…the Harvard radical of the John Reed type, one of those ever-​youthful lightweight high-​spirited American intellectuals, faithful to his Marx or his Bakunin, to Isadora, Randolph Bourne, Lenin and Trotsky, Max Eastman, Cocteau, Andre Gide, the Ballets Russes, Eisenstein the beautiful avant-​garde pantheon of the good old days. (Bellow, 1975, pp. 321–​322)

Humboldt and Huggins reach the point that “to the high types of Martyrdom the twentieth century has added the farcical martyr. This … is the artist. By wishing to play a great role in the fate of mankind he becomes a bum and a joke.” They are forgotten and marginalized from the center of American culture. Huggins is found at a New York pub lecturing on old ideologies to drunkards. American society does not need talkative dissenters and revolutionists in the seventies. They are gone with Daniel Bell’s exclamation, “the end of ideology.” In a way they are victims of the age. Their overconsciousness about the issues of the age leads them to suffer, to be mad in the eyes of the common people and mass society; they become ‘martyrs’; when they seek an influential position in society, they ironically “become a bum and a joke.” Humboldt supports Adlai Stevenson in the elections of 1952 not only because he thinks he can beat Ike, or even because he is a man of culture, but also because he believes that “[c]ulture would come into its own in Washington” (Bellow, 1975, p. 25), and he might be situated at the heart of the intellectual scene in America. He addresses Charles Citrine: If Stevenson is in, literature is in we’re in, Charlie. Stevenson reads my poems… Stevenson carries my ballads with him on the campaign trail. Intellectuals are coming up in this country. Democracy is finally about to begin creating a civilization in the USA. That’s why Kathleen and I left the Village. … Stevenson was Aristotle’s great-​souled man. In his administration cabinet members would quote Yeats and Joyce. The new Joint Chiefs would know Thucydides. Humboldt would be consulted about each State of the Union message. He was going to be the Goethe of the new government and build Weimar in Washington. (Bellow, 1975, pp. 25–​26)

Humboldt thinks that Stevenson can help overcome the marginality of poets. If he is at the heart of the political system, then Citrine, Humboldt, Huggins and all other intellectuals are there too. Stevenson reads his poems, carries his ballads on his electoral campaign. He is the representative of culture in politics and materialism. Humboldt and Kathleen left the Village because they believed that Stevenson was about to create a democracy built on culture, philosophy, poetry and intellectuals. He is “Aristotle’s great-​souled man,” and in his administration, members would quote Yeats and Joyce, they know

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Thucydides, and Humboldt himself would be the Goethe of Stevenson’s government. However, to Humboldt Stevenson’s defeat means a victory for American materialism and vulgarity over real culture. His lunacy and overconsciousness become the wisdom that would save him from the authority of the crowd and low culture. Henderson and Sammler ascribe a moral and philosophical touch to their wisdom. In a Derridian tone, they reject the rationality and the utilitarianism of Western culture, the hegemony of logocentric thinking, and seek to foreground a spiritual peace in their lives. Henderson’s mythical journey to Africa “Who-​who was I? A millionaire wanderer and wayfarer. A brutal and violent man driven into the world. A man who fled his own country, settled by his fore fathers. A fellow whose heart said, I want, I want” (Bellow, 1959, p. 67), and Sammler’s memories and recollections sketch the philosophy behind their wisdom. Henderson strives to achieve morality through being a mad intellect, which Lily, his second wife, reassures, asserting that “one has to live not for evil but for good, not death but life, not illusion but reality” (Bellow, 1959, p. 18). Lily’s and Henderson’s struggle against the deconstructive forces of society becomes their priority. Reality, life and good can be achieved only through their escaping the material life of New York, the lights of the cosmopolitan city, and the trivialities of the masses that are lusting after worldly desires. Henderson proposes that the calculations of reason and the rationality of science do not guarantee morality, nor do they ensure humanism; morality is in danger in the context of capitalistic America. In America, business and money have replaced culture and intellectual thinking, and that is historically proven, Henderson admits. Books on how to make money are preferred to those of great thinkers. Henderson’s overconsciousness about this cultural and moral decay in America pushes him to escape, in spite of his wealth and social position: “I am rich. From my old man I inherited three million dollars after taxes…. Next order of business: I am a graduate of an Ivy League university” (Bellow, 1959, p. 7). Sammler shows his wisdom through his survival of war atrocities and the decline of civility in modern America. He equates it with sainthood and wisdom: “At the present level of the human evolution propositions were held… by choices which were narrowed down to sainthood and madness. We are mad unless we are saintly, saintly only as we soar above madness” (Bellow, 1970, p. 87). It is the wisdom that comes by the end of the day, the end of an age and the end of a civilization. In his Illuminations, Benjamin points out, “as Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight.

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Only in extinction is the collector comprehended” (1997, p. 67). Sammler is the metaphorical representation of the owl of Minerva, as he emerges as a culture collector and civilization gatherer at a time of crisis of culture and humanism in America, or what Bellow thinks of as the late age of capitalism. Sammler spends most of his daytime in the New York public library collecting and recording the culture of the masses in America and thinking of the possibility of transplanting the European Enlightenment to the New World, all the while watching the various social evils and vulgar lives of the masses on the street. However, his experience ends up with frustration. He discovers that both European and American cultures have been morally and ethically degenerating, starting from the early 20th century. Bellow himself experiences this frustration, confessing in an interview with Boyers: “Occasionally I worry about what’s happening to culture in the United States, but on other days I think there is no culture in the United States, and there’s no point in worrying about it” (1975, p. 6). Sammler becomes a historical relic and an exemplar of consciousness and wisdom. He juxtaposes religion as a form of spiritual release and madness as a pure moral and intellectual insight. Bellow writes in the novel, “Mr. Sammler had a symbolic character. He, personally, was a symbol. His friends and family had made him a judge and a priest. And of what was he a symbol?” (1970, p. 91). The answer is he becomes a symbol of civility and wisdom in a society where low culture and masses dominate the scene. Again, Bellow points out that “the whole nation, all of civilized society, perhaps, [were] seeking the blameless state of madness. The privileged, the almost aristocratic state of madness” (1970, p. 85). He agrees that 20th-​century neobarbarism is the direct heir of the 18th-​century Enlightenment, which is why the enlightenment had succumbed to “self-​destruction.” Sammler concludes that man has entered into a new kind of barbarism and has lost his humanistic traits, and this can be seen in the atrocities of the World Wars, anti-​Semitism, the Holocaust, the Cold War and fascism. Bellow maintains that the Enlightenment has always meant the subliminal and the moral in every aspect of life. However, it satirically takes a wrong turn, and Sammler provides a good example of being a victim of this change. His entire family was killed by the Nazi regime except for his daughter, Shula. He escaped from a totalitarian Europe dominated by the power of one man to a democratic America controlled by every man; he had to spend all the summer in a cemetery to save his life, like a dead man; he was wounded and blinded in war; he and Shula suffered from trauma after that; he was betrayed

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by most of his Polish friends when he fought for them. He is a witness to the consequences of the Enlightenment and deeply involved in them, and he realizes that the history of the Enlightenment is no better than a series of killings. Privileged of being a man of high culture, Sammler becomes a symbol of wisdom in the age of madness. This section has two fundamental purposes. In the first part, the researcher seeks to sum up the manifestations of the heroes’ wisdom as outlined in the previous parts of this chapter. In the second part, Bellow’s position as one of the major American moralists of the 20th century is strengthened. Bellow maintains that happiness is to be regarded as an ultimate aim of the wisdom of his heroes. Therefore, it should be investigated in line with moral ends and human worth, reason and faith, madness and peace, gift and wisdom. These principles, Bellow acknowledges, are fundamental as they trace the wisdom of his heroes, their being categorized within high culture, which he defines as the Enlightenment’s moral and ethical norms, as opposed to the culture of the masses. It is methodologically necessary to know what kind of subjects Bellow’s heroes are, Bellow reminds us, in order to show how they fight against all sorts of triviality and low culture. As a matter of fact, Herzog writes a new discourse that challenges the authority of existing discourses, and ends up becoming a mad intellectual. Humboldt and Citrine begin where Herzog ends up, and finish seeking to rewrite the lost manuscript. Sammler, Corde and Henderson take Humboldt’s and Citrine’s project to reassure the wisdom of the intellectual and their high consciousness about the age. All of them share one common point which is deconstructing the amorality and the animalistic features of the modern age, the low culture of the masses and the decline of civility. The effect of this is to awaken the awareness of the scrupulous accordance of these protagonists, in their circular movement from madness to wisdom, with Foucault’s structures of thought and Derrida’s deconstruction of the grand narratives of metaphysics. Here again, Bellow is suggesting that madness is a moment of peace, of erasing and rewriting new and different systems of thought, of legislating for more unbroken moral norms. Bellow deplores madness, and assumes that it is the absent truth of modern morality. The novelist, on this point, uses what modernity rejects, madness, to argue for what it adopts, wisdom. In short, one can only deduce that the novelist’s view of happiness stems from his moral theory which deplores the European intellectual, the philosophical and moral legacy of the Enlightenment, and subverts both mass society and low culture.

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Thus, Bellow does not extricate himself from the power of the Enlightenment’s morality as much as he exploits its ideals in order to transplant them in the American cultural scene. His heroes believe that art should satisfy the ends of morality and humanism. In It All Adds Up, Bellow asserts that one should be young forever: “To be modern is to be mobile, forever en route, with few local attachments anywhere, cosmopolitan, not particularly disturbed to be an outsider in temporary quarters” (1995, p. 8). He continues, “when we say modern[ity] I suppose we mean that we recognize the signature of Enlightenment and of reason… we recognize also the limitations of enlightenment. We have learned from history that Enlightenment, liberation, doom may go together” (1995, p. 11). Bellow’s intention is not to reject the Enlightenment and show its contradictions as much as to ground his heroes in its intellectual milieu, and make them aware of its contradictions in the continuum of history. Deconstructionism maintains the absence of the heavy tradition of the past along with the habits of metaphysics; Bellow, in the same way, announces that the future under capitalism is not promising, and society will be one of brutality, intolerance, amorality, business and barbarity. In this chapter, the madness of Bellow’s heroes has been shown to be only the wisdom of intellectuals. The manifestations of this wisdom are apparent through morality, wisdom, reason as faith, peace and gift, and happiness. These ethics have penetrated into the minds of Bellow’s protagonists and deepened their consciousness about the marginalization of intellectuals and the centralization of low culture and the masses in capitalistic America. The chapter also introduced Bellow’s heroes as men of ideas, idealists, dissenters and revolutionists of the age. However, they are marginalized, victimized, degraded, humiliated, disregarded, and forgotten in spite of their celebrity and their contributions to American culture. The reason behind this partly lies in their being idealists, men of imagination and letters and partly because of the spoilt American culture. Herzog satirizes the norms of the masses and is sympathetically mocked by Bellow himself for being too utopian. Henderson, Sammler and Humboldt sketch the decline of humanism and the agony of the intellectual. Corde illustrates this humanistic fall through the crisis of the communist system in Romania. Because of this cultural decay, American intellectuals are destined to suffer, and it is here that deconstruction is summoned to regulate this decline.

·5· THE AGONY OF INTELLECTUALS AND THE DECLINE OF CIVILITY “He’s on the make everywhere and cultivates all the Chicago hotshots—​clergymen, newspapermen, professors, television guys, federal judges, Hadassah ladies. Jesus Christ, he never lets up. He organizes new combinations on television. Like Paul Tillich and Malcolm X and Hedda Hopper on one program...He’s a ringmaster, popularizer, liaison for the elites. He grabs up celebrities and brings them before the public. And he makes all sorts of people feel that he has exactly what they’ve been looking for. Subtlety for the subtle. Warmth for the warm. For the crude, crudity. For the crooks, hypocrisy. Atrocity for the atrocious. Whatever your heart desires. Emotional plasma which can circulate in any system.” Herzog (214–​5), Bellow. S. 1956. 214–​15. “Bellow’s intellectual characters are called ‘egghead’ by the masses in the novels. They are totally opposite to those types of physical workers. They are passive, effeminate, self-​analytical, secluded, aloof, eccentric, introverted, tall but non-​muscular, facially yellowish, hard to please, and uprooted. They are erudite, a walking dictionary, ready to be consulted. But they don’t know how to talk: Once they start a conversation, it soon turns into a lecture like a tape-​recorded program. They are awkward at everyday life: they are credulous, and become easy prey for the masses; they earn a lot, spending little for themselves, or depend completely on their patrons. When they need help, they resort to a bookshelf first, finding no answer there.” Rho, H. 1999. 13.

Bellow’s reflection on the wisdom of his heroes was conceived in the previous chapter as a necessary condition for entering his later novels. It can be concluded that the novelist valorizes Man’s morality by emphasizing the most sublime ideals of the Enlightenment, such as faith, reason, happiness, peace, morality, and humanism. Bellow acknowledges this legacy on his heroes and considers it fundamental and enduring. The heroes in the five novels Herzog, Henderson, Sammler, Humboldt and Corde are possessors of European high culture and are deeply immersed in European liberal education. They live a noble life, away from the vulgarity of the masses and their junk culture. In

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doing so, they ironically and sympathetically alienate themselves from their own society, from their families and even from their own lives. Their wisdom pushes them away from the center of American society to its periphery, and sardonically centralizes the crowd. This chapter addresses the aspects of the agony of Bellow’s heroes and the way it leads to the decline of civility in modern America. Bellow’s insight about this cultural crisis refers back to the fact that the West lives under a dictatorship of the commonplace, the unqualified individual and the sovereign mass. Although the world remains in certain respects civilized, its inhabitants are barbarians, and barbarism is defined by the absence of norms. As shall be outlined in this chapter, barbarians and barbarism are metaphorically coined with the select man and the mass man. The select intellectual leads a noble life, whereas the mass man chooses a common life. The former is impelled by his very nature to seek a norm higher and superior to himself, a norm whose authority he freely accepts. The latter is attached to life, its worldly desires and its material interests. This engenders the culture of the mass and high culture, which is at best a vulgarized reflection of High Culture. Bellow’s heroes predict that American culture will be overwhelmed by the masses after the 1950s in spite of the high rate of higher education, and refer this to liberal democracy, ultra capitalism, scientific experimentation and industrialization. This chapter will also show how Bellow’s intellectual heroes observe modern American culture in terms of junk culture, consuming and the entertainment society. These heroes question the lack of norms and nobility in this culture and strive to deconstruct its fundamental assumptions. The more the masses play the role of reality instructors, give advice to intellectuals, and read junk magazines on sex and commercial goods, the more the intellectuals become alienated and the more they develop a strategy of deconstruction based on books, wisdom and high thinking. While the masses seem to be well adjusted to society, showy and licentious, the intellectuals strive to restore the change in the center and periphery in American society. They centralize art, humanities, classical books, morality and religion, and marginalize science, commodity, consumerism, technology, and psychiatry. They deconstruct all makers of the culture industry, which is based on analysis, systemization and standardization, and not imagination and morality. Herzog envisages the agony of the intellect and the decline of civility in American society. He is a bumbler, victim and sufferer. No other story is chaotic as his because he narrates his story through the eyes of an emotionally distraught narrator, Herzog. He is the most erudite, and therefore is capable of

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producing agony by using an epistolary style that embellishes his faceted ideas. Divorce from his wife Madeleine ends his life and aggravates his physical and mental anxiety. His story, therefore, begins at the end of his failed marriage to his second wife. And as he searches for equilibrium and relief, he moves from city to city, from person to person, and from one idea to another, a movement which Rovit calls “the myth of the eternal journey, or better, the eternal wandering” (1975, p. 121). Engaged in aimless wandering, Herzog is prohibited from establishing permanent bonds between himself and anything else in the universe. He admits that intellectuals of the humanities are responsible for civilization and humanism. They should not rest from their wanderings for subliminal goals. They bear the history of the world on their shoulders and painfully serve as the world’s conscience and memory. Herzog is impelled “by the need to explain, to have it out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify, to make amends” (Bellow, 1964, p. 2), and this intensifies his agony and alienation. Herzog maintains that his life has been ruined: “Considering his entire life, he realized that he had mismanaged everything-​everything. His life was, as the phrase goes, ruined” (Bellow, 1964, p. 10), “in grief he does not know what to do” (Bellow, 1964, p. 78). After having a brilliant start with his Ph.D. thesis on “The State of Nature in 17th and 18th Century English and French Political Philosophy” (Bellow, 1964, p. 19), he unexpectedly changes his focus and begins research for a book titled Romanticism and Christianity. His vulnerability might be seen as the result of his intellectual failure in his attempts to restore the disorder of the world, his illusive success with his two wives, Daisy and Madeleine, and his peculiar sense of madness. …he admitted that he had been a bad husband… To his son and his daughter he was a loving but bad father. To his own parents he had been an ungrateful child. To his country, an indifferent citizen. To his brothers and his sister, affectionate but remote. With his friends, an egoist. With love, lazy. With brightness, dull. With power, passive. With his own soul, evasive. (Bellow, 1964, pp. 11–​12)

He introduces himself as a “bad husband,” a “loving but bad father,” an “ungrateful child,” an “indifferent citizen,” a “remote” brother, an “egoist” friend, a “lazy” lover, dull, passive and evasive. His life with his family is passive; his participation in the world is not by means of a positive contribution but by means of his negative, but tireless, efforts of writing letters. His obsession with epistles reflects the type of his addressees, famous intellectuals, politicians and philosophers, whether dead or live including Herzog

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himself: “Dear Moses E. Herzog, since when have you taken such an interest in social questions, in the external world? Until lately, you led a life of innocent sloth” (Bellow, 1964, p. 68). Herzog resists in order to reach the infinite. For him, it is more than an insane writer’s compulsion; it is a holy ceremony of an intellectual and a declaration of war against faithless friends and the decline of civility. He says: What can thoughtful people and humanists do but struggle toward suitable words … I’ve been writing letters helter-​skelter in all directions … I go after reality with language. Perhaps I’d like to change it all into language, to force Madeleine and Gersbach to have a Conscience … I must be trying to keep tight the tensions without which human beings can no longer be called human. If they don’t suffer, they’ve gotten away from me. And I’ve filled the world with letters to prevent their escape … I really believe that brotherhood is what makes a man human. (Bellow, 1964, p. 272)

Herzog has been struggling against mass society, their low culture and its ethics of betrayal. He goes “after reality with language … to change it … to force Madeleine and Gersbach to have a Conscience.” He does not consider them humans as they both betrayed him. They cannot suffer, and because of this they cannot go away from him. Herzog decides to fight with his words as he “filled the world with letters to prevent their escape.” He gives lectures even when he makes love with women. He reacts gently to all the evils that faced him either from his Madeleine and Gersbach, or from fake intellectuals or mass society. When Madeleine declares divorce with the “terrifying menstrual ice of her rages, the look of the murderess” (Bellow, 1964, p. 63), he felt anger: What if he had knocked her down, clutched her hair, dragged her screaming and fighting around the room, flogged her until her buttocks bled. What if he had! He should have torn her clothes, ripped off her necklace, brought his fists down on her head. He rejected this mental violence, sighing. He was afraid he was really given in secret to this sort of brutality. (Bellow, 1964, p. 10)

However, he internalized his anger and “rejected this mental violence … this sort of brutality.” Out of wisdom and subliminal morality, Herzog does not react violently but decides to leave his house. Bellow maintains that Herzog’s inaction underpins an intellectual possessing dignity and a whole philosophy of Jewish ethics, which implies in itself that his agony is derived not only from the betrayal of Madeleine and Gersbach, or the amorality of the masses, but also from his personal romantic temperament characterized by anachronism and narcissism.

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Anachronism and narcissism crystallize Herzog’s personality and intensify his agony and the decline of civility. Herzog is a professorial type to be found in the humanities. He is an academic to Bellow’s mind whose place is university in America. Ironically, even in universities, students are not interested in humanities and liberal education but are concerned with sex, love, race, degrees and sports. Herzog finds himself alienated in the place where he should be happy. This anachronistic feature makes it difficult for him to continue his relationships with women. After his divorces from Daisy and Madeleine, he keeps the same habits of ‘manipulating’ women. Women in a narcissistic society, Lasch says in The Culture of Narcissism, demand two things in their associations with men “sexual satisfaction and tenderness” (1991, p. 203). In contrast, Herzog gives them ideas and anxiety. He assumes he will “never understand what women want. What do they want? They eat green salad and drink human blood” (Bellow, 1964, p. 41). Aunt Zelda, one of the representative narcissistic women, advises Herzog that a girl is expected to have “nightly erotic gratification, safety, money, insurance, furs, jewelry, cleaning women, drapes, dresses, hats, night clubs, country clubs, automobiles, theater” from her husband (Bellow, 1964, p. 40). Madeleine loves Gersbach because he is a family man a practical man; while Herzog remains a man of ideas who talks about philosophy even in the intercourse. With Sono, he “behaved like a philosopher who cared only about the very highest things—​creative reason, how to render good for evil, and all the wisdom of old books. Because he thought and cared about belief” (Bellow, 1964, p. 185). She cries before making love with him. Ramona is the only woman who can make him happy. “She is an ideal mixture of intellect, business, and pleasure: she is an acrobat in a sexual circus” (Bellow, 1964, p. 189). She got an MA in art history at Columbia and runs a lucrative flower shop in Manhattan. But he runs away from her. Herzog’s anachronistic personality cannot cope with narcissistic women and the egoist system, a gesture that deepens his agony and ensures the decline of civility and humanism in modern America. Sammler and Humboldt underpin similar experiences of agony in their struggle to deconstruct mass society and the narcissistic system. Sammler suffers because of the illusive and misleading intentions of the Enlightenment. He believes that its principles with regard to morality, happiness, the sublime and humanism remain theoretical. In modern American culture, individualism and democracy do not fulfill the spirit of the Enlightenment. Sammler announces:

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It has only been in the last two centuries that the majority of people in civilized countries have claimed the privilege of being individuals. Formerly they were slave, peasant, laborer, even artisan, but not person. It is clear that this revolution, a triumph for justice in many ways slaves should be free, killing toil should end, the soul should have liberty has also introduced new kinds of grief and misery. (Bellow, 1970, p. 228)

Sammler maintains that the modern age is deceived and betrayed by the theories of the Enlightenment, which brings “new kinds of grief and misery.” The emergence of individualism and democracy results in cultural grief in America, in spite of its massive economic development and prosperity. The alienation of intellectuals in mass society, including Sammler, has become rougher, more brutal, more materialistic, more capitalistic, and less ethical. Physically, Sammler reflects the agony of the age as his look appears “gloomy, pale, poor and yellowish” (Bellow, 1970, p. 16) in an age requiring power and good appearance. Sammler is helpless about his life, mentally exhausted, and feels that society is degenerating: Mr. Sammler ground his coffee in a square box, cranking counterclockwise between long knees. To commonplace actions he brought a special pedantic awkwardness. In Poland, France, England, students, young gentlemen of his time, had been unacquainted with kitchens. Now he did things that cooks and maids had once done. He did them with a certain priestly stiffness. Acknowledgment of social descent. Historical ruin. Transformation of society. (Bellow, 1970, p. 7)

He sardonically mocks the vulgarized habits of society in modern America and summons his lost aristocracy: “Now he did things that cooks and maids had once done. He did them with a certain priestly stiffness. Acknowledgment of social descent. Historical ruin. Transformation of society.” European students of his time were unacquainted with kitchens and menial work. Elya Gruner, a medical doctor, was forced to do menial work to help Sammler and his daughter immigrate and provide them with their daily expenses. Deeply immersed in this industrialized society, Sammler opposes Darwin’s theory of social evolution. He maintains that American society has been developing into devolution, the tragic fate of civilization. There spreads a general tendency of less seriousness and much irresponsibility, which results in and from the appearance of gangsters dominating society. Sammler is critically involved in the Holocaust, the incidents of the sixties in America and Israel’s six-​day war of 1967, and he considers them the result of fascist gangsters. Sammler realizes that what has happened to him and to his family, and ultimately, to Jews under the shadow of Nazi genocide, is another form of gangster politics,

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a variation on gang wars justified by the counterfeit science of the Reich that juxtaposes with Israel’s 1967 war. He satirically says: This war was a most minor affair. In modem experience, so very little. Nothing at all. And the people involved in it, the boys, after fighting, played soccer at A1 Arish. They cleared a space, and they kicked and butted, they leaped up, they trotted on the sand. Or in the shade of the hangars they took out their books and read biology or chemistry, philosophy, preparing for exams perhaps. (Bellow, 1970, p. 252)

The boys and girls involved in the war do not know much about what is happening around them. Amidst war, they play soccer, fight, trot on the sand, read their books, and prepare for their exams. Bellow suggests that these gangsters deceive the world with peace and declare war on other peoples’ territories. Sammler says that gangsters are everywhere in the modern age and dominate the scene: In Russia, in China, and here [America], very mediocre people have the power to end life altogether. These representatives not representatives of the best but Calibans or, in the jargon, creeps will decide for us all whether we live or die. Man now plays the drama of universal death. (p. 220)

He struggles to deconstruct this negative mode of life. He stands against these gangsters. The agony of civilization in America is further intensified by the metaphorical act of the black pickpocket’s theft and his crush in one of the crowds around Columbus Circle in New York City. “The pickpocket’s importance as a symbolic actor on the stage of American mass culture reaches its peak when he exposes his penis to Sammler after recognizing that Sammler has been watching his pickpocketing performance” (Rho, 1999, p. 67). Bellow describes the scene as follows: It was displayed to Sammler with great oval testicles, a large tan-​and-​purple uncircumcised thing a tube, a snake; metallic hairs bristled at the thick base and the tip curled beyond the supporting, demonstrating hand, suggesting the fleshly mobility of an elephant’s trunk, though the skin was somewhat iridescent rather than thick or rough. … The man’s expression was not directly menacing but oddly, serenely masterful. The thing was shown with mystifying certitude. Lordliness. (1970, pp. 49–​50)

Sammler reminds us that sexual madness has been overwhelming America, that “there was a conspiracy against the sacredness of life, [that] humankind, crazy for symbols, has been trying to utter what it does not know itself”

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(Bellow, 1970, p. 21). The pickpocket is not a human being but an animal. He is “a crystallized representation of Western civilization’s besiegement” (Bellow, 1970, p. 18). The Negro’s brutality, the thief, and the Jewish gaze, Sammler, metaphorically overtone the wrong path the Enlightenment takes and the deconstructive and critical position Bellow maintains toward this change. The Negro symbolizes the biological danger and the Jew, the intellectual danger; the Jew is killed or sterilized. But the Negro is castrated. The penis is annihilated. One is no longer aware of the Negro but only of a penis. The Negro is eclipsed. He is turned into a penis. He is a penis. Sammler, the representative of Jewish intellectuals, deconstructs this cultural nihilism in America and New York City in particular with critical blindness and critical insight as if the city were a literary text. De Man says, “The literary texts are themselves critical but blinded, and the critical reading of the critics tries to deconstruct the blindness” in order to “make the unseen visible” (1993, p. 141), adding, “however negative it may sound,” “deconstruction implies the possibility of rebuilding” (p. 140). Symmetrically Sammler reads New York City as a cultural text; interestingly enough, “he represents de Man’s position as well: he has one blind eye and one insightful eye. His left eye was wounded in the Holocaust and can distinguish just black and white, while his right eye is intuitive enough to pierce through the American culture that is invisible to the masses. He is the only one who catches sight of the pickpocketing in a crowded bus and who stands against it by reporting it to the police” (Rho, 1999, pp. 70–​71). Humboldt adds to the agony of the poet the decline of civility. His agony and frustration stem from a cultural atmosphere in America that disregards cultural elitists, and marginalizes them. He wants to prove his creativity and originality through political fame and cash money. Like Herzog, he supports Stevenson in the elections against Eisenhower as he believes he will bring culture and humanism to Washington. However, after his failure, he reveals his desperation and anger with anti-​intellectual American culture. He is a poet, and yet, he cannot deny his being American. He lusts for money: With a million bucks … I’ll be free to think of nothing but poetry … If I’m obsessed by money, as a poet shouldn’t be, there’s a reason for it. The reason is that we’re Americans after all. What kind of American would I be if I were innocent about money, I ask you? Things have to be combined as Wallace Stevens combined them … No, I go along with Horace Walpole. Walpole said it was natural for free men to think about money. Why? Because money is freedom, that’s why. (Bellow, 1975, p. 159)

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Humboldt is eager for money not because of the influence of the culture of materialism, but because of the symbolical function which money acquires. He will be free to think only of poetry. He confesses to Citrine, “The reason is that we’re Americans after all. What kind of American would I be if I were innocent about money, I ask you?” His dangling between his worldly desires and intellectual pursuits epitomizes the conflict between his morals and the American ethos of money and capitalism. Humboldt illustrates his eagerness for luxurious life through the personification of the cars he drives. At first, he drives a Buick Roadmaster, the American symbol of success, as a result of his best-​selling “The Harlequin Ballads.” He is “the first poet in America with power brakes” (Bellow, 1975, p. 20). The other car is an Oldsmobile, “a big powerful car” and it costs him “lots of dough to keep it in a garage, more than the rent in my fifth-​floor walk-​up” (Bellow, 1975, p. 340). To his mind, the best car makers are Cadillac, Lincoln and Benz, with Buick and Oldsmobile next, and Chevrolet and Dodge at the bottom. His cars are personified in relation to his function as a poet. He says, “Opening the Phaedrus a few months ago, I just couldn’t do it. I broke down. My gears are stripped. My lining is shot. It is all shattered. I didn’t have the strength to bear Plato’s beautiful words, and started to cry. The original, fresh self isn’t there anymore” (Bellow, 1975, p. 340). As Humboldt fades away, Citrine replaces him, and changes his car from a Dodge to a Benz; he calls it an “elite machine, and identifies himself as elite who leads the American culture” (Bellow, 1975, p. 35). His car represents money and culture, and “an attack on it was like an attack on myself” (p. 36), Citrine says. Cantabile, like the pickpocket thief, a gangster who belongs to the underground culture, severely damages Citrine’s Benz and challenges his high culture. After the loss of the Benz, Citrine begins to decline as Humboldt did, while Cantabile and Citrine’s businessman brother Julius are thriving in a Thunderbird and a Cadillac. Compared with the exasperation of the artists, the practical men are prosperous, driving expensive cars. In La Salle Street, Citrine finds the Jaguars and Lincolns and Rolls-​Royces of stockbrokers and corporation lawyers of the deeper thieves and the loftier politicians and the spiritual elite of American business, the eagles in the heights far above the daily, hourly, and momentary destinies of men. Humboldt and Citrine want to show that they are up to date with modern America, but they also struggle to deconstruct a “culture where the American Dollar takes the place of the sublime, spiritual ceremony” (Rho, 1999, p. 115). After Humboldt’s hospitalization and tragic death, Bellow tells that “at the morgue there were no readers of modem poetry. The name Von

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Humboldt Fleisher meant nothing. So he lay there, another derelict” (p. 16). Citrine waits for his role to repeat Humboldt’s tragic fate, in the meantime he mourns, regrets, feels the deep agony and loss of Humboldt, “The agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises…. It’s become clearer and clearer to me in Humboldt’s heartbreak and madness. He performed all the stormy steps of that routine. That performance was conclusive. That it’s perfectly plain, now can’t be continued” (Bellow, 1975, p. 477). Henderson goes through a spiritual quest to envisage agony in American society. When asked by an interviewer which of his characters was most like himself, Bellow replied without hesitation, “Henderson the absurd seeker of high qualities.” He further explains that “what Henderson is really seeking is a remedy to the anxiety over death … I meant him to say that human life is intolerable if we must endure endless doubt” (Steers, 1964, p. 38). Eugene Henderson millionaire, American, pig-​farmer, a lover, husband, father, son, alcoholic, would-​be musician, madman, a highly educated man, a modern exemplar of American society receives a call to adventure. Inside him, the words “I want, I want, I want” relentlessly repeat themselves, and he is drawn to his “heart’s ultimate need.” When a heart insists on its destiny, the agony is great, and so too the danger. He cannot cope with the ethics of modern American society, and for this reason he decides to bring change, to deconstruct the existing values of his society. His mythical hero-​journey is a quest for the means of the regeneration of a society as a whole. He says: Oh, shame, shame! How can we? Why do we allow ourselves? What are we doing? The last little room of dirt is waiting. With­out windows. So for God’s sake make a move, Henderson, put forth effort. You, too, will die of this pestilence. Death will annihilate you and nothing will remain, and there will be nothing left but junk. Because nothing will have been and so nothing will be left. While something still is now! For the sake of all, get out. (Bellow, 1959, p. 40)

Henderson’s moral crisis stems from the questioning of the concept of death:  “You, too, will die of this pestilence. Death will annihilate you and nothing will remain.” He maintains that there is a need for changing values and encountering death:  “So for God’s sake make a move, Henderson, put forth effort.” He rejects death as a finitude and summons the resurrection of the soul, the rebirth of the spirit and the immortality of the soul. Through his guide in Africa, Romilayu, he epitomizes the desire of his generation to redeem anxiety over death, the present over the future: “Millions of Americans have gone forth since the war to redeem the present and discover the future. …

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It’s the destiny of my generation of Americans to go out in the world and try to find the wisdom of life” (Bellow, 1959, pp. 276–​277). Henderson, Bellow informs the reader, refuses the death of the soul and maintains that this is the wisdom of life. Henderson deconstructs the concept of death as shared by common people, unifies the mystery of the inside and the outside, the self and the world. He ventures to regions of supernatural wonder to bring some moral values to his society, a society which is dominated by materialism, business and standardization. He separates from the world, penetrates to a source of power, and makes a life-​enhancing return. The secret he learns is the renewal of life. He returns to tell the reader that death is only part of a cycle: “The hero has died as a modern man; but as eternal man perfected, unspecific, universal man he has been reborn” (Bellow, 1959, p. 20). Henderson pictures resurrection, rebirth, being and becoming by referring to the symbolical function of the orphaned child twice. The first is in the case of his daughter. The second is when he leaves Africa, wilderness, for New York, civilization. When Henderson’s daughter, Ricey, returned to school, bringing along with her an abandoned black infant she had found in a shoe box on the back seat of an old Buick, the headmistress called the Hendersons to inform them of the situation. Reluctantly, Henderson visited the school in a drunken condition and was told that Ricey would have to leave since the school had “the psychological welfare of the other girls to consider” (Bellow, 1959, p. 37). The protagonist challenged her decision with the contention that “those kids can learn noble feelings from my Ricey” who, he claimed, “is one of those rapturous girls.” The headmistress would not be dissuaded from her decision, however, especially when Henderson, in trying to convince her that the baby could not possibly be his daughter’s natural child, blurted out, “The girl is a virgin. She is fifty million times more pure than you or I” (Bellow, 1959, p. 37). On the plane in Newfoundland over the “pure white lining of the gray Arctic silence” (Bellow, 1959, p. 341), Henderson’s story ends up (or begins) with the orphaned child in his arms. He has always been aware of the importance of children for their symbolical function of new beginnings. By the end, Henderson leaps with joy at the triumph of life over death recollecting King Dahfu’s words: “Debris of failure fills the tomb and grave…. Yet a vital current is still flowing. There is an evolution. We must think of it” (Bellow, 1959, p. 237). Henderson admits that a childlike joy is needed for a new beginning, that to stand against the chaos of his society and his ontological dilemma, he must realize that he and

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the world are one, that the voice that said “I want” should have been saying, “she wants, he wants, they want” (Bellow, 1959, p. 286). Dean Albert Corde envisages agony by drawing attention to the falsity and the utopian ideology of communism. He advocates thereby the end of deep political conflict in the West and the end of illusive attempts to reconstruct society. Bellow reveals the reality of the Left, and deconstructs its fundamental ethics both historically and fictionally. When Bellow visited Romania in 1979, he predicted the collapse of the communist regime, and his prediction came true three years later. And when Corde visits Romania to see his hospitalized mother-​in-​law, Valeria, this supplies him with the opportunity to compare two different ideologies: communism and democratic capitalism. Corde informs us about the dictators of Bucharest the Colonel and his secret police called the Securitate as much as those of Chicago, masses. The Colonel is a symbol of corruption and dictatorship. He is a symbolic instrument of the communist party; he controls the hospital where Valeria is taken for intensive care. Valeria was the founder of this hospital and served as the Minister of Health before Ceausescu’s regime, and yet she is disregarded. The hospital looks like an old prison with its yellow and pale paint with monsters ruling its inhabitants. The Colonel restricts Corde’s and Minna’s visit to Valeria not because Valeria is medically prohibited from contact with outsiders, but because the Colonel wants to show his authority over these two famous Americans. Corde remarks that “nothing was big except the colonel’s authority” (Bellow, 1982, p. 3). The bureaucratic dictatorship in Romania results in the emergence of a new kind of aristocracy, not that of intellect or ability, but of right-​thinkers and conformists. The Colonel is an example of this social reformation. He is not a genuine Marxist but one of the “New Class” who lives like one of the “Texas millionaires” (Bellow, 1959, p. 131). He takes the place of old Romanian aristocrats like Valeria and Dr. Raresh, though not their ideals of socialism, philosophy, morality and virtue but their social benefits. The Colonel’s authority is challenged when the two Americans, Corde and Minna, visit Valeria without his permission. They have not yet been disillusioned with the ideology of communism at that time. “The hospital is a place of life and death to them, not a space for ideology and its argument. They make the same kind of mistake when they contact an American ambassador, urging him to defeat the Colonel’s sovereignty. The result is a worsening of the situation. They will be allowed to visit Valeria only one more time before she dies” (Bellow, 1982, p. 149).

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The Colonel is a symbolical aspect of this one-​dimensional man. He is a man of power; he is a decision taker, the builder, the teacher. Valeria, Dr. Raresh and Dr. Voynich represent the intellectuals of high culture in Romania, while culture under the regime of Ceausescu is low culture. Dr. Raresh introduces brain surgery to Romania and serves as a Minister of Health. He is an idealist and utopian communist; he welcomes Russian soldiers, but they betray him when they steal his watch and Mercedes. He lacks the pragmatism to cope with the new political realities of the socialist state. Valeria possesses the same traits as her husband. She is the founder of the hospital where she is hospitalized and is a major feminine aristocratic figure in modern Romania. They are disregarded and destined to be ostracized by communists. They have a dream of an equal social system, but they are disillusioned. Dr. Voynich is another intellectual who witnesses the broken dream of communism. Being a political critic of Ceausescu’s regime, he is sentenced to more than ten years in prison, set free, and then used by the system as an advertisement to play the role of the happiest man. Dr. Voynich becomes another Spangler, the journalist and spokesman of Ceausescu in Washington. Vlada, Minna’s friend and a scientist at Chicago University, reminds Corde that it is nothing for them to be a dean, but being a famous journalist with connections with the ambassador really matters. Corde criticizes the communist regime and predicts its failure as it increases the sufferings of people, and, behind this, Bellow criticizes the double-​faced and contradictory ideology of American capitalism and democracy as it provides the means for this regime to control its people. Corde informs the reader about bribery as another aspect of corruption in communist Romania. Minna announces that “whatever we have to do, cigarettes will make it easier,” and Corde agrees: “A pack or two of king-​sized Kents saved dreary hours of waiting.” The usual commodity for bartering is a packet of Kent cigarettes, which is equivalent to a dollar or 15 liters of petrol. When Corde deals with the documents for Valeria’s funeral, he observes, “No waiting. He [Traian] went to the head of the line. He presented himself at the desk boldly, making essential signals, and putting down the cigarettes” (Bellow, 1982, p. 170). The power of cigarettes makes the impossible possible. The bribes are accepted without pretension or compunction; they are spread wide over communist society. Both the givers and the receivers consider them naturally. Another threat that deepens Corde’s agony is the emergence of a new bourgeois mentality. Gherea is an expert in brain surgery; he is not a man of culture and philosophy, nor is he a man of idealism. He says, “You don’t give

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me five hundred thousand lei, I don’t remove your brain tumor” (Bellow, 1982, p. 23). He would not operate on the dictator’s son without money. When not making money, he spends all the rest of his time on sex. He is a man of “pictures, music” (Bellow, 1982, p. 23). He is an avatar of money and sex. He is a knowledge machine whom even the dictator has no means to control. The concierge Ioanna is less threatening than Gherea, yet she plays multiple and contradictory roles: “Whenever Valeria went abroad, Ioanna’s name was high on her shopping list. …[She was] big on emotion, loyal to the family, fully informed, very potent, dangerous to neglect. …Bellow [She] protected, loved and blackmailed the old sisters. How to interpret this?” (Bellow, 1982, p. 72). Corde’s illusions about Romania come true when Ceausescu and his wife Elena are executed by the rebellious mob. Communism, which had lasted from 1965 to 1989, fell apart. Valeria passed away a decade before Ceausescu, and Bellow’s predictions about Romanian communism are proved right, at least in The Dean’s December. Bellow is an early deconstructive practitioner. In a postmodern era, concepts like deconstruction and subversion become fundamental tools in assessing the morality and the ethics of modern America. Differently put, the norms of high culture re-​evaluate the norms of low culture, the elites reread the masses. What follows is that amorality converges with deconstructionism and postmodernity in their insistence on ethical quandary, the illusive universality of values and the uncertain foundations of morality. Bellow’s famous words “we need wisdom most when we believe in it least” (1995, p. 174), become highly significant in describing an age that is characterized by indecision, traumatic moments, anxiety, a stubbornly unknown future and the domination of the masses and low culture. His point, one ventures to suppose, is that postmodernity is modernity without illusions or, in other words, modernity is postmodernity refusing to accept its own truth. This implies that the illusive ideals of morality boil down to the belief that modernity is but a temporary and reparable state, sooner or later to be replaced by amorality. This is fictionally envisaged when Herzog, Henderson, Sammler, Humboldt and Corde show their agony and underpin the amorality of capitalistic America. Death operates as a metaphor that crystallizes amoral capitalism, illusive democracy as well as totalitarian communism. The Dean’s December is a memoir about various scenes of real and metaphorical deaths: the death of Valeria, the execution of Ceausescu and his wife, the killing of the student Lucas Ebry, and eventually, the death of morality and humanism in Romania and Chicago. As the story unfolds, Corde starts to inform us about his attempts

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to cope with the death of his mother-​in-​law, Valeria, and unexpectedly ends up lamenting the metaphorical death of morality. Corde’s failure to find comfort in Bucharest, his coming back to the United States with Valeria’s corpse, the murder scenes in Chicago, and the brutality, violence and horror in the US cities do not offer any ethical foundation for a moral world. Corde begs “not to be a fool” when Shakespeare, Dante, Kant, Aristotle and Greek moral philosophy, to his mind, turn out to be fundamental to the new generations in order to guarantee “a moral revolution.” Death leads to madness and lethargy: “I imagine, sometimes, that if a film could be made of one’s life, every other frame would be death.... Destruction and resurrection in alternate beats of being, but speed makes it seem continuous. But you see, kid, with ordinary consciousness you can’t even begin to know what’s happening” (Bellow, 1982, p. 295). This intensifies Corde’s moral uncertainty about life and the world. As an inquisitive and committed journalist, Corde has suffered enough in a county of capitalistic democracy. He expects temporary relief in Romania to replace American democracy. Disappointed and frustrated with the socialist experience, he returns to Chicago to tap another ideology, capitalistic democracy. Corde becomes more exposed to barbarism and death scenes in Chicago. Unlike Spangler, Provost Alec Witt and even Mina, he could have been a famous and successful journalist, but he is a man of classical style, that is, he is a man of truth. He writes articles as a way to truth rather than for sale. They are not commercial products to him. Vlada, a chemist and Minna’s friend at Harvard, addresses him by saying, “you’re an artist in your line, not the ordinary kind of journalist.” Bellow agrees, saying in an interview with Matthew Roudane, “Mr. Corde writes his article like an artist rather than a journalist” (Roudane, 1984, p. 273). Corde is a serious, creative writer. He metaphorically represents Bellow’s estrangement in the 1980s: “Dean Corde’s unpopularity with the media is clearly a metaphor for Bellow’s estrangement from his readers” (Christhilf, 1984, p. 66). Corde’s agony is apparent in the Chicago of capitalistic democracy. He thinks that “only poetry had the strength ‘to rival the attractions of narcotics, the magnetism of TV, the excitement of sex, or the ecstasies of destruction’.” He has lost the moral foundation on which he could build the worth of the classics. He has nothing to share with common people in Chicago like Zaehner, Mason, Max, Sorokin and Elfrida. It is his boyhood friend Dewey Spangler who dominates modern America because he is a “world communicator,” a “maker of discourse,” “statesmanlike and doughy” (Bellow, 1982, p. 244), and has no college education but he decodes the likes and dislikes of the

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masses exactly (p. 67). He is cynical toward “writers who talked about ‘spirit’, intellectuals in flight from the material realities of the present age” (Bellow, 1982, p. 122). He is the businessman of the culture industry, and he has his marketing strategy for that: If you were going to be a communicator, you had to know the passwords, the code-​ words, you had to signify your acceptance of the prevailing standards.... The Dean’s problem had been one of language. Nobody will buy what you’re selling—​not in those words. They don’t even know what your product is. Professor Corde...is very hard on journalism, on the mass media. His charge is that they fail to deal with the moral, emotional, imaginative life, in short, the true life of human beings, and that their great power prevents people from having access to this true life. (1982, p. 301)

Spangler is a good communicator to the American masses; he knows “the passwords, the code-​words … of the prevailing standards.” In the newspapers he writes the same bad news, tragedy, crimes, while “the Dean’s problem had been one of language.” Charlie Citrine in Humboldt’s Gift says, “For forty years during the worst crises of civilization I read the papers faithfully and this faithful reading did no one any good. Nothing was prevented thereby. I gradually stopped reading the news” (Bellow, 1975, p. 471). Spangler’s information to the masses is false information, and it is only meant for entertainment and daily consumption. Corde suffers because the masses as well as journalists like Spangler “fail to deal with the moral, emotional, imaginative life, in short, the true life of human beings, and that their great power prevents people from having access to this true life.” Nobody likes his articles. No one knows about them in the first place. The masses regard him as problematic. He writes about county jail, county hospital, and urban Chicago in Harper’s. The Chicagoans ignore or overlook the existence of evils in those areas. The county jail is run by criminal gangs, becoming a center of every possible evil and re-​producing prisoners. Corde continues, “Damn rough scene. Drugs, rackets, homosexual rape. Plenty of money changing hands, and people beaten and tortured. Lots of weapons,” and “the prisoners…tucked trouser bottoms into socks to keep the rats from running up their legs in the night” (Bellow, 1982, p. 152). Nobody dares to intervene and investigate this dark side of democracy except Albert Corde and Rufus Ridpath. Ridpath takes charge of the jail and changes it; he cuts suicide crimes, death scenes, reduces vandalism, and cuts the budget allocated to the jail, but he was stamped “dangerous” (Bellow, 1975, p. 59) because he is too honest, too unpolitical, too anti-​business-​like. In Time and Newsweek, “Grotesque front-​page close-​ups made him look like a gorilla”

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(Bellow, 1982, p. 59). Corde concludes, “Nothing true really true could be said in the papers,” and “Somehow the media are more comfortable with phonies, with ‘unprincipled men’” (p. 54). The death metaphor appears again in the case of Lucas Ebry. Lucas Ebry and Reggie Hines a black pimp and a prostitute, together kill a white student, Rick Lester. Corde, as Dean of Students, arranges to settle the case. But he is marked a racist, a dangerous intellectual, and an unpolitical simpleton. The white masses do not want a deep investigation of the crime, The Chicagoan newspapers rush to a quick judgment, consider the dean unbiased. No students, no administrators, no mass media are interested in knowing what really happened, who is innocent and who is not, who is responsible for taking the case to court, and what procedures are to be followed, and the case turns out to be a nuisance to Corde and not a real attempt to find the truth. The death of Rick demonstrates the vulgarity of capitalistic democracy, especially when Lydia Lester, Rick’s wife, is threatened by Mason, a militant supporter of black radicals and Corde’s nephew, and reflects the trial as a trivial performance, a show, in the presence of Max Detillion, the defense lawyer of Lucas Ebry, and the mass media. Indifference, as Lash indicates, characterizes capitalistic American democracy:  “In our time democracy is more seriously threatened by indifference than by intolerance or superstition” (1999, p. 89); Citrine in Humboldt’s Gift agrees: “What you needed in a big American city was a deep no-​affect belt, a critical mass of indifference” (Bellow, 1975, p. 35). Death turns out to be a concept and a metaphor that intensifies Corde’s agony and cultural decline in capitalistic America. Citrine in Humboldt’s Gift tells the story of his dead friend, Humboldt, which is in a way his own story. Death becomes a metaphor for amorality and a sign of struggle against all forms of low culture and conformity. Citrine repeats Humboldt’s fate, and the whole story turns out to be a tale of Citrine’s anger, regret and nostalgia for the dead poet. Citrine is haunted by Humboldt whatever he is engaged in, and copies the poet’s agony. He is regarded as a criminal in a police station, being photographed and fingerprinted for a criminal’s file when he is suspected of being a partner with Cantabile. His dignity as an intellectual, a winner of several prizes, counts for nothing for the police. (Rho, 1999, p. 136)

Humboldt’s story begins with subliminal and intellectual reflections on a utopian world and tragically ends up conveying scenes of death and fear. He strives to establish moral grounds to modern America through rereading “Homer,

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Vergil, Plato, Dante, Kant, the theories of idealism, the British romanticism, Milton, Hegel, Marx, T. S. Eliot, Marvell, Shakespeare” (Bellow, 1975, p. 11). Ironically, his Platonic views and philosophical insights do not help restore morality and humanism. The subject’s failure with his wife, his financial crisis and the loss of his manuscript by the end of the novel stand for the illusive foundations of morality in capitalistic democracy. Citrine experiences the same humiliation as Humboldt. He is arrested by the police, loaded in a police car like an animal, disregarded, and beaten by ignorant, stinky policeman. He says: The agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises…. It’s become clearer and clearer to me in Humboldt’s heartbreak and madness. He performed all the stormy steps of that routine. That performance was conclusive. That it’s perfectly plain, now can’t be continued. Now we must listen in secret to the sound of the truth that God puts into us. (Bellow, 1975, p. 477)

Citrine’s agony becomes “clearer and clearer…in Humboldt’s heartbreak and madness.” They are both forgotten beauties. Citrine performs all the same stormy steps as Humboldt. In “The Isolation of Modern Poetry,” Schwartz epitomizes the fate of Citrine: “[N]ot government subsidy, nor yearly prizes, nor a national academy can disguise the fact that there is no genuine place for the poet in modem life. He has no country, no community, insofar as he is a poet, and his greatest enemy is money, since poetry does not yield him a livelihood” (1970, pp. 9–​10). Humboldt and Citrine suffer from the masses as they prevent them from having a genuine place in modern life. Humboldt detests them as they do not purchase his poems after the fifties, disregard him, forget the beauties of his art, and eventually reject him from the center of the American cultural scene. Citrine hates them even though they are the source of his prosperity. He does not beg for their attention, rather, he suffers from ordeals called Cantabile, Langotardi, Denise, Renata, Senora, and many others. Citrine is unrealistic and romantic; he cannot live like others, for he has “no country, no community, insofar as he is a poet,” and while he shows sympathy with the masses, he receives mockery, enmity and humiliation. He is a successor of Humboldt not of the poet’s alcoholism, medication obsession, conflict between literature and lucre, and jealousy of what he does not have, but of his anxiety concerning the rough reality and his ingenious creativity. He can see himself only through Humboldt; he is another Humboldt, or a Herzog under the shade of Humboldt.

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Citrine deconstructs the power of the masses as he thinks he is higher than them. They are a nuisance to him. He says, “The good old bourgeois virtues … are gone forever” (Bellow, 1975, p. 48). He is anachronistic like Herzog, utopian like Corde, idealist like Humboldt, a dreamer like a hermit, Henderson. He confesses that “the weight of the sense world is too heavy … getting heavier all the time” (Bellow, 1975, p. 293). Citrine is like an innocent child, an intellectual hero who speaks as if giving a lecture, a stranger who looks for distance, and evades responsibility; he looks for a savior: “How typical of me. The usual craving. I looked for help. I longed for someone to do the stations of the cross with me. Just like Pa. And where was Pa? Pa was in the cemetery” (Bellow, 1975, p. 70). “Pa” is not that real father, but he signifies a symbolical one that saves him from the hegemony of the masses. He is an intellectual who seeks to deconstruct the barbarity of modern American society at any cost, a society that fails to acknowledge his spirit, and refuses to pay tribute to intellectuals. He is bookish, and confesses that books are fundamental in facing American low culture. He announces: Ah my higher life! When I was young I believed that being an intellectual assured me of a higher life. In this Humboldt and I were exactly alike. He too would have respected and adored the learning, the rationality, the analytical power of a man like Richard Durnwald. For Durnwald the only brave, the only passionate, the only manly life was a life of thought. I had agreed. (p. 186)

His favorite thinkers are Humboldt and Richard Durnwald, who admit that “the only brave, the only passionate, the only manly life was a life of thought.” However, while facing versions of reality, he cannot find solutions to the brutality of Chicago’s gangsters. Rinaldo Cantabile is one of them. Cantabile is a king of threats and a representative of underground culture. He threatens Citrine to pay his debt; he threatens a businessman called Stronson to extort money; he threatens lawyers and managers in Europe to get high commission while negotiating deals for them in America. Citrine finds himself involved in Cantabile’s affairs without his choice. Cantabile suggests killing Denise, Citrine’s ex-​wife, to relieve his pain and help him get rid of his divorce litigation. He offers high-​quality French prostitutes with regard to Citrine’s prestige; one of them is Polly, the wife of his friend. When Citrine refuses to give him money, he batters his Benz and forces him to smell his excrement while he was doing his business in the toilet. This is the most barbarous thing Citrine ever experienced from Cantabile. Citrine can feel himself being humiliated: “Of course he wanted to humiliate me. Because I was a Chevalier

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of the Légion d’honneur? Not that he actually knew of this. But he was aware that I was as they would say in Chicago a Brain, a man of culture or intellectual attainments” (Bellow, 1975, p. 83). Cantabile convinces himself that he proudly controls everything. Cantabile and Vito Langobardi are two emblematic examples of Chicago gangsters and good representers of modern American culture. They are brutal, egoist, materialist, wicked, inhuman, immoral and vulgar. Cantabile profits from those in need, advertises abortion to university students, saying, “Call us if this misfortune occurs. We will advise and help free of charge” (Bellow, 1975, p. 175). Langobardi is the king of the underground world. He has an elegance and majesty which Citrine does not have: In his own way he was an American executive. Handsome Langobardi dressed far better than any board chairman. Even his coat sleeves were ingeniously lined, and the back of his waistcoat was made of beautiful paisley material … He was manly, he had power. In his low voice he gave instructions, made rulings, decisions, set penalties. (Bellow, 1975, p. 69)

Contrary to Citrine, Langobardi belongs to every day American life, while Citrine is ignorant; he lacks the skills of communication and dialogism. Ironically, Langobardi, head of the gangsters, is “dressed far better than any board chairman. Even his coat sleeves were ingeniously lined, and the back of his waistcoat was made of beautiful paisley material,” like a representative of American elegance and culture, and “in his low voice he gave instructions, made rulings, decisions, set penalties,” stressing his manhood and power, and drawing attention to Citrine’s weaknesses: “Get smart, Charlie. Do it the way I do” (Bellow, 1975, p. 69). Citrine’s agony in his relationship with reality instructors is justified through his ambivalent relations with women. He divorces Denise and escapes to Renata to have sexual relief. Denise is “warlike and shrill,” and has a “martial personality.” She squeezes him because she thinks she is smarter than him as far as non-​academic affairs are concerned. He is not able to understand her real intentions behind their divorce:  “Real Americans are supposed to suffer with their wives, and wives with husbands. Like Mr. and Mrs. Abraham Lincoln. It’s the classic US grief.” He appears naïve, romantic and innocent, a man of letters whose friend Urbanovich warns, “You’ve led a more or less bohemian life. Now you’ve had a taste of marriage, the family, middle-​class institutions, and you want to drop out. But we can’t allow you to dabble like that” (Bellow, 1975, pp. 231–​232).

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Renata represents his relief, sexual pleasure. He transcends his marriage failure into a temporary successful relationship with Renata. She attracts him, her major is sex: “She went from fun to mirth to happiness and finally to a climax, her body straightening in the French provincial Palm Court chair. She nearly passed out with a fine long quiver. This was almost fishlike in its delicacy” (Bellow, 1975, pp. 360–​361). In Humboldt’s tragic death, she resuscitates him through magical sex to help him forget the tragedy of his friend. Citrine confesses, “She gave me a fragrant hankie, oddly redolent, as if she kept it not in her pocketbook but between her legs. I put it to my face and curiously enough it did something, it gave me some comfort. That young woman had a good understanding of certain fundamentals” (Bellow, 1975, p. 341). Sardonically, as he gets sexual consolation from Renata, he puts aside his spiritual and intellectual interests and falls into boredom. Renata is the female Cantabile and Langobardi. She deepens his grief as she addresses him: “When the dear/​Disappear/​There are others/​Waiting near” (Bellow, 1975, p. 281). She is a snob, a philistine, a daughter of many fathers she does not know her biological father. At Kennedy airport, she says “Let’s have a drink in the VIP Lounge. I don’t want to drink where it’s so noisy and the glasses are sticky” (Bellow, 1975, p. 378). Her fake aristocracy juxtaposes with her mother, Senora. Senora makes money without any job and spends its on Renata’s daily necessities rather than education, lives like a princess, attracts men with her body, and helps Renata dominate him. Citrine suffocates because of this culture of trickery, Machiavellianism and exploitation, and he assumes that his tragic end is drawing very near. Death and resurrection in the case of Henderson operate as a metaphor of salvation, redemption and affirmation in modern American society. Henderson begins as alienated, rebellious against life’s terms, comic on the quixotic American self, and demanding a special fate. He flees from the piled-​ up burden of his life and from the unredeemed death he sees before him. He decides to ensure his affirmation is not in the civilization of New York and its business, risky and material culture, but in savage Africa. He wants to affirm the meaningfulness of life and show that a human life is not like a stone falling from life to death. He claims, “Chaos doesn’t run the whole show. That this is not a sick and hasty ride, helpless, through a dream into oblivion.” He continues, “I believe there is justice and that much is promised.” In his journey, Henderson does not die; rather, he celebrates life. He is a becomer and ‘beer’, and he tells Romilayu, “I wouldn’t agree to the death of my soul” (Bellow, 1959, p. 277). He flees from this death, quarrels with

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Lily, his first wife, at the beginning of the story, and becomes furious at her when she tells a friend that Henderson is “unkillable” (Bellow, 1959, p. 6). He responds, “You’ll never kill me. I’m too rugged!” The absolute amoral culture of New York triggers off the atmosphere of death and nihilism. Henderson remarks: I looked in at an octopus, and the creature seemed also to look at me and press its soft head to the glass, flat, the flesh becoming pale and granular, blanched, speckled. The eyes spoke to me coldly. But even more speaking, even more cold, was the soft head with its speckles, a cosmic coldness in which I felt I was dying. The tentacles throbbed and motioned through the glass, the bubbles sped upward, and I thought, “This is my last day. Death is giving me notice.” (Bellow, 1959, p. 19)

Henderson runs from the absoluteness of death, playing the violin in order to reach his dead father, “for it so happens that I have never been able to convince myself the dead are utterly dead” (Bellow, 1959, p. 30). Kiss Lenox, Henderson’s maid, dies in the kitchen, and Henderson, going to the woman’s cottage, is shocked by the hoards of ancient claptrap she kept as a means of cheating death. And he thinks, “You, too, will die of pestilence. Death will annihilate you and nothing will remain, and there will be nothing left but junk” (Bellow, 1959, p. 40). In Africa, Henderson continues to escape death. Dahfu, the king of the Wariri tribe, calls him an “avoider.” His terror of the octopus is repeated in the image of the lion’s cave, which “recalled to me the speckled vision of twilight where I saw that creature, the octopus” (Bellow, 1959, p. 220); the lion provokes terror, he says: “The animal’s face is pure fire to me. Every day. I have to close my eyes” (Bellow, 1959, p. 283). Death is epitomized in blood and red color, as in Dahfu’s slips, his wound, and Henderson’s beard. The Wariri tribe is in some way connected with death; it is aggressive, hostile, cruel and warlike. This is evidenced by the hanging corpses on the edge of the village, the dead man in Henderson’s hut, the shrunken head of an assumed sorceress, and may represent a death instinct as well as an aggressive instinct. Their religious ceremonies include such barbaric acts as a wrestling match between a dwarf and an old woman, a contest in which two men whip each other, and a display of irreverence and brutality to the carved statues of their gods. These carved wooden statues of varying sizes represent gods who rule “the air, the mountains, fire, plants, cattle, luck, sickness, clouds, birth, death” (Bellow, 1959, p. 181). Henderson, who has a love of life, is horrified by the spectacle, especially when the Wariri tribe reveals its attitude toward life through ceremonies of

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screaming, chanting, striking each other, whipping and wrestling. He is forced into this spectacle, and in this way, through violent and aggressive force, the Wariri impose their will upon life: the thunderclaps and the rains come down. “Dahfu, who disapproves of his tribe’s behavior, explains to Henderson that the shrieking crowd represents the ‘earthly dominion’, that man is a ‘creature of revenges’ who receives blows from life and passes them to others” (Markos, 1966, p. 103), and Henderson thinks “it is a continuity matter” (Bellow, 1959, p. 213). Dahfu tells Henderson that the Arnewi and the Wariri were once a single tribe “but separated over the luck question” (Bellow, 1959, p. 166), but beyond these vestiges, the leaders of the two tribes, Queen Willatable and King Dahfu, represent the full harmonization of human forces and serve to epitomize therefore that equilibrium which Henderson seeks to achieve. Henderson runs from the death of morality in New York as well as real scenes of death in the wilderness of Africa. Escapism becomes a moment of deconstruction. It turns out to be refusal and negation of modern American capitalist democracy. It is a resurrection, the birth of a new reality. Henderson rejects the ethos and reality of the masses in modern America, the habits of tribes in Africa, but, he sardonically accepts his own reality. He says, “I am on damned good terms with reality, and don’t you forget it” (Bellow, 1959, p. 36). He begs for reality: “But how much unreality can [humankind] stand?” (Bellow, 1959, p. 105). Henderson seeks to deconstruct the amoral ethics of the contemporary world and bring some change to humanity; he loves his version of reality, his ideal constructions, his mental journey. He believes, “It’s you who makes the world what it is. Reality is you” (Bellow, 1959, p. 123). Reality is mental travel; it is “the old bitch,” a female figure: the lioness and, especially, Willatale. Henderson is invited to kiss Willatale on the belly. A great heat emanates from her and he feels “contact with a certain power, unmistakable!” (p. 7). Henderson needs to learn to accept death as well as beauty; the possible death that might be engendered from the lioness, the queen, and the beauty that lies in her spirit and power. Then he can redeem his spirit and affirm humanism and morality amidst chaos and death. After the horrible death of King Dahfu in one of the Wariri ceremonies, dancing and chanting, Henderson decides to run to civilization. His journey turns out to be a sign that he has come about: “the sleep is burst, and I have come to myself” (Bellow, 1959, p. 328). He acknowledges this truth and admits that he has arranged to estrange himself from life because of his dread of death. At the root of his self-​avoidance and his restless search has been his fear of the masses and low culture, and to acknowledge their ethics means to

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share them, and be part of their savagery. His efforts, he realizes, are “to raise my spirit from the earth, to leave the body of this death. I was very stubborn. I wanted to raise into another world” (Bellow, 1959, p. 9). Henderson seeks to deconstruct the ethics of the masses in New York, and protect himself from their collapse. On the plane back to New York, he gazes down at the Atlantic Ocean as he is no longer afraid of the depths within him. He recalls “the time in his youth when his job was to draw crowds at an amusement park by riding in a roller coaster with an age-​worn, battered, tragic-​looking bear named Smolak. In despair and fear Henderson and the bear clung to each other for safety” (Markos, 1966, p. 114), “I enbeared by him, and he probably humanized by me” (Markos, 1966, p. 339). The journey represents a moment of resurrection, salvation and redemption. Henderson envisages his ontological quest for morality by the possible unity between man and the world, that “man absorbs the influences from the external world, or whether the meaning is more profound, the bear perhaps being a symbol of some kind of tragic preconsciousness, or a symbol of the inevitability of suffering. But the bear is also, like Willatale, a beer with a capacity for accepting all of life” (Markos, 1966, p. 115). [Henderson] “had seen too much of life, and somewhere in his huge head he had worked it out that for creatures there is nothing that ever runs unmingled” (Markos, 1966, p. 339). Sammler’s oblique view with regard to American systematic life overtones his perception of the problem of cultural amorality. This is evidenced by his critique of American society as being one-​dimensional, lacking the audacity to use its mind and understanding. Bellow himself informs the reader that in a capitalistic democracy the function of critique is not allowed. Everybody wants to be intentionally blind by overlooking or disregarding his freedom to criticize society. Sammler narrates the story of the black thief, and when the police are informed about it, they just ignore the crime, partly because of its being a daily occurrence, and partly because they report crimes in chronological order. They make waiting lists and deal with them not according to their importance but according to their order, “which makes for a democracy of crimes, all crimes being considered equal” (Bellow, 1970, p. 71). Another example of cultural decay is when Sammler describes public telephone booths and New York’s subway as being willfully and maliciously destroyed and defaced. They are disgustingly dirty, he says, “descending to the subway” equates with “the grave, Elya, Death, entombment, the Mezvinski vault” for the protagonist (Bellow, 1970, p. 120). Taxis are never on time, communication systems are

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unreliable, and thus he loses confidence in this system which is based on wisdom and morality. Sammler continues to unveil corruption in New York. He claims, “Penicillin keeps New York looking cleaner. No faces gnawed by syphilis, with gaping nose-​holes as in ancient times” (Bellow, 1970, p. 163). This is “America … advertised throughout the universe as the most desirable, most exemplary of all nations” (p. 14). More strikingly, he censures the city: New York makes one think about the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world. The end wouldn’t come as a surprise here. Many people already bank on it … I am not sure that this is the worst of all times. But it is in the air now that things are falling apart, and I am affected by it. (p. 304)

New York marks the collapse of civilization and the end of the world. Drugs keep it clean. As a half-​blind Holocaust survivor, Sammler reads the city as a critical text, deploying de Man’s “blindness and insight” to dare to think and use his own understanding in a one-​dimensional society. It is very ironic and contradictory that he, half-​blind, can see dirty New York with its corruption, while others having full sight cannot remark the decay of the city. Sammler deconstructs the fake apparent glory ascribed to America as “the most desirable, most exemplary of all nations,” and he believes that everything is “falling apart, and [he is] affected by it.” Bellow predicts the moral decline of capitalistic democracy in America. He fictionally illustrates this, and his characters fit this claim. Gruner’s two children, Wallace and Angela, are of this tendency. While Gruner is attached to his background and its European cultural tradition, his children are egoists. Wallace retorts to Sammler, “Roots? Roots are not modern. That’s a peasant conception, soil and roots. Peasantry is going to disappear. That’s the real meaning of the modern revolution, to prepare world peasantry for a new state of existence. I certainly have no roots” (Bellow, 1970, pp. 245–​246). The barrenness of morality is strikingly envisaged through the deconstruction of the American family and the changing relations between parents and children. Dr. Gruner, his children Wallace and Angela, Mr. Sammler and his daughter Shula are emblematic instances that shall be investigated in depth. The parents can no longer control their children. Dr. Gruner and his children fit this claim. They have no affection toward each other. Gruner calls Wallace a “moron,” and Angela a “cow” and a “sloppy cunt” (Bellow, 1970, p. 285). He has no parental authority over them, nor are they ready to abide by his instructions. Wallace is a trouble maker wherever he goes: Europe, Africa,

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America. He steals his father’s money. When he is arrested in Russia, Gruner spends a lot to free him. When Gruner is sick, Wallace does not care about him; he is busy spending Gruner’s money and is worried about how much he will inherit after the death of his father. Gruner lacks the self-​confidence to educate Angela and confesses that he does not have the legal or moral authority to control her. She drives her father crazy because of her sexual adventures. She is proud of the group sex experience she had in Mexico, enjoying its secrecy, but being afraid of whether her sexual orgy will be discovered by her father. The ties between the father and his daughter are incurably broken. She hides her sexual adventures and tells the men she goes with, “Daddy would die if he knew this,” and eventually, “her debauchery is partly the cause of his death” (Bellow, 1970, p. 78). Gruner’s family is tragically destroyed, and what sardonically keep their relations going are “the house, the Rolls Royce, and money” (Bellow, 1970, p. 66). Shula is sex-​obsessed like Angela, and she manipulates her father, Sammler, who describes her lust as follows: Shula, like all the ladies perhaps, was needy needed gratification of numerous instincts, needed the warmth and pressure of men, needed a child for sucking and nurture, needed female emancipation, needed the exercise of the mind, needed continuity, needed interest interest! needed flattery, needed triumph, power, rabbis, needed priests, needed fuel for all that was perverse and crazy, needed noble action of the intellect, needed culture, demanded the sublime. No scarcity was acknowledged. If you tried to deal with all these immediate needs you were a lost man. (Bellow, 1970, p. 35)

To legitimize her sexual desires, Shula attacks what she calls the enemies of life “Western civilization could [not] survive universal dissemination... the enemies of civilization would attack it” (Bellow, 1970, p. 34)—​in the name of proletarian revolution, reason, irrationality, sex, perfect instantaneous freedom and madness. She needs the warmth and pressure of men, a child for sucking, female emancipation, exercise of the mind, continuity, interest, flattery, triumph, power, the noble action of the intellect, culture, and the sublime. She is in need of everything, and if one deals with all her needs, one will get easily lost. She is the epitome of modern youth in America. She hides her debauchery from her father, and he is curious about her whereabouts. “They look like players in a hide and seek game, but Sammler is afraid of finding his daughter in the act of sexual intercourse” (Bellow, 1970, p. 76). Sammler explains this contamination of the American family by the absence of a moral contract. In a modern capitalistic society which is

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characterized by industrialization and mass culture, the human being is alienated from his birth until his death. Man is born in a hospital, gets married in a church, dies in a hospital, and is buried alone. This life journey takes place in private and institutionalized places and lacks the warmth of love, humanism and togetherness. Bloom intensifies Sammler’s thinking: “People sup together, play together, travel together, but they do not think together,” they exist in a “temporary togetherness” (1986, pp. 57–​58). Angela refuses to marry Wharton Horricker because what she wants is sex, not a committed and responsible life of husband and wife. Gruner dies alone in the hospital where he spent his life. Sammler rejects this modern amorality. He seeks to establish his own planet. He deconstructs the modern American capitalistic way of life, and projects himself into finding “New worlds? Fresh beginnings? Not such a simple matter” (Bellow, 1970, p. 136). His preferred planet is Earth, where human beings can create a moral contract and live ethically and responsibly. Gruner presents an example of ethics of which Sammler has dreamt: “he did meet the terms of his contract. The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it—​that we all know God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know” (Bellow, 1970, p. 313). In the case of Herzog, cultural amorality is apparent in the anti-​intellectual American scene. Herzog deconstructs anti-​ intellectual American ethics, which he claims to be built on the principles of the masses, risk and business culture. One instance that illustrates this is Herzog’s support for Adlai Stevenson in the election of 1952 when Eisenhower won. Stevenson’s defeat represented a shock to American intellectuals including Herzog. To Herzog’s mind, Stevenson was an intellectual, a man of culture and high classics, and he could have restored morality and humanism to American society, while Eisenhower is a war general, practical, a man of business, belongs to “reality instructors,” and he would aggravate the alienation of intellectuals. Stevenson loses the election against the representative of the masses. Stevenson turns out to be the victim of the accumulated grievances against intellectuals and brain trusters, and his political fate was taken as a yardstick by which liberal intellectuals measured the position of intellect in American political life. Herzog “embraced Stevenson with a readiness and a unanimity that seems without parallel in American history” (Bellow, 1964, p. 222). Anti-​intellectual American culture admits that “American intellectuals did not feel for or understand their country; they had grown irresponsible and arrogant” (Bellow, 1964, p. 223). This accuses intellectuals of being ignorant and careless about

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the benefits of the country, deepens Herzog’s agony in American capitalistic democracy, and introduces “Stevenson, like Herzog, [as] anachronistic, a man who shouldn’t have been born in an age of liberal democracy, where Bellow doesn’t feel at home, either” (Rho, 1999, p. 34). Herzog reveals his anger over anti-​intellectual American culture. He desperately meditates: I thought this country might be ready for its great age in the world and intelligence at last assert itself in public affairs a little more of Emerson’s American Scholar, the intellectual coming into their own. But the instinct of the people was to reject mentality and its images, ideas, perhaps mistrusting them as foreign. It preferred to put its trust in visible goods. So things go on as before with those who think a great deal and effect nothing, and those who think nothing evidently doing it all. … Bah! The general won because he expressed low-​grade universal potato love. (Bellow, 1964, p. 66)

He expresses his desperation on the fate of intellectuals in this country, where “the instinct of the people was to reject mentality and its images, ideas, perhaps mistrusting them as foreign.” The masses reject sublime ideas and endorse “visible goods.” Americans prefer reality instructors, practical men, hunters, cowboys, boxers, football players, farmers, and war heroes like Eisenhower who won the election because he expressed low-​grade universal potato love, while intellectuals such as Herzog and Humboldt are disregarded and marginalized. Gersbach the, boxer, Willie engineer, technologist, contractor, and house builder, Ramona the florist and, business-​woman, and Himmelstein the lawyer belong to this category. They dominate American society. They represent a brutal, vulgar and dangerous world to Herzog “the more he is alienated, the more he becomes bookish” (Bellow, 1964, p. 310) and he cannot face them when they strive to destroy his life. Herzog takes a critical position against anti-​intellectual American culture and its ethics of amorality. He has a strong doubt about the morality and humanism of the masses who are interested only in material stuff. Capitalistic democracy, he believes, intensifies this atmosphere as it engenders the absolute equality between intellectuals and masses. Rho interestingly maintains that: The contemporary age is overwhelmingly dominated by the masses. High culture and the society of a few “select men” were turned over by “the revolt of the masses.” The “average man” and the “mass man” are omnipresent, replacing all the intellectuals who were in the center of the “higher” civilization. (1999, p. 36)

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Herzog remarks on this change, noting “the revolutions of the twentieth century, the liberation of the masses by production, created private life but gave nothing to fill it with” (Bellow, 1964, p. 125). “The revolt of the masses” is fictionally carried out by figures like Gersbach, Madeleine, Sandor Himmelstein, Harvey Simkin, Dr. Edvig, Shapiro, Willie, and others. They replace intellectuals and take their position “in the center of higher civilization.” Herzog confesses that they want to force their ethics of amorality and teach about risk, business, vulgarity and brutality “Reality instructors. They want to teach you to punish you with the lessons of the Real” (Bellow, 1964, p. 125). He rejects their fake lessons, and strikingly deconstructs the assumptions of their beliefs. He believes that: “the progress of civilization indeed, the survival of civilization—​depended on the successes of Moses E. Herzog” (Bellow, 1964, p. 125). The moral and ethical functions of public places such as church, school, and family are left to experts, lawyers, doctors and businessmen. These experts lawyers, psychiatrists, scientists, journalists, professors become leaders; they make a new power group in American society and threaten the elites. Herzog calls them “the new elites,” and envisages their danger as follows: In every community there is a class of people profoundly dangerous to the rest. I don’t mean the criminals. For them we have punitive sanctions. I mean the leaders. Invariably the most dangerous people seek the power. … Mr. Editor, we are bound to be the slaves of those who have power to destroy us. (Bellow, 1964, p. 51)

The new elites, the experts, the leaders, or rather new criminals, are “profoundly dangerous to the rest,” namely, the intellectuals. They are experts in making money; they look for power, dominate other social classes, and force their ethics and morals of materialism and egoism. They aggravate the absolute capitalistic democracy of the masses. Mr. Emmett Strawforth, a former petroleum engineer and Herzog’s classmate, is a good example of the dictatorship of capitalism. He thinks he is the scientist and the leader of the country who engenders new methods of finding petrol in the Arctic zone. Herzog, compared to him, is ignorant. He is interested only in encyclopedic humanistic studies like the history of Western philosophy. Herzog, a supposed spokesman of his community, is pushed away from the center of the American intellectual scene while the masses and the new elites take his place at the center and predict the future of American society. Valentine Gersbach is one of the masses, a new elite dictator who destroyed Herzog’s life. Rho describes him as follows:

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He is all barbarism, mediocrity, commonplaceness, and vulgarity. But he is a king of mass culture in every field education, journalism, religion, literature, sports, academics, and even sexuality. He is a radio announcer, a disk-​jockey, an educational director of an FM station in Chicago. (1999, pp. 38–​39)

And Herzog continues: He’s on the make everywhere and cultivates all the Chicago hot-​shots clergymen, newspapermen, professors, television guys, federal judges, Hadassah ladies. Jesus Christ, he never lets up. He organizes new combinations on television. Like Paul Tillich and Malcolm X and Hedda Hopper on one program. He’s a ringmaster, popularizer, liaison for the elites. He grabs up celebrities and brings them before the public. And he makes all sorts of people feel that he has exactly what they’ve been looking for. Subtlety for the subtle. Warmth for the warm. For the crude, crudity. For the crooks, hypocrisy. Atrocity for the atrocious. Whatever your heart desires. Emotional plasma which can circulate in any system. (Bellow, 1964, pp. 214–​215)

Gersbach shows the face of modern barbarity, commonplaceness and vulgarity, and in Herzog’s words, he is the king of the masses who is able to deal with “clergymen, newspapermen, professors, television guys, federal judges, Hadassah ladies.” He is everywhere in Chicago doing everything in the fields of education, journalism, religion, literature, sports, academia, and even sexuality. He is the voice of the masses in the media, as he is the Chicago radio announcer and TV combination organizer. He acts as a fake intellectual who grabs up celebrities and brings them before the public. In front of them, he pretends to be a poet, speaking of his parents’ tragic immigration history in an auditorium, forcing the audience to listen to his junk poems by locking the door outside. He traces the diplomatic images of hypocrisy, modern crudity, atrocity and subtlety when Simkin asks him, “do you mean to say that those philosophers you’ve studied so many years are all frustrated by one Valentine Gersbach?,” responding positively, “it seems true” (p. 215). Gersbach is Herzog without practicality. He takes Herzog’s wife, daughter and house in Chicago. He acts as an intellectual and strangely asks Herzog about the best way to have sex with Madeleine. Herzog cries, “She [Madeleine] and Valentine ran my life for me. I didn’t know a thing about it. All the decisions were made by them where I lived, where I worked, how much rent I paid. Even my mental problems were set by them” (Bellow, 1964, p. 194). Madeleine belongs to the masses, though she has a Ph.D. in Russian. She is a pseudo-​intellectual: though brilliant, she maintains a superficial interest in a variety of subjects more for the sake of pride and prestige than for the

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wealth of learning. She has no deep interest in intellectual matters, being a “pseudo-​intellectual,” and she does not involve herself in philosophical discussions about modern America, nor even show any deep knowledge about her field of study, Russian religious history. She has a Ph.D. only for the sake of prestige. Herzog says about her, “she is a package beauty” (Bellow, 1964, p. 33). Monsignor Hilton, a Catholic priest, introduces her to Catholicism, and she converts from her religion of Judaism to Catholic Orthodoxy again only because of prestige and because she wants to appear as a part of modern America. She spends more time putting cosmetic stuff on her face, than attempting to get to know her new religion and abide by its regulations. She thinks she can be purified by wearing clerical black clothing even while committing adultery with Gersbach. Egbert Shapiro satirizes Herzog, and replaces him in the modern American scene. They have similar stories of immigration and poverty. They also have the same Jewish background as they are sons of immigrant Russian parents. While Herzog crystallizes the image of the real intellectual in the novel, Shapiro envisages the image of a fake one. He is a male Madeleine. Like Gersbach, he reflects the hypocrisy and the crudity of the masses. He pretends to belong to high culture when he talks to Madeleine, and she acts as if she were superior to him. They sardonically exchange ignorance and hypocrisy. Shapiro, Herzog says, cannot get rid of his Russian cultural heritage and integrate into capitalistic America with its bourgeois ways of life. He wears clothes like “a dollar-​crazed Croatian steelworker” (Bellow, 1964, p. 71) and uses inappropriate phrases in his conversations. He confuses the nobility of language with the language of the nobility. When Madeleine invites him over for food, he responds using inappropriate phrases, “no, no thank you very much, Mrs. Herzog. Delightful! But I have a stomach condition,” and Herzog remarks, “Condition! He had ulcers. Vanity kept him from saying it” (Bellow, 1964, p. 73). Shapiro serves to elicit Herzog’s contempt for culture without direction, mind without heart, a contempt which covers Mady by extension. Like Stevenson, Herzog is defeated in this pseudo-​intellectual scene, and this aggravates the barbarity and amorality of American mass society. The lawyers Sandor Himmelstein and Harvey Simkin intensify the cheap culture in capitalistic America. They belong to what Herzog calls reality instructors and American masses. Himmelstein and Simkin are interested only in making as much money as they can. Ironically, they do not believe in the superiority of law, morality and equality: rather, they ask their clients if they have enough money to defend their cases in court. Himmelstein mocks

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education, and degrades intellectuals:  “Jesus! You don’t know anything … You an educated man? Thank God my old pa didn’t have the dough to send me to the U. of C. I worked in the Davis Store and went to John Marshall. Education? It’s a laugh! You don’t know what goes on” (Bellow, 1964, p. 88). Education is a “laugh.” He advocates that the less educated one is the more successful and the more practical they are. He tells Herzog about the facts of his case in court: “Well,” said Sandor, “speaking as a lawyer, I can see you with a jury. They’ll look at Madeleine, blooming and lovely, then you, haggard and gray-​haired, and bam! There goes your custody suit. That’s the jury system. Dumber than cave men, those bastards—​I know this isn’t easy for you to hear, but I better say it. Guys at our time of life must face facts.” “Facts!” said Herzog, faint, groping, outraged. (Bellow, 1964, p. 83)

Himmelstein calls the jury “bastards” who judge based on appearances. He informs Herzog that they will first “look at Madeleine, then at him” then decide. Madeleine is “lovely and blooming,” while Herzog, having a wild appearance, is “haggard and gray-​haired.” Their system favors good-​looking shapes and disdains intellectuals. He addresses Herzog, saying, “We’re all whores in this world…I know damn well I’m a whore I bet you a suit of clothes you’re a whore. …too” (Bellow, 1964, pp. 85–​86). Simkin sympathizes with Herzog as he “always spoke of Moses’ earnings with a ring of sadness. Poor intellectuals, so badly treated” (Bellow, 1964, p. 212). They confess the nastiness and the snobbery of the masses and the fate of poor intellectuals. They pretend to be experts about facts, but Himmelstein proves the contrary as he cannot control the debauchery of his daughters, while Simkin proves to be a “greedy old money-​grubber” (Bellow, 1964, p. 213). Herzog deconstructs this anti-​intellectual culture that celebrates lust for money and rejects their notions about the death of humanism. He mocks the habits of the masses, including these two lawyers, and deeply behind this he deconstructs the ethics of American society that allows them to be a domineering class. To embark on the agony of the artist and the decline of civility in Bellow’s later novels is as difficult as it is necessary. The difficulty arises from the nature of the cultural background, which silently lurks behind Bellow’s protagonists and their attempts to subvert the deconstructive forces of the masses and low culture. Deconstructionism and Bellow’s protagonists are commonly regarded as open texts, indefinable processes, projects of writing that develop only through subversion and deconstruction. The necessity stems from the

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postulate that one could not gain deep insight into the mind and the world of the novelist without deploying the plethora of newly emerging findings of the deconstructive theory. Strikingly, in being beyond the reach of definition and closure, the heroes interestingly meet on one ground: survival in a society which is dominated by the hegemony of capitalism and the values of democracy. In this way, it has become fundamental to investigate how these heroes are alienated, marginalized, degraded and rejected by the masses on the modern American cultural scene, how their agony and marginalization result in the decline of civility and the end of humanism, and how they deconstruct the ethics of the masses and find their way amidst this cultural backdrop. Bellow has thus turned into an interpreter and legislator at the same time. He interprets the amoral ethics of the masses and legislates for morality and humanism. Within this climate of doubt and dispute, subversion and deconstruction, meaning is not found or discovered; rather, it is being created and represented by the novelist as a text, and then consumed and erased by the reader. Addressing the agony of intellectuals and cultural amorality paves the way for the deconstruction of capitalism in modern America as the root cause of all sorts of decay, and as a possible solution, the heroes suggest the regaining of humanism.

·6· DECONSTRUCTING CAPITALISM “The university has, in fact, become a sausage-​machine which turns out people without any real culture, and incapable of thinking for themselves, but trained to fit into the economic system of a highly industrialized society. The student may glory in the renown of his university status, but in fact he is being fed ‘culture’ as a goose is fed grain—​to be sacrificed on the altar of bourgeois appetites.” Cohn-​Bendit, D. 1968. 27.

The focus in the previous chapters has not been on the study of the aesthetic and the stylistic peculiarities as much as it has been on Bellow’s vision of the relationship between intellectuals and the masses, high culture and low culture, the values of humanism and the ethics of capitalism and democracy in American society. The unifying thread that gives sense and legitimacy to the novelist’s vision is the way he strikingly perceives the concept of madness and deploys the strategies of subversion and deconstruction in his later writings. Studying Bellow provides clear instances of the way the project of madness turns out to be the wisdom of intellectuals, as well as the way the values of morality and humanism have been dramatically altered during the second half of the 20th century in America, which has resulted in the agony of intellectuals and the decline of civility. Agony has been investigated both fictionally and culturally, and has proved thereby the scrupulous overlap between the agony of the heroes in their milieu and the cultural decay of capitalistic America. This chapter addresses how Bellow takes the project of deconstruction further by elaborating on the ways the heroes deconstruct the capitalistic roots of American culture. In so doing, the goal is to identify the actions taken by the heroes to bridge the gap between them and the masses, as well as to propose

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recommendations both to prevent the decline of civility in modern American society and to assess the efforts exerted to regain morality. Most interestingly, the chapter shall purport to envision how the Bellow shows scrupulous faithfulness to the premises of deconstructionism and keeps reiterating what is to be deciphered/​decoded next. The outcome of this subversive gesture is that the novelist has been developing a theory of morality and humanism, not like those that are generated by apocalyptic theories, but like that which the Enlightenment purported to establish. In this chapter, therefore, a focus on the categories of deconstructing capitalism and deconstructing capitalistic identity will be at the heart of the formulation of recommendations to find a solution to the agony of intellectuals and the decay of American culture. Herzog, Sammler and Citrine deconstruct the ethics of capitalism in modern America. Bellow purports to formulate certain recommendations to end the agony of his intellectuals and the decay in modern America. Herzog argues that the crisis of capitalism triggers off the crisis of civilization. This should be ended in order to regain humanism and morality. The indecision of thought, the ups and downs of mind/​reason are usually acquainted with the booms and declines of civilizations. One of Herzog’s famous imaginary letters reads: Anyway, Shapiro, I was in no mood for [discussing] the hidden fate of Man. Nothing seemed especially hidden it was all painfully clear … I think [we] must have started that seminar … on the decay of the religious foundations of civilization. Are all the traditions used up, the beliefs done for, the consciousness of the masses not yet ready for the next development? Is this the full crisis of dissolution? Has the filthy moment come when moral feeling dies, conscience disintegrates, and the respect for liberty, law, public decency, all the rest, collapses in cowardice, decadence, blood? Old Proudhon’s visions of darkness and evil can’t be passed over, but we mustn’t forget how quickly the visions of genius become the scanned goods of the intellectuals. (Bellow, 1964, pp. 95–​96)

Herzog informs us that the fate of human beings is no longer hidden:  it is painfully clear. The diminishing role of religion and the death of God result in “the decay of civilization.” In the late age of capitalism in America, “the consciousness of the masses is not yet ready for the next development.” It is the “full crisis of dissolution,” Herzog admits. The decline of civility and the agony of the intellectuals have come “when moral feeling dies, conscience disintegrates, and the respect for liberty, law, public decency, all the rest, collapses in cowardice, decadence, blood.” Herzog maintains that the visions of intellectuals become fundamental in the deconstruction of the nihilism

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of capitalism and the subversion of its absurdity. The wisdom of intellectuals represents a starting moment of consciousness about the ‘filthy’ roots of American culture. Herzog demystifies that the hidden fate of Man is unavoidably related to the illusive foundations of capitalism. Being subversive and deconstructive in its nature, knowledge of the bourgeois society in Europe during the 18th and the 19th centuries has dissolved and turned into obscure jargon. The revolutionary ideas of Marx, Hegel and Comte proved their failure. The empires of Britain, Germany and France have declined and eventually ended up with tragic wars. The aristocratic dignity of the old regimes, the utopian models of antiquity and the moral theories of the Enlightenment are now being replaced by racism, nuclear threats, marginalization, exploitation, sexism, new imperialism, homophobia, terrorism, fear, illusion, false thinking and no truth. Conscience disintegrated, moral feelings died, and respect for the law, liberty and public decency collapsed. In a typically Foucauldian move, Herzog asserts that madness is the main source of ‘no knowledge’, suggesting that “clinical psychologists might write fascinating histories” (Bellow, 1964, p. 99), and interestingly offers a brief historical account of the factors that serve to produce a subversive form of knowledge: Melancholia in the Middle Ages. Schizophrenia in the eighteenth century. And then this Bulgarian, Banowitch, seeing all power struggles in terms of paranoid mentality a curious, creepy mind, that one, convinced that madness always rules the world. The Dictator must have living crowds and also a crowd of corpses. The vision of mankind as a lot of cannibals, running in packs, gibbering, bewailing its own murderers, pressing out the living as dead excrement. (Bellow, 1964, p. 99)

Psychotherapy and paranoia, as manifestations of 20th-​century capitalism, dominate the intellectual scene. The authority of religion and morality diminishes in favor of psychotherapy. Psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and psychiatrists appear as a new group of experts who replace religion and morality. Most of the mad minor characters go to therapists to solve their problems instead of church. Herzog and Madeleine frequently visit Dr. Edvig to get advice about their marriage. Phoebe Gersbach goes to her own psychiatrist to get counseling about her husband’s betrayal. Himmelstein gets psychic treatment because of his daughters’ waste of money. America becomes a country of psychiatric imperialism, where the psychiatrist takes a priest’s place, a doctor’s place, the place of the self-​reliant individual, and becomes a modem god, and where the masses pay too much money to diagnose their mental

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problems. Psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, along with the masses, create a culture industry out of psychotherapy which standardized American society. This should be revised to regain humanism and morality. Bellow deconstructs this capitalistic culture, which aims at systematizing the human mind. He doubly satirizes psychotherapists: first, as being ignorant of their profession, and second, as being money grabbers and metal climbers rather than real intellectual doctors. Sardonically enough, Bellow does not place doctors in the field of scientific intellectuals, but calls them experts. Dr. Edvig pretends to master the field of psychotherapy and summons Freud in discussions with his patients. He explains every client’s mental problem with paranoia, about which he ironically does not know anything. He acts like an expert with his clients and prepares a ready list of words to diagnose his clients “Pride, Anger, Excessive ‘Rationality’, Homosexual Inclinations, Competitiveness, Mistrust of Emotion, Inability to Bear Criticism, Hostile Projection, Delusions” (Bellow, 1964, p. 77). Bellow mocks him and considers him a fake doctor who cannot tell the difference between real and spurious patients. He legitimizes the betrayal of Madeleine and Gersbach to Herzog; he diagnoses Madeleine as religious, Herzog as a patient suffering from paranoia, and Gersbach as a wise helper character. Edvig and Himmelstein are good representatives of capitalistic culture with its fake knowledge. They have the characteristics of the new elite; their livelihoods rest not so much on the ownership of property as on the manipulation of information and professional expertise. They harm the masses and do not provide them with any service as experts. They manipulate intellectuals, make money out of the rich, tell lies to the masses, and pretend to be knowledgeable and educated to their colleagues. In their conversations with their clients, they first discuss the amount of money they have to pay to do the job. They theorize a one-​dimensional society that equates the intellectuals and the masses, high culture with low culture. They ensure the hegemony of materialism and the death of God and morality. Herzog mocks and deconstructs therapists, psychoanalysts and experts. He considers them to be the root cause of cultural decay in America. More strikingly, he refers to the metaphor of the perpetual death and resurrection of civilization to confirm that philosophers like Hobbes and Hume fail to understand the nature of the human being, which unfathomably affects the quality of the knowledge they produce. Herzog, therefore, epitomizes a world in a state of crisis where the subject remains unable to trust his knowledge, culture and civilization. Throughout the whole story, Herzog struggles to deconstruct

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the ethics of capitalism and replace the Western philosophies in American mass culture. In capitalistic democracy, culture is a very cheap, unrefined one, a junk culture, a kingdom of frivolity and entertainment. Herzog watches “the uptown public, its theatrical spirit, its performers the transvestite homosexuals painted with great originality, the wigged women, the lesbians looking so male you had to wait for them to pass and see them from behind to determine their true sex, hair dyes of every shade.” He feels spiritual nausea for this fake culture with its dirty theater and mad actors. The thematic plot helpers and young generation characters in Mr. Sammler’s Planet represent an epistemological break with capitalism. They deconstruct the past as represented by Sammler and Dr. Gruner and establish a new form of knowledge based on capitalistic democracy. They belong to the mainstream of American society, and they seem to be happy with its culture. They enjoy every aspect of capitalism and democracy and ignore grand values of morality and humanism. They create a one-​dimensional and conformist society; and while they are biologically alive, they are emotionally, spiritually and morally dead. Sammler is not a conformist. He deconstructs this culture and criticizes his society with its capitalist premises. Kaufmann intensifies Sammler’s worries: “Who is more alienated a writer in America who in 1970 does not have a television set, or one who spends much of his leisure time watching television? The nonconformist is obviously alienated from his society, but perhaps those who conform are alienated from themselves” (1970, p. xxxviii). Seemingly, the writer who does not have a TV set is alienated from society and mass culture, while the masses that have all the means of entertainment are alienated from themselves. The first category is aware of its alienation, while the second is not, and this aggravates its tragic fate under capitalistic democracy. Bellow reveals that the modern form of knowledge is that for the young generation. It creates a standardized, one-​dimensional, amoral and fake society, a society without civility, and excludes intellectuals from the center of the American cultural scene. Bellow deconstructs this culture and maintains its being the logical aftermath of capitalism and the radical socioeconomic and political changes that occurred in America in the 1960s and the 1970s. Sammler attacks the youths in the novel, considering them narcissistic, hedonistic, ignorant, and standing for the symbol of sexual wanton. They are introduced in the context of the stormy sixties in America, the New Left and the hippie culture, a rebellious culture that opposes the established norms. This crisis of knowledge and bankruptcy of capitalism is summed up in the idea

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that the entire system of Western society, built upon Aristotelian logic, the Judeo-​Christian ethic and upon a series of economic systems from Hobbes to Marx to Keynes, does not work. Sammler is a man of knowledge who is trained in European humanistic culture and philosophy. He escaped German totalitarianism under the Nazi regime for totalitarianism in America controlled by the uncivil crowd. America has become a place of massive industrialization, where production, materialism and business become the only existing values. It has become a place of microeconomics and a culture industry that take over the world. The youths, therefore, develop their theory of counterculture loyalty, while Sammler finds it boring, deconstructive and authoritarian. Angela illustrates this counterculture through her gaudy clothing, psychedelic posters, decorated car, group sex and sexual party games, raising the slogan, “if it feels good, do it, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else” (Bellow, 1970, p. 20). She wears a yellow undergarment and “a microskirt, a band of green across the thighs,” and the dress is a “sexual kindergarten dress, Baby Doll costume” (p. 295). Wharton Horricker, Angela’s boyfriend, epitomizes this image-​based culture. He is fond of imported European clothes, buys the latest fashion, and is assiduous in keeping his body in shape. He is “a physical culturist (tennis, weight lifting). Tall, from California, marvelous teeth. … Extremely critical of other people’s clothes. … Once when he thought her (Angela) improperly dressed, he abandoned her on the street” (Bellow, 1970, p. 68). He is a representative of the “cult of masculine elegance,” and he and Angela are both exemplars of athletic beauty (p. 69). Sammler regards them as hedonistic and considers the countercultural movement behind them vulgar, profane and barbaric. Bellow deconstructs the culture of the New Leftists and the hippies, and rejects their capitalistic assumptions. In an interview with Boyers, he reveals, “I began, in the late 50s, to think about leaving the eastern seaboard, because I didn’t want to belong to any of the gangs, and I felt the madness of the 60s approaching. I think the 60s will be remembered as the decade of frenzy, and violent agitation, having very little to do with literature or art” (1975, p. 13). He reveals that he escaped dictatorship and the gangs of the East in the late 50s only to find them in America in the 60s. It was a decade of madness and violent agitation, which had nothing to do with the arts and humanities. Sammler believes that the cultural rebellion in America was only an extension of gangster politics in Europe, and the only difference is that the gangsters were a few dictators in Europe while they are the crowds in America. The young characters in the novel live the cultural values of the hippies,

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smoke marijuana, engage in liberated sex, and live communally. Angela and Horricker demonstrate this as they have sex on the beach with a striking carelessness. Rho describes them as follows: The New Leftists in the novel are ignorant, mean, philistine, and dirty. They have no respect for the elders, or even for themselves, no civility, no nobility, no dignity. Once Sammler employed several university youths to help him study, but they were found to be completely without culture or any real education, even if they did attend Columbia University. (1999, p. 81)

Sammler ascribes them with a negative capitalistic image. They are seen “with the big dirty boots and the helpless vital pathos of young dogs with their first red erections” and of “sex-​excrement-​militancy, explosiveness, abusiveness, tooth-​showing, Barbary ape howling.” When he lectures on liberal arts in England in the 1930s, one ignorant dirty leftist regarding him with great indifference and boredom shouts out, without manners, “Hey! Old Man! … What you are saying is shit,” and then addresses the audience: “Why do you listen to this effete old shit? What has he got to tell you? His balls are dry. He’s dead. He can’t come” (Bellow, 1970, p. 42). The audience expects a lecture on modern violence, sex, New Left and hippie values, science and risk in business, and Sammler’s old fashioned boring topic. The student’s resentment at Sammler epitomizes the death of value, the lack of respect for intellectuals, the ignorance of the student and the bankruptcy of knowledge of capitalism. Sammler interestingly discusses the transplantation of European culture in America. Conservatives and intellectuals enjoy this topic, while youths protest and criticize Sammler’s anachronism. Sammler informs the reader that most of the Frankfurt School scholars immigrated to America because of the threat of the Nazis. Half of them were Jews and connected with Columbia University. They transplanted the European culture in America. Most of them stayed in America after the end of the war, but some of them decided to return to Germany because of the cultural disappointment Sammler experiences in the novel. The quality of education has degraded the system of knowledge. Wallace and Feffer graduated from Columbia University, but their contribution to knowledge is contrary to their famous university. Wallace is interested only in sex, money and imported clothes. He examines his secretary’s breasts in his law office instead of practicing the law. On his father’s death, he talks about sports statistics with Gruner’s physician, Dr. Cosbie, an ex-​football player and gambler. He makes efforts to solve the crossword puzzle in a magazine. He is, as Gruner says, “a high-​IQ moron” (Bellow, 1970, p. 177). He is

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a man of everything: “Wallace nearly became a physicist; he nearly became a mathematician … nearly a lawyer … nearly an engineer, nearly a Ph.D. in behavioral science. … Nearly an alcoholic, nearly a homosexual” (Bellow, 1970, p. 88). Feffer is the other version of Wallace. He is a fake intellectual. He enters Columbia University, though he does not deserve it. He quotes Aristotle’s Metaphysics without understanding the philosopher. He organizes a seminar at the university and ignores Sammler upon his arrival. He uses his brain to make money cunningly, to sexually exploit his assistant Fanny. He is a hustler, a go-​getter, a philanderer, a public relations personality, always looking for some kind of finder’s fee, full of new ideas, and comically plans to make it in materialist America. When he takes a picture of the black pickpocket’s stealing theft, it is not out of rationalist inquisitiveness but for his own material benefit and self-​aggrandizement, the final extension of the privileging of the self, characteristic of the Enlightenment, intensified and externalized in capitalist, consumer-​oriented America, and it makes the pickpocket a commodity to be framed, packaged and sold to Look a popular magazine to satisfy the masses’ curiosity. Wallace and Feffer are manifestations of American democratic capitalism that values business and worldly desires. Citrine depends on the knowledge of businessmen and risky people. This concurrently shows the domination of the values of capitalistic democracy and the attempts to deconstruct them. As previously mentioned, Citrine calls George Swiebel, Alec Szathmar and Pierre Thaxter reality instructors, and he unfathomably depends on their helpfulness and advice. They are proven to be ignorant, dirty, opportunistic and materialistic. Swiebel, a man of business, in contact with radio, television and journalism, teaches Citrine the way to get rid of stress. Citrine temporarily feels happy, but in the end he cannot accept his reality. Again, Swiebel represents the voice of the media and metaphorically stands for the masses in modern America. He teaches Citrine the way to deal with a divorce case, how to counter a gangster, how to be cured of physical pain without taking medicaments. Citrine says, “When I’m in despair he’s always the first person I telephone.” Swiebel dominates Citrine, and shows the death of value and the crisis of knowledge. Citrine appears to be weak, impractical, aloof, utopian, much like Humboldt, and in need of help and advice. Szathmar attacks Citrine’s values by introducing Renata to him. She is a sex model, and Szathmar advises Citrine to be practical with her. “In his chair his posture suggested clumsy but unshakable sexual horsemanship atop pretty ladies” (Bellow, 1975, p. 207). He presents himself as a man of reality

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and advises Citrine to be practical, to belong to the masses. He assures him that sex with Renata would make him forget his failures and cure his idealism. Pierre Thaxter pretends to be a man of culture, and Citrine describes him as follows: Pierre Thaxter was absolutely mad for Culture. He was a classicist, heavily trained by monks in Latin and Greek. He learned French from a governess, and studied it in college as well. He had taught himself Arabic also, and read esoteric books. He played Stravinsky on the piano, knew much about the Ballets Russes. On Matisse and Monet he was something of an authority. (Bellow, 1975, p. 251)

Thaxter appears to be a man of culture who reminds Citrine of his sibling, Humboldt. He is trained in classic and Greek knowledge. He knows French and Arabic, reads esoteric books, and plays the piano. In short, Citrine thought, at first glance, that Thaxter was another Humboldt who may deconstruct the culture of capitalism and build a new culture in America. However, he ironically turns out to be a fake intellectual, materialist, opportunist, and liar who uses Citrine. “He is a leech bloodsucking Citrine. He wastes Citrine’s money, not editing the magazine, but purchasing all manner of non-​ intellectual and high grade goods special wine, a special bed, a special TV, special food, first class air tickets, a cruise ticket, high-​tech computers, luxury furniture, a Cadillac, a specially ordered umbrella handle, etc.” (Rho, 1999, p. 125). He represents the newly emerging bourgeoisie; he lives and spends like an aristocrat. He is eager for sexual adventures and to try “the flesh” of all the sorts of ladies he meets. Citrine feels betrayed and eluded by Thaxter in particular and the social class he stands for in general. Bellow, behind this, intensifies the crisis of the capitalistic democracy of modern America. Julius, Citrine’s brother, is another example of capitalistic democracy in modern America. He is a man of business, action and practical things. He builds apartments, bridges and buildings, and thereby changes the image of America physically, unlike Citrine, who is a man of ideas and theories. Julius is a man of the present and the future; he is the man that America needs most, and he asks his brother, “if you had to be an intellectual, why couldn’t you be the tough type, a Herman Kahn or a Milton Friedman, one of those aggressive guys you read in The Wall Street Journal!” To Julius, successful people like Khan and Friedman, two famous American economists, not men of abstract ideas like his brother. Citrine cannot cope with the directions of his brother, nor can he use the advice of Thaxter and Szathmar. He escapes to the mysticism of Rudolf

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Steiner and Owen Barfield. Bellow deconstructs the root cause of this cultural backdrop. He diagnoses human beings’ unhappiness as a result of technological development and secularization. He admits that capitalistic democracy deepens the crisis of capitalism and generates an atmosphere of alienation and decline in modern America. And it is because of this that his intellectual protagonists deconstruct and subvert the fundamental premises of capitalism. Deconstructing capitalism in The Dean’s December is envisaged through Corde’s attacks on layers of dictatorship. Corde shows a critical awareness of the bankruptcy of capitalism and its negative effects on American society. In Romania, he attacks the bureaucracy of the communist system, the dictatorship of the Colonel, the surveillance system and the decline of civility. When he returns to America, he faces more dictators of other sorts. He addresses Mina, “it’s the weak democracies that produce dictatorships. Or that our decadence is heading full speed towards decadence” (Bellow, 1982, p. 20). Corde maintains that those who take on the role of Ceausescu in America are the vulgar masses and the mass media. They produce a low culture based on material things and image; they pursue a life of worldly desires and of momentary pleasures, spend every day noisily and boisterously like actors on TV, and have a large emptiness within themselves. Max Detillion, Corde’s cousin, is a good example. He belongs to the masses, defends them, and speaks in their names. He is a lawyer who defends Lucas Ebry not for the sake of justice, but in order to advertise his career. Corde comments, “Win or lose, it was bound to improve his reputation. Chicago is still more his scene than it is mine” (Bellow, 1982, p. 279). He behaves in the court like a leading actor; he gives orders and directions. Corde reveals the lawyer’s addiction to sexual adventures; he stresses his belonging to the hippie movement of the sixties. Corde thereby underlines his debauchery, saying “if he should ever be elected to office, he wouldn’t put his hand on a Bible to take the oath, he’d put it on his cock” (Bellow, 1982, p. 147). Corde reveals that dictatorship and the practices of capitalistic democracy can be seen in the court of Chicago, and he deconstructs those habits. This place, according to the masses, is no longer seen as the symbol of justice and equality, but a place where deals, bribery and sexual attraction take place. In the court, lawyers such as Max Detillion and Sam Varennes work to make money and empower their connections, not practice the law. Varennes proves to be stupid, ignorant and incapable of practicing the law with limited insights about his profession. He defends Spofford Mitchell, a black rapist and killer, and instead of practicing a scientific investigation of the crime and looking

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for proof and details that can help him understand the case, he approaches it with the traditional myth that blacks are obsessed with raping white women. Billy Edrix, Corde informs the reader, wants to divorce his wife who is accused of attempting to kill Edrix and is legally proved guilty of that. However, the court orders him to be responsible for his wife until divorce is completely settled. Edrix rejects the ethics of the court, and Corde assists him, stating its decision to be being inhuman, illegal and illogical. Corde is apathetic about this:  while Bellow explicitly rejects this phenomenon and deconstructs its root cause, capitalism. Corde confesses that Max has used and abused him. This metaphorical image stands for the perpetual conflict between capitalism and intellectualism, the masses and the intellectual, business and ethics. Corde tells Elfrida, his sister, about it: “I dropped a lot of dough on him. Let’s say I was paying tuition. I had to take a special course.” “Learning what, dear?” “Things I should have known fifty years ago. A postgraduate seminar in bone headedness and idiocy.” […] “Maybe a quarter of a million wasn’t tuition enough.” “I see what you mean. Losing that much dough didn’t make me suffer enough. I’m still an idiot, and I haven’t got the dough to enroll in another course.” (Bellow, 1982, pp.  97–​98)

Corde rhetorically reads her reaction to his confession. He says: He was sounding out his sister on the Chicago articles, trying to get her opinion. Did she see those disturbing pieces as his new venture in idiocy? … She was perhaps as sorry for her brother as he was for Cousin Max. She believed he was a very strange man. His hang-​ups were not like other people’s … he had his own most original, incomprehensible way of screwing things up. (Bellow, 1982, p. 98)

Max takes Corde’s money in order to establish a magazine, but he disappears. He spends the money on his personal desires and ignores Corde. Elfrida feels sorry for her brother, but she does not dare to express it openly. Corde

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contemplates her and reads her inner thinking. Bellow reiterates that Max represents the failure of liberal education and the fake intellectual of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Mason, Corde’s nephew, is another dictator in capitalistic America. He is the epitome of the rebellious and militant student of the sixties. When he argues with Corde about Lucas Ebry, his intention is to confront his uncle and not look for justice. Corde stands for the symbol of the authority of the school, and because of this Mason rebels against him. Rho describes this conflict in terms of power and subversion: “Mason makes his own scenario about how the murder case has happened, and Corde has his own too. But the key point is not the truth about the homicide, but the conflict between student and university as authority, black and white, radical and conservative, culture and counterculture” (1999, p. 166). Mason maintains that Lucas Ebry is real, while others are not including his uncle, who lives only through and by seminars about Plato and the Good. He rejects his uncle’s superior and racist view about those people of the underclass who are considered dopers, muggers and whores. Mason regards his uncle and the social category behind him as the “thinking population and establishment intellectuals” who admit that the masses and the rest of people “are nothing but mice!” (Bellow, 1982, p. 36). Corde is a representative of high culture, while Mason is a representative of the people of the street. Ebry is his comrade in the communist party. He intends to teach his ignorant uncle some lessons about Chicago’s social reality. He had earned the right to speak for the oppressed because he and Ebry had worked together in the grease and garbage of the kitchen, sweat rags tied on their foreheads (Bellow, 1982, p. 35). Henderson illustrates Corde’s attitude toward the layers of dictatorship and capitalism in America in Henderson the Rain King. He reveals that his suffering and chaos are the result of his not being what he really is. He regards himself as other to his society, and his non-​being existence stems from his alienation in the capitalistic democracy of America. Differently put, he regards himself not in terms of belongingness but rather in terms of his difference in an environment of others, parents, wives, girls, children, who are not identical to him. He confesses that “Society is what beats me. Alone I can be pretty good, but let me go among people and there’s the devil to pay” (Bellow, 1959, p. 49). By society, Henderson means the masses, the mass media, experts, journalists, lawyers and doctors who are guided by money, business and risk principles. Henderson’s “chaotic condition” envisages the human condition in America in the sixties in which one feels separated from one’s real being.

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Heidegger calls it “fallen” or “inauthentic.” Sahakian describes Heidegger’s view of the inauthentic as follows: Dasein is authentic when he is something of his own, and inauthentic when he is busy, excited, preoccupied. Inauthenticity is to be distinguished from the authentic self by being recognized as a they-​self, that is as the group self, the public self, or as a part of the social existence into which the self is dispersed, falling into anonymity and depersonalization. Having fallen (fallenness) into inauthentic Being, such an indi­vidual is susceptible to publicness. (1968, p. 350)

Henderson has fallen in his society with its capitalistic premises. Bellow maintains that Henderson’s authentic self has dispersed itself into the form of body spirit in which he now exists. Henderson deconstructs the ethics of society in New York in order to regain his real being. His literal world, his irascibility, music lessons, eccentric tendencies and constant activities become outer symbols for a state of mind that needs to be changed. Henderson runs away from all aspects of material life in New York, the different sorts of dictatorship, in order to exist as an authentic being in the world. His alienation and his being other in his society deepen his ontological and existential loss and provide him with the rationale to struggle against conformity. He says, “when things got very bad I often looked into books to see whether I could find some helpful words, and one day I read, ‘The forgiveness of sins is perpetual and righteousness first is not required’. This impressed me so deeply that I went around saying it to myself” (Bellow, 1959, p. 3). “Forgiveness” with no required “righteousness” removes all personal responsibility of the self. It reduces the self to a passive entity. Henderson struggles to deconstruct the outer world, admitting, “It was a question of spirit, too, for when it comes to struggling I am in a special class. From the earliest times I have struggled without rest” (Bellow, 1959, p. 68). Bellow has given particular emphasis to the decline of capitalism in America and its results on culture and society. From the beginning of the novel through to the end, he depicts Henderson’s suffering with an acute awareness of the ailments of the masses, the reckless economic system, the death of civility and the philosophical infirmities which characterize his existence. One senses a morbid depression of the spirit and an alienated existence. Henderson deconstructs the ethics of the masses, including his wife, Lily, his son and his daughter. From a community or external family perspective, Henderson’s behavior is unpredictable, irrational and frequently violent. He shouts at the elderly maid, Miss Lenox, and causes her a heart attack. He is regarded as mad, eccentric, misdirected and alienated in his society. One concludes that such

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extremely violent behavior stems from his need to distance himself from “others” in order to save his own awareness of being. That the masses lack a full sense of being is apparent in the way they subordinate their existence to their function. Differently said, they know themselves only through the economic function they perform; this intensifies the tragic condition of modern man, labels and negates the authentic self. Capitalistic democracy in America displaces Henderson, who regards himself as inferior in value and economic function to his pigs. He says, “Even the pigs were profitable. I couldn’t lose money. But they were killed and they were eaten. They made ham and gloves and gelatin and fertilizer. What did I make? Why, I made a sort of trophy, I suppose. A man like me may be something like a trophy” (Bellow, 1959, p. 24). Sardonically, Henderson confesses his awareness of being useless in attempting to discover the authenticity of the self in his society. What do you do with yourself if you have a temperament like mine? A student of mine once explained to me that if you inflict your anger on inanimate things, you not only spare the living, as a civilized man ought to do, but you get rid of the bad stuff in you. This seemed to make good sense, and I tried it out. I tried with all my heart, chopping wood, lifting plowing, laying cement blocks, pouring concrete, and cooking mash for the pigs. On my own place, stripped to the waist like a convict, I broke stones with a sledgehammer. It helped, but not enough. Rude begets rude, and blows, blows; at least in my case; it not only begot but it increased. Wrath increased with wrath. (Bellow, 1959, p. 23)

For Henderson, capitalism acquires animalistic features, once comparing himself to animals, pigs, and another time ascribing violence and wrath to his behavior. He celebrates the profitability and productivity of animals and the uselessness of human being including himself. This kind of nihilistic and absurd existence, being the main result of the negativity of capitalistic democracy, triggers off Henderson’s deconstruction and generates a ceaseless search for the ontology of the self. Through Henderson, Bellow explicitly suggests that the ethics of capitalism in modern American society and culture must be deconstructed and subverted in order to generate a counterculture of humanism and life. From ontological and philosophical perspectives, intellectuals such as Henderson, Corde, Herzog, Humboldt and Sammler should be considered as moral and ethical legislators of their society, while the materialistic ethics of capitalism must be revised. Sammler struggles to destabilize capitalistic identity. He offers to deconstruct its ethics, and refers to many strategies to achieve that. Frequently, his

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perception of the world almost makes sense, but usually he finds himself lost, “powerless,” strange, “a past person,” “poor in spirit,” “not himself” (Bellow, 1970, p. 264). Storytelling unsettles the link between life and meaning, the narrator and the account of his life, his identity and lack of identity. Sammler says that having no identity is the fact of being torn “between the human and the not-​human states, between content and emptiness, between full and void, meaning and not-​meaning, between this world and no world. Flying, freed from gravitation, light with release and dread, doubting his destination, fearing there was nothing to receive him” (Bellow, 1970, p. 264). Identity is contaminated by the already existing nonsense of capitalism. Modern and big cities, to Sammler’s mind, are ‘whores’, the earth is our grave, and it is highly characterized by death, emptiness, strangeness and void. Bellow advises us not to tell stories about wars, ‘lies’, about no identities, or about the impossibility of writing the memories of dead intellectual figures. Sammler assumes that the difficulty of telling stories is acquainted with the difficulty of writing an account of dead philosophers. Telling stories, to Sammler’s mind, is like telling fictions and lies of our identity, and this aggravates the negativity of capitalism. Sammler destabilizes the identity of the masses, tells their story of decline as they incarnate American capitalism. He recommends that that kind of identity should be bypassed by intellectuals in order to achieve harmony and wisdom in society. The masses tell stories of failure and meaninglessness, while Sammler underpins a story of otherness and alienation. It is the story of consciousness about the failures of American mass and capitalistic culture. The masses fail to tell their stories to the intellectuals. They fail in higher education; the university in America becomes a machine press, and the students turn out to be raw materials. In Cohn-​Bendit’s words: The university has, in fact, become a sausage-​machine which turns out people without any real culture, and incapable of thinking for themselves, but trained to fit into the economic system of a highly industrialized society. The student may glory in the renown of his university status, but in fact he is being fed ‘culture’ as a goose is fed grain to be sacrificed on the altar of bourgeois appetites. (1968, p. 27)

Society has become mechanized, systemized and incapable of thinking for itself. The university produces students without any culture. It produces experts, lawyers, journalists, scientists; they are uneducated products in the cultural and intellectual sense of the term. Bellow discusses the negative effects of capitalism on American society and maintains that the dilemma

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of education in a democratic society is inevitable as most of the writers of antiquity were members of the aristocracy of masters. Bellow accepts the masses and experts in American society, with regret, as they are not able to tell stories of identity and belongingness. They render intellectuals into others and make the culture of advertisement, image and desire spread over society. In short, they affirm that the whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry, and accordingly, the culture industry as a whole has molded men as a type to be unfailingly reproduced in every product. In mass society, identity is deeply associated with effectiveness, efficiency, techniques and productivity, and it rejects the adage that old age is wisdom. Sammler’s inability to tell a meaningful story of his life is explainable from this changed social viewpoint. Bellow suggests that this cultural decay should be revised in line with the heroes’ wisdom and morality, and that the capitalistic identity of nihilism and decay should be deconstructed. Sammler tells the reader Feffer’s identity of meaninglessness. Feffer takes Sammler’s place in modern America. He has easy access to television programs, and it helps him make money, and become a celebrity. He knows how to address the masses as well as intellectuals by using television and radio programs. Television and radio are democratic: they turn all participants into listeners and authoritatively subject them to broadcast programs which are all exactly the same. Feffer knows that the mass media shapes public opinion, creates power and increases his domination. Bellow maintains that in our era, the authority of common sense and public opinion has replaced the legacy of the church, the state and conscience. Television has become a leading authority and a powerful expression of mass culture, and he deploys it to dominate Sammler. The latter says, “You confuse me, Feffer. There are moments when I am slightly not myself under your influence. I get muddled. You’re very noisy, very turbulent” (Bellow, 1970, p. 119). With Feffer’s meaningless identity and incoherent stories of the masses come the otherness of Sammler and the indifference of the crowd. When Bellow describes the fight scene between the pickpocket and Feffer, he stresses the indifference of the crowd. It does not interfere. It watches the fight as spectators, with unethical and amoral attention, not as noble masters of society. The crowd is other to the society where it lives as well as to itself. Sammler attempted to intervene: “‘Some of you’, Sammler ordered. ‘Here! Help him. Break this up’. But of course ‘some of you’ did not exist. No one would do anything, and suddenly Sammler felt extremely foreign voice, accent, syntax, manner, face, mind, everything, foreign” (Bellow, 1970, p. 287). Sammler’s

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otherness reaches its peak when Feffer takes his place, when he realizes that he cannot change his society, when he feels alienated in his society, and when he faces his physical weakness in front of social evils. But there was something worse here than this event itself, namely, the feeling that stole over Sammler. It was a feeling of horror and grew in strength, grew and grew. What was it? How was it to be put? He was a man who had come back. He had rejoined life. He was near to others. But in some essential way he was also companionless. He was old. He lacked physical force. He knew what to do, but had no power to execute it Sammler was powerless. To be so powerless was death. And suddenly he saw himself not so much standing as strangely leaning, as reclining, and peculiarly in profile, and as a past person. That was not himself. It was someone and this struck him poor in spirit. (p. 289)

Sammler’s otherness stems not only from his being an intellectual who faces social evils, but also from his being companionless, his being old and his lack of physical power. “He knew what to do, but had no power to execute it.” That is death, strangeness and past for him. Bellow metaphorically makes Eisen, a crippled Russian Jew, interfere in the fight scene, and this intensifies the notion that not only does the one-​eyed Sammler sees much more than that two-​eyed crowd, but also that the crippled Eisen is stronger than that two-​legged  crowd. Citrine deconstructs capitalistic identity as it overemphasizes exclusion and tells bad stories. One’s identity in capitalism, according to him, is sketched only through crimes and debauchery. For instance, mania, crime, catastrophe, risk, to Cantabile’s mind, and death epitomize one’s identity in this ‘vile century’. In a world which is full of “alienation, rationalization, bureaucracy, unconscious powers, technological mass society, theological uncertainties, boredom” (Bellow, 1975, p. 199), grasping tranquility, sense in life, Citrine acknowledges, becomes daunting. Humboldt’s story ends up with heartbreak and madness. Opportunities to gain a better life become smaller; a lot of his unheard-​of poetry remains buried. The ‘false and unnecessary history’ misleads the reader, and “makes the agony too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises in the old way” (Bellow, 1975, p. 477). The story unexpectedly ends up with the loss of the manuscript, Humboldt’s imaginary story, which metaphorically stands for the impossibility of telling one’s story, and thereby tracing one’s identity. Bellow recommends that this line of bad storytelling and identity is to be deconstructed in order to put an end to the heroes’ agony and the decline of civility.

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Psychoanalysis does not provide any gift for meaning or identity. Rather, it complicates and deepens the negativity of capitalism. This curable strategy needs further revision and deconstruction. Starting with the assumptions that “recounting entails the acceptance of the story as a project, a gesture towards the possibility of meaning, and as a link with others” (Davis, 2004, p. 138), Bellow acknowledges the ‘failure’ of his heroes to represent their traumas and bridge the gap between self and other, and it is because of this that Citrine refers to Steiner and Barfield as an exit, a means to teach him how to retreat from disgust, anxiety, disappointment, vulgarity, a divorce lawsuit and a monetary crisis, in which he is trapped. They expect to make a human revolution through fully understanding human nature. Steiner maintains in his Anthroposophy in Everyday Life, “In thy thinking cosmic thoughts are living; lose thyself in cosmic thoughts. In thy feeling cosmic forces are weaving; feel thyself through cosmic forces. In thy willing cosmic beings are working; create thyself through beings of will” (1955, p. 66). Citrine tells his story through Steiner’s anthroposophy, though he does not practice the spiritual training as sincerely and patiently as they recommend. When Renata refuses to have sex with him and goes with Flonzaley instead, Citrine visits Dr. Scheldt, a Steinerian anthroposophist, to discuss anthroposophy. He is not curious about the subject, but he wants relief from painfulness and jealousy. By the end of his story, he realizes that he has been betrayed by everybody, and he decides to stay at the Swiss Steiner Center with his two daughters. Such abstract Steinerian terms as consciousness, self, body, soul and spirit are narcotics for Citrine’s suffering here, there, and everywhere. Citrine tells the story of his alienation and displacement, and suggests deconstructing the stories of the identity of the masses in American society. In spite of his being affluent and a commercially successful writer, he still cannot tell the story of his identity, nor can he cope with the identity of the masses and low culture. Bellow informs us that Americans are tuned to living with novelty: a new invention, a new product, a vigorous youthful spirit, or a new husband or wife. In the novel, Citrine talks about a society which is fond of business, technology, sex-​money, rather than philosophy, creative thinking, affection, civility and humanism. He is part of this culture as well as its victim. He is in his mid-​50s, but he prefers young Renata, who is in her thirties. Renata is younger, newer and fresher than the other ladies he once knew. When she rejects him and chooses Flonzaley, a wealthy undertaker, as her husband instead of Citrine, he realizes that he cannot survive in a society that cherishes youth, money and sex. This generates confused stories of identity

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and otherness. Bellow confesses that this is the aftermath of ultra capitalism in America, that it must be deconstructed in line with Sammler’s wisdom and morality. The circulation of the concepts of identity, storytelling and psychoanalysis in Herzog ensures transference, susceptibility to others and openness to otherness at the center of the self. The novel builds up a complex network of transferences and substitutions. Divorce and the absence of Madeleine are already substituted by Ramona’s love. Herzog’s failures and boredom are unexpectedly transferred into ceaseless intellectual reflections on romanticism and the spirit of Enlightenment philosophy. Madness substitutes wisdom, hatred stands for love, while ignorance replaces knowledge. As he continues to relate his stories, Herzog ‘unconsciously’ concedes his inability to achieve a sense in life out of his storytelling. The pessimistic end of the novel emphasizes the assumption that capitalistic identity should be revised in line with Herzog’s morals and wisdom. Herzog sardonically tells the story of the capitalistic identity of American mass society, and recommends deconstructing its negativity. Rho says, “Herzog observes meticulously the cheap mass culture while he is waiting on the subway platform:  the scribbled drawings representing male and female sexual organs, marks in eccentric shapes, unidentifiable letters on the wall. The mirror, the benches, and commercial vending machines are chained and blocked as if they demonstrate their accessibility only by tough masses” (1999, p. 48). Herzog depicts the image of cheap mass culture in terms of “the odors of stone, of urine, bitterly tonic, the smells of rust and of lubricants…the presence of a current of urgency, speed, of infinite desire” (Bellow, 1964, p. 176). He informs us that this culture is characterized by lust and sex. The graphic symbols of male and female sexual organs are drawn everywhere on the walls; they suggest stories of sexual adventures and mark the manifestations of capitalism in American society. The outer space of the city, its streets and roads, its machines and cars are envisaged as the property of the masses and demarcate where Herzog is other to them. Herzog recommends that this image has to be changed, and certain moral and ethical values have to be brought into society. Bellow attacks the ethics of capitalism by attacking the role the court plays in the novel. Herzog confesses that it functions as a symbolic place that helps the appearance of liberal and capitalistic democracy and, consequently, of mass culture. Like Corde, Herzog reveals that lawyers and judges are not interested in justice and practicing the law: rather, they are fond of

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making spectacles and comic shows. The court turns out to be a means of entertainment. It is theater. Bellow is pessimistic about this function: “That mass of flesh rising from the opening of the magistrate’s black cloth, nearly eyeless, or whale-​eyed, was, after all, a human head. The hollow, ignorant voice, a human voice” (1964, p. 227). Aleck, a prostitute, makes the court a brothel. She addresses the judge by saying, “Filth makes it better, judge,” and it is noted that “the magistrate showed intense satisfaction” (Bellow, 1964, p. 228). The present audience enjoys her speech; the judge shows satisfaction with regard to her audacity and sexual connotations. Nobody is concerned with what Aleck is accused of. They care about what they should not and they do not care about what they should. Bellow sarcastically rejects this culture and considers it the result of capitalistic and liberal democracy which has failed to give identity the features of humanism and meaningfulness. Henderson deforms his real story by sketching imaginary journeys in the wilderness of Africa. Escaping madness, boredom, rituals and materialism in New York, he implicitly acknowledges his inability to draw his own identity in modern capitalistic America. The imaginary journey stands for Henderson’s attempts to involve others in his stories, while the fictional subjects represent possible figures that are seeking to interfere in the circuit of storytelling. Identity, the gift of meaning and sense in life, Bellow concedes, are made by relating our stories to others, by being analysts to analysands, and authors to readers. This can be seen in Henderson’s reflections on the romantic space of Africa, the Arnewi and the Wariri tribes, and the death of their king. Henderson’s failure to achieve sense in his life is further illustrated by his coming back to New York, the point of departure, his realization that one’s identity remains a matter of storytelling. Henderson relates the story of his being humiliated by the symbols of capitalism. He recalls the cross-​road incident and deepens the feeling of alienation and loss in contemporary human being. Henderson talks about how he is stripped, soaped and shaved by four Army medics, who leave him naked, hairless and standing in the middle of a crossroads near the waterfront at Salerno. They ran away and left me bald and shivering, ugly, naked, prickling between the legs and under the arms, raging, laughing, and swearing revenge. These are the things a man never forgets and afterward truly values. That beautiful sky, and the itch of the razors; and the Mediterranean, which is the cradle of mankind; the towering softness of the air; the sinking softness of the water, where Ulysses got lost, where he, too, was naked as the sirens sang. (Bellow, 1959, p. 22)

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Bellow traces the discrepancy between Henderson and the gangs of the war: they stand for the masses, the crowd, vulgarity, image, superficial culture, while Henderson represents a mad quester for high qualities. Nakedness is only a metaphor that overtones the naked state of high culture and intellectuals. The gangs are introduced in terms of frivolity, “laughing” and masochistically enjoying Henderson’s extreme pain. Henderson “never forgets and afterward truly values” the gang’s deed. Bellow describes Henderson symmetrically with the beauty of nature, “the beautiful sky,” “the Mediterranean,” the softness of the air, “the sinking softness of the water,” and thereby reduces the intensity of pain and humiliation. Bellow rejects this condition and explicitly shows his commitment to deconstructing the anxieties of capitalism as a crucial step toward the realization of authentic being. In The Dean’s December, Alec Witt, an epitome of capitalistic culture, undermines the ontological and spiritual identity of intellectuals such as Albert Corde and assigns superiority to scientists like Minna and Vlada. He accepts Corde’s resignation from the deanship and keeps the door open for businessmen to control the college. He concedes that only wealthy figures can help develop education, not thinkers. Kristol emphasizes Bellow’s rejection to businessmen, scientists and experts and their negative interference in universities as a source of knowledge and identity, saying: University administrators have long since ceased to have anything to say about education. By general consent, their job is administration, not education. When was the last time a university president came forth with a new idea about education? When was the last time a university president wrote a significant book about the education of … “his” students? Robert M. Hutchins was the last of that breed; he has had no noteworthy successors. Indeed, the surest way for an ambitious man never to become a university president is to let it be known that he actually has a philosophy of education. The faculty, suspicious of possible interference, will rise up in rebellion. The university president today is primarily the chief executive of a corporate institution, not an educator. (Kristol, 1969, pp. 148–​149)

Administrators deface the moral function of the university and associate it with the ethics of capitalistic materialism. Kristol accuses the administrators of damaging the identity of university. They are not interested in education, books or intellectual creativity, but in deals and making money out of the university. They have no philosophy of education, and they are generally seen as executives of a corporate institution. In the novel, Miss Porson, Corde’s secretary, is one example to be mentioned in this respect. She does not assist Corde in his work, nor does she follow his directions. She wastes time gossiping with

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administrators. In her mid-​60s, she tries to attract young men, and have sex with them. Corde maintains that intellectuals ignore their mission as educators. They seek power and serve other authorities. He recommends that this capitalistic identity must be deconstructed and revised. Educators become part of a capitalistic culture which negates their moral and ethical identity and values money and business. Bellow fictionally relates the story of intellectuals in America in the late sixties and seventies who served various forms of power. He confesses that their services to bureaucratic powers lead to the acceptance “a haunting suspicion that history belongs to men of action and that men of ideas are powerless in a world that has no use for philosophy” (Lasch, 1969, p. 112). Corde is an exception in his society as he remains faithful to his ontological and ethical values of true identity. When he discusses the issue of identity in his city, the masses consider him crazy, ignorant, and he regards himself as an outsider. Liberals find him reactionary, conservatives ambiguous, and professional urbanologists say he is hasty. Corde contemplates: “Things have always been like this in American cities, ugly and terrifying. Mr. Corde should have prepared himself by reading some history.” … “Mr. Corde believes in gemutlichkeit more than in public welfare. And what makes him think that what it takes to save little black kids is to get them to read Shakespeare? Next he will suggest that we teach them Demosthenes and make speeches in Greek. The answer to juvenile crime is not in King Lear or Macbeth.” “The Dean’s opinion is that a moral revolution is required.” (Bellow, 1982, p. 187)

Elfrida represents the social class Corde wants to deconstruct. She stands for the image of success of making money and is ready to hand over her culture and money to Mason, her son. She is the epitome of lights and vivacity in the modern American city and is fond of commodity and commercialism. She says, “When I’m out of sorts it comforts me that there are people down in the lobby. I don’t have to face an empty lawn when my heart is troubled. Thank God I unloaded that big pretentious house” (Bellow, 1982, p. 84). Her life is empty of any valuable knowledge of Shakespeare, the Greek tradition or Demosthenes. She is obsessed with the crowd, the masses, and that is why she does not leave public places and hotels. After the death of her husband, Zaehner, she gets married to Judge Sorokin, a symbol of power, authority, money and practical life. She admits that he will take care of her son and make her happy. Elfrida illustrates Bellow’s assumption with regard to serving politics and power in America.

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Corde reveals the negative effects of democratic capitalism when he is invited to a dog’s birthday party by Sorokin’s brother. He is frustrated when he is introduced to a big black dog, and finds himself singing in its presence, “Happy Birthday, Dear Dolphie” (Bellow, 1982, p. 293). He confesses that this is “decadence.” It is a comedy. When those present give presents, donate money to the dog and use colors and lights to celebrate him, Corde sardonically admits that this is the apocalypse of American culture. He informs us that democratic equality between individuals is guaranteed and, more strikingly, that capitalistic equality between human beings and their pets is practiced. In Romania, Corde suffers from the non-​existence of equality while in America he is overwhelmed by its omnipresence. Again, he admits that all these habits of capitalism must be revised and deconstructed. Corde acknowledges the existence of two slums in America: a material slum and a slum of the spirit. Bellow juxtaposes them and struggles to deconstruct their negative effects on American identity. In the novel, Corde believes that the end of philosophy, art and high culture is the cause behind spiritual decadence and the loss of one’s identity. The material slum in America, the culture of business, commercialism, risk, the lack of morality, and our inability to tell coherent stories about ourselves are the core causes of spiritual slum and tragedy in the modern world. Bellow assumes that a scientific revolution cannot purify the internal wasteland of the mind and the soul, and civilization must begin to purge and resurrect itself. In short, Bellow admits that storytelling provides a theory of bad identity in capitalistic America. Unlike Brooks, who asserts that it is “only through the transferential situation of stories that one reaches the understanding of otherness” (1992, p. 12), Bellow pinpoints that storytelling is illogical, that stories remain a mere fiction which cannot provide any real sense in life. In capitalistic America, drawing one’s identity is like writing stories of broken lives and fractured selves. Bellow suggests that the new form of identity can only be achieved through the act of interpretation of stories that must be shared between the masses and the intellectuals. The rebirth of humanity is a matter of rewriting life, of constructing and reconstructing one’s perception of the world. It is in this way that Bellow’s strategy of deconstructing capitalistic identity is highly revealing in the reconstruction of the world in line with wisdom, morality, happiness and reason. Strikingly, what Bellow initially sought to advocate is that it is only through the deconstruction and the subversion of capitalistic identity that the possibilities of rebirth, understanding and forgiveness can be fulfilled. The novelist’s endeavor to give sense to nonsense,

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to sketch one’s identity through storytelling unexpectedly ends up with his failure of writing coherent and appropriate stories. The gesture of giving sense to agony turns out to be an endless curative experience. This chapter has focused on Bellow’s efforts to deconstruct the culture of capitalism as it represents the core cause of decline and apocalypse in modern American society. Its purpose has been much more modest:  to discuss the author’s views of deconstructing capitalism and deconstructing capitalistic identity. Such a discussion has purported to illustrate the novelist’s strategies of deconstruction and formulate certain recommendations to solve the problem of the alienation of intellectuals in modern American society. Bellow, and through him his intellectual protagonists, recommends that higher education and universities in America should have a vital role in producing a generation of students trained in European liberal humanities. Experts, he reminds us, are not intellectuals: rather, they are the offspring of a nihilistic and amoral capitalistic culture in America. Bellow recommends also that religion, morality and humanism should replace the ethics of money, materialism and risk in America. In short, European humanistic culture, he vehemently suggests, should be transplanted into the American soul in order to prevent the further decay of American culture. What follows, accordingly, is that Bellow’s later novels, as seen in the previous chapters, present good examples of subversion and deconstruction. They also provide good instances of how to build a world of humanism and dignity amidst the ethics of the negativity of the masses and low culture. As argued, Bellow deconstructs capitalism in America and considers it to be the root cause of the decline of American society. On many occasions, he is commonly regarded as an author of morality, sublime, freedom, happiness, faith and wisdom. On many others, he is strongly argued to be the hero of madness as wisdom, subversion and deconstruction. The duty of bringing all these contradictions together becomes daunting and interesting.

·7· CONCLUSION The agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises. It’s become clearer and clearer to me in Humboldt’s heartbreak and madness. He performed all the stormy steps of that routine. That performance was conclusive. That—​it’s perfectly plain, now—​can’t be continued. Now we must listen in secret to the sound of the truth that God puts into us. Bellow, S. 1975. 477.

The present book aimed to determine the way Bellow’s intellectual heroes deconstruct the amoral impacts of capitalism on modern American society by centralizing their humanistic and moral role amidst the heart of the cultural scene of America. To achieve this purpose, the following strategies were employed: a) Analyzing how madness is epitomized in terms of wisdom and morality in Bellow’s later novels, b) Describing the manifestations of the agony and marginalization of intellectuals in their society and associating it with the cultural decay in modern America and c) Identifying the actions taken by the heroes to bridge the gap between them and the masses by deconstructing the negativity of capitalism and formulating recommendations to halt the cultural decay in modern America and regain morality and humanism. Based on a qualitative analysis of Bellow’s later novels, it can be concluded that the agony of intellectuals and cultural decay in modern America can be prevented by re-​evaluating the principles of democratic capitalism. The results indicate that the deconstruction and subversion of capitalism are fundamental actions that must be taken to formulate a new moral and humanistic basis for American society. Madness as the wisdom of intellectuals has been regarded as a fundamental condition for entering Bellow’s deconstruction of capitalistic ethos. The

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heroes in his later novels have been introduced as men of ideas and letters, philosophers, poets, artists, idealists, dissenters and revolutionists of the age. However, they are marginalized, victimized, degraded, humiliated, disregarded, and forgotten in spite of their celebrity and contribution to American culture. The manifestations of their madness as wisdom are apparent in the themes of morality, wisdom, reason as faith, peace and happiness. These ethics penetrated into the minds of Bellow’s protagonists and deepened their consciousness about their marginalization and alienation on the one hand and the centralization of low culture and the masses in capitalistic America on the other. The agony of intellectuals and the cultural decay in modern America are found to be the aftermath of the negativity of capitalism. Materialism, individualism, narcissism and brutality result in the decline of civility and the alienation of Bellow’s heroes. For this reason, they deconstruct this model of life and visualize their moral and subliminal ethics. Admitting that America is a fertile soul of anti-​intellectual culture and contains a one-​dimensional society, Bellow suggests deconstructing capitalism itself as it represents the core cause of this cultural backdrop. The most obvious finding which emerges from this study is the deconstruction of capitalism as an action taken by the heroes to prevent the cultural decay in America. Bellow’s intellectual heroes admit that capitalistic democracy systematizes, mechanizes and dehumanizes the American mind. It kills creativity and imagination. More sardonically, they assure us that it deracinates the values of morality and humanism and further aggravates the degradation of intellectuals. Bellow suggests that this form of knowledge should be revised and that European culture and its humanistic tradition should be transplanted into America instead. Intellectuals, higher education and universities should play a vital role in this radical change. As its title implies, this book sought to address the concepts of madness and deconstruction in Bellow’s later novels. The originality and the novelty that this this work has introduced is the deploying of the deconstructive approach to unveil certain blind spots that classical or early critics of Bellow undeliberately ignored. Critics like Ihab Hassan, Malcolm Bradbury, Tony Tanner, John Jacob Clayton, Louana L. Peontek, Judy Lee Svore, Francis Patrick Fox, Cornel Bonca, and others have investigated themes like the modern city, Jewishness, the dignity of human being, the categories of women, ontology and being, and the strategies of the self in the postmodern era, but they have not paid much attention to the rapidly changing theories of texts

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and criticism namely deconstructionism in Bellow’s texts. It is because of this that this study returned to the deconstructive approach with the assumption that Bellow’s peculiar sense of madness and subversion can only be understood within this intellectual and theoretical platform. The Bellovian texts may still speak to us if we are theoretically and intellectually prepared to listen to them. By this token, this study has attempted to sketch the way Bellow’s intellectual protagonists deconstruct the amoral and unethical values of the masses and low culture in modern America. Confessing that they live in a milieu which is governed by the logic of capitalistic democracy, commodity, business, consumerism and risk, they struggle to deconstruct these values first, and capitalism itself second, as it represents the core cause of this cultural and humanistic decline. Their alienation and madness, they admit, stem from their being intellectuals in the European humanistic tradition as well as their being other to the vulgarity and frivolity of the masses. The deconstructive approach has shown the vital roles Derrida, Foucault and de Man have played in formulating this work. Derrida established a revolutionary theory of deconstructionism that generates absolute doubt in metaphysics, logocentrism and conformity. To his mind, modernity is the other facet of an authoritarian, illusive and grand discourse of metaphysical thinking. Derrida deconstructs grand norms and concepts like morality, reason and faith that are related to metaphysics. The question of what is next governs the logic of his thinking, and keeps reverberating whenever there is a need for it. Bellow’s intellectual protagonists deploy Derrida’s deconstructive premises in their ceaseless attempts to look for the infinite. Additionally, they scrupulously adopt the Derridean deconstructive method to subvert the ethics of the masses and low culture, and deracinate the negativity of capitalism in the cultural scene of America. Foucault plays a significant role in intensifying the theme of madness and the method of deconstruction. Madness, in his sense, is ascribed with the strangeness and the peculiarity of a specific social category. Historically, mad figures are excluded from the aristocracy and bourgeois class; they are tragically imprisoned in deserted areas. Adopting an archeological method and a genealogical design, Foucault initiates the concept of episteme to address the structures of thought and the history of ideas. Civilization develops through this epistemic formula of history, gap, lacuna and interruption. Foucault meets with Derrida in his digging deep into the history of ideas and deconstructing the postulates and the legacy of the past. Bellow’s intellectual heroes meet with Foucault’s method of archeology in the investigation of the history of

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ideas. Interestingly, though they maintain that they are strange in their societies and alienated from its ethical and moral norms, they still do not share the reasons for their alienation and madness with Foucault’s mad figures. They associate back their madness and alienation with their being intellectuals in a society that is dominated by low culture and the masses. Bellow exploits Foucault’s method and design of deconstruction, but interestingly alters the content of and the reasons for madness and alienation. De Man offers the concepts of blindness and insight in the readability of literary texts. This is methodologically related to the reading, deciphering, decoding and deconstruction of meanings in literary works. Differently said, the meaning in works of art is highly dependent on the insight of its context in order to grasp the blindness of the text, and reciprocally the silent clues of the text to decode the blind context. What follows is that the whole history of philosophy and criticism is nothing other than a history of its own errors and blindness. Bellow unconsciously deploys this theoretical platform to generate an anthropological investigation of modern capitalistic American society. The Bellovian intellectual protagonists use their insights and wisdom to deconstruct the blindness of the masses and their ethics. As argued, Henderson, Herzog, Sammler, Corde and Humboldt prove the blindness of a society directed by materialism, amorality and risk and the marginality of intellectuals amidst this cultural decline. Again, Bellow undeliberately exploits Derrida’s deconstructive method, Foucault’s notion of marginality and centrality in the order of things, and de Man’s blindness and insight to regulate the imbalanced position of intellectuals in modern America. Bellow was commonly seen as America’s most famous novelist of the postwar era. This reputation was solidly intensified when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 1976. Since then, he has been considered as an author of alienated and marginalized intellectuals. Bellow’s heroes have been introduced in line with morality, humanism, reason, faith and wisdom. They are intellectuals trained in the European classical norms of humanism and morality. Bellow intentionally introduces them in this way in order to legitimate his deconstruction of low culture and the ethics of the masses. Scholars such as Rho and Bloom find in his writings the sublime culture of the European tradition and the rebellious tone of intellectuals against capitalism with its vulgarity, materialism and nihilism. He reveals that the cultural crises in modern America are to be attributed to the disappearance, negligence or disregard of what is fundamental and enduring. By this, he means the Great Books, the cultural and philosophical European heritage, starting from the

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Greek era, passing through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, up to the modern moment, whose spirit resists capitalistic democracy and moral devaluation. As argued, though Bellow’s intellectual heroes were born and brought up in a capitalistic background, they wrench themselves from this context and struggle to deconstruct its amoral ethics. Bellow’s intellectual protagonists are the embodiment of his strategies of deconstruction which is symmetrically concomitant with the Committee on Social Thought, co-​founded by Robert M. Hutchins for the study of the Great Ideas at the University of Chicago in 1962. Interestingly, Bellow produced the four novels under consideration shortly after joining the Committee. He wrote Herzog in 1964, two years after joining the Committee, Mr. Sammler’s Planet in 1970, Humboldt’s Gift in 1975, and The Dean’s December in 1982. His belief in the importance of the Great Books was directed to the public’s attention again in 1987 when he wrote the Foreword for Allan Bloom’s polemical book, The Closing of the American Mind. One limitation of this book that should not go unnoticed is that it does not take account of Bellow’s personal journeys in America in the revelation of the crisis of capitalism and the alienation of intellectuals in modern America. As a matter of fact, Bellow’s journeys to American cities, particularly New York and Chicago, must have been highly unsettling due to his youth and obvious sensitivities. Bellow’s movements from Canada to America and then within America, coming into contact with alien cultures of an indigenous sort—​minority peoples, peasants, workers, masses—​and experiencing physical displacement from the familiar to the unknown was ideologically disruptive for him. And it is no coincidence that Bellow was strikingly influenced by this milieu. However, these facts have been deliberately ignored in the analysis of the novels based on a deconstructive maxim which admits that there is nothing outside of the text. The current state of knowledge with regard to Bellow’s fictional world has ranged from the thematic perspective to the historical, the autobiographical, the religious and the stylistic. Researchers have inattentively neglected and abandoned relating Bellow’s world of fiction to poststructuralist theories, particularly deconstructionism. They have also undeliberately missed the importance of the investigation of the themes of madness and subversion. It is for this reason that this book has strived to contribute to the body of research by addressing these gaps. This contribution can be seen at the theoretical, methodological and thematic levels as well as its resolution of trending issues. First, this book has employed an innovative analytical and methodological approach in addressing the themes of madness and subversion in Bellow’s

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later novels. It deploys a combination of Derrida’s premises on deconstructionism, Foucault’s conception of “épistémè” and de Man’s views on blindness and insight in order to explain the social and historical fracture from which Bellow’s intellectuals suffer. The motivation for carrying out such an approach stemmed from the striking overlaps existing between the themes of madness and subversion on the one hand and the theory of deconstructionism on the other. The current state of knowledge has not sufficiently investigated these affinities. Researchers such as Clayton, Hassan and Malin have prioritized thematic, textual, historical and autobiographical investigations of the Bellovian fictional world. This complicates the efforts of unraveling the possible matches between Bellow’s novels and theories of texts in general and deconstructionism in particular. Although it originates from the literary realm, the problematic issue at the center of this work has high theoretical relevance:  this book is part of deeper reflections on the relationship between the concepts of deconstructionism, capitalism and intellectualism in modern America. The analytical challenge the author has faced lies in bringing all these concepts together with the themes of madness and subversion. This study has thus contributed to the current state of knowledge by generating a new theoretical platform based on the deconstructive approach. It offers an innovative methodology that paves the way for future scholars to address Bellow’s later novels in light of the insights and findings of other theories. This methodology offers a better understanding of the concept of deconstructionism in relationship with the concepts of philosophy, literature, logocentrism, discourse boundaries and history. The author has started with the postulate that one cannot understand the deconstructive theory or deploy it in this work unless the overlaps between these concepts had been investigated in detail. It also offers better knowledge about the trajectory and the development of the theory of deconstructionism. As a matter of fact, this refers back to unraveling the way deconstructionism has historically developed within the frames of modernity and postmodernity. These findings help maintain striking connections between deconstructionism and the themes of madness and subversion in Bellow’s later novels. These connections trigger off the originality and the novelty of the methodology deployed in this work as well as the themes posed for analysis and investigation. The use of this methodology saves the present author from falling into classical readings of Bellow’s fictional world. Deconstruction, the epitome

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of poststructuralist thought, does not aim to negate other interpretations and show their complete futility, nor does it strive to force its own premises. Instead, it envisions that criticism is not a single identifiable gesture, but an open-​ended process of assessment which, to borrow a term from Habermas, has no “final point or destination” (1973, p. 1). The current state of knowledge has not used critical theories which may help analyze Bellow from different perspectives. The deconstructive perspective offers such a critical standpoint, throughout which it incorporates several prominent readings and gives the critic the chance to operate on the text as long as they contribute to the creation of a logical and convincing meaning. In line with this, a new account of the peculiarities in the Bellovian fictional world will only take place when the compatibility between the novelist’s narratives on the one hand and the deconstructive prisms on the other one was recognized. The thematic contribution of this work stems from its investigation of the themes of madness and subversion in Bellow’s later novels. It has already been remarked upon that nothing has been written on these themes. Surprisingly, the author found out instead that critics like Bradbury, Hassan, Clayton and Malin have focused on classical themes related to history, religion, happiness, war, traveling, life, death, urban life, women, etc. Briefly, these themes can be summed up as follows: faith, morality, agony, realism, heroism, city, urban life, journeys and sacrifice. This book goes beyond the findings of these themes and suggests a new reading based on the themes of madness and subversion. One finding based on this reading is that madness is associated with illusion, intellectualism and wisdom. It has been portrayed in accordance with the agony of intellectuals and their attempts to bring some change to their society. Starting with Bellow himself, he advocates that the madness and the illusion of his heroes can only tell stories of marginalized and disregarded intellectuals and predict the histories of nations and ideas. Madness as wisdom and illusion as overconsciousness trigger off subversion and deconstruction. Madness, as wisdom and overconsciousness, reveals the disillusionment of Bellow’s protagonists and their struggle to subvert and deconstruct the ethics of the crowd and low culture. Bellow sets the links between madness, subversion and deconstruction, and this area of investigation in itself represents the major thematic contribution of this work. Finally, this book provides suggestions and recommendations to help solve the problem of the alienation of intellectuals and the crisis of capitalism in modern America. They can be summarized as follows: a) The role of

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religion must be regained at the center of American life. God and the church are meant to play a vital role in stopping the decay of civilization, b) The foundations of capitalism are amoral and they need to be revised. Humanism, morality, conscience, and respect for liberty, law and public decency must be stressed, c) The role of the culture industry and the mechanization and systemization of the modern American mind must be re-​evaluated, d) The one-​dimensional society, low culture, the hegemony of materialism, capitalistic democracy and the modern form of knowledge must be assessed, e) Fake intellectuals, opportunists and materialists must be excluded from American society and f) The ethics of the newly emerging bourgeois social groups in America must be deconstructed. Additionally, the means by which these recommendations can be put into practice to bring some change to modern America are suggested to be as follows. First, American universities should lecture of on the liberal arts, humanities and philosophy, and should teach the young generation about European humanistic and noble ethics. Second, European humanistic and liberal culture must be transplanted into the American soul. Third, the place of God must be regained and the function of psychoanalysis, science and systemization in the American mind must be revised. This book is not only meant to tackle the problem of the madness of intellectuals in modern America theoretically, nor is it only meant to provide fictional speculations about the themes of madness and subversion, not even meant to provide a detailed description of the American mind in the second half of the 20th century; rather, added to all these purposes, it has strived to contribute in a practical manner to solving the problem at hand, providing recommendations and offering means to put them into practice. These findings have a number of important implications for future practice. In fact, Bellow sets out recommendations that policy makers, intellectuals, educators as well as governments should adopt in order to ‘fabricate’ a moral and wise society, and step away from the negativity of capitalism. Bellow recommends: a) to regain the role of religion, God and the church in modern America to stop the decay of civilization, b) to revise the illusive and amoral foundations of capitalism, and restoring moral feelings, conscience, and respect for liberty, law, public decency and humanism, c) to re-​evaluate the role of the culture industry and the mechanization and systemization of the modern American mind, to assess the one-​dimensional society, low culture, the hegemony of materialism, capitalistic democracy and the modern form of knowledge, d) reform the socioeconomic and political capitalistic features

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in America in line with morality and wisdom to reconsider the place and importance of modern features of life in America, including cars, money, sex groups, sexual party games, psychedelic party posters, clothes, fashion and slogans. The totalitarianism of the civil crowd in America has to be re-​evaluated, and this cultural and civilizational decay should be addressed in line with European moral and humanistic culture, e) revise sexual relationships, fake intellectuals, opportunists and materialists, f) deconstructing the ethics of the newly emerging bourgeois social groups in America, g) subvert the knowledge of businessmen and risky people: journalists, lawyers, the media, doctors and experts in general. Bellow suggests that a reasonable way to put these recommendations into practice can be achieved by:





1) Lecturing on the liberal arts, humanities and philosophy in American universities, and letting the young generation know about European humanistic and noble ethics. 2) Transplanting European humanistic and liberal culture into the American soul. 3) Encouraging higher education and universities to play a bigger and a vital role in producing students trained in European high culture and humanism. 4) Putting the place of God back at the center of American daily life, and revising the function of psychoanalysis, science and systemization in the modern American mind.

While this study has established a deconstructive approach with regard to Bellow’s later novels, further research should be carried out to determine the manifestations of deconstruction in Bellow’s world of fiction. More scholarly efforts need to be carried out to unveil the undeliberately missed gaps of knowledge concerning Bellow’s art and deconstructionism.

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