"Enlightenment? Marvelous! But out of hand, wasn't it?"

Saul Bellow remains a divisive writer. Some are put off for good by the increasing reaction evident over time in his books. Others find his writing artless, idea-heavy, grasping for significance in its abundant references to intellectual figures, his critical popularity more a function of politics than literature. Still others would name him the exemplary American writer, the great American writer of the 20th century, modernist par excellence. For my part, I like him, though I've had my struggles at the level of the (sometimes rambling, aimless) sentence, and have written about him accordingly (see my two posts (one, two) on re-reading The Adventures of Augie March). And I find I'm interested in the reactionary strain in his writing, in the way that conservatism can be instructive, can tap into something overlooked by others, or perhaps in its willingness to lay bare a problem otherwise obscured.

All of which is preamble to the following long-ish passage from Mr. Sammler's Planet, one of Bellow's more controversial novels (I've seen it dismissed out of hand as "racist", and indeed the subplot about the crazy black man who exposes himself to Sammler on the bus is... well, it's problematic at best). The passage comes early in the novel, and Sammler is musing about his niece Angela (in whom "you confronted sensual womanhood without remission. You smelled it,  too." (!)) and the implications, as he sees them, of modern rights and demands and etc:

Sammler in his Gymnasium days once translated from Saint Augustine: "The Devil hath established his cities in the North." He thought of this often. […] Without the power of the North, its mines, its industries, the world would never have reached its astonishing modern form. And regardless of Augustine, Sammler had always loved his Northern cities, especially London, the blessings of its gloom, of coal smoke, gray rains, and the mental and human opportunities of a dark muffled environment. There one came to terms with obscurity, with low tones, one did not demand full clarity of mind or motive. But now Augustine's odd statement required a new interpretation. Listening to Angela carefully, Sammler perceived different developments. The labor of Puritanism now was ending. The dark satanic mills changing into light satanic mills. The reprobates turning into children of joy, the sexual ways of the seraglio and of the Congo bush adopted by the emancipated masses of New York, Amsterdam, London. Old Sammler with his screwy visions! He saw the increasing triumph of Enlightenment—Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, Adultery! 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 the different races affirmed, Social Security, public health, the dignity of the person, the right to justice—the struggles of three revolutionary centuries being won while the feudal bonds of Church and Family weakened and the privileges of aristocracy (without any duties) spread wide, democratized, especially the libidinous privileges, the right to be uninhibited, spontaneous, urinating, defecating, belching, coupling in all positions, tripling, quadrupling, polymorphous, noble in being natural, primitive, combining the leisure and luxurious inventiveness of Versailles with the hibiscus-covered erotic ease of Samoa. Dark romanticism now took hold. As old at least as the strange Orientalism of the Knights Templar, and since then filled up with Lady Stanhopes, Baudelaires, de Nervals, Stevensons, and Gauguins—those South-loving barbarians. Oh yes, the Templars. They had adored the Muslims. One hair from the head of a Saracen was more precious than the whole body of a Christian. Such crazy fervor! And now all the racism, all the strange erotic persuasions, the tourism and local color, the exotics of it had broken up but the mental masses, inheriting everything in a debased state, had formed an idea of the corrupting disease of being white and of the healing power of black. The dreams of nineteenth-century poets polluted the psychic atmosphere of the great boroughs and suburbs of New York. Add to this the dangerous lunging staggering crazy violence of fanatics, and the trouble was very deep. Like many people who had seen the world collapse once, Mr. Sammler entertained the possibility it might collapse twice. He did not agree with refugee friends that this doom was inevitable, but liberal beliefs did not seem capable of self-defense, and you could smell decay. You could see the suicidal impulses of civilization pushing strongly. You wondered whether this Western culture could survive universal dissemination—whether only its science and technology or administrative practices would travel, be adopted by other societies. Or whether the worst enemies of civilization might not prove to be its petted intellectuals who attacked it at its weakest moments—attacked it in the name of proletarian revolution, in the name of reason, and in the name of irrationality, in the name of visceral depth, in the name of sex, in the name of perfect instantaneous freedom. For what it amounted to was limitless demand—insatiability, refusal of the doomed creature (death being sure and final) to go away from this earth unsatisfied. A full bill of demand and complaint was therefore presented by each individual. Non-negotiable. Recognizing no scarcity of supply in any human development. Enlightenment? Marvelous! But out of hand, wasn't it?

Oh, man, there's so much! Obviously, on the surface, this reads like a cranky old-man rant about the kids and the girls and barbarians. And he comes right out and says that Enlightenment is all well and good for white folks and Western culture, but worrisome when everyone else wants in on the game. And he's focused on moral decline and sexual mores, which is hard to take too seriously. And he subsumes under the phrase "the power of the North" all the labor it exploited in the so-called South. And there are some great dog whistles in there, like "petted intellectuals" and "disease of being white and of the healing power of black" and the spectre of Muslim-lovers and so on.

And I love it. I love it for the writing, for one, for the way he moves through this paragraph, with its piled-on parallel phrases and its crazy lists and those characteristic not-quite-grammatical turns. But I also love it for its ideas, though I look at them a little upside-down from how they're no doubt intended. After all, never mind whether "this Western culture could survive universal dissemination", it cannot be universally disseminated, and its deepening and spread to date has been setting the stage for world-wide ecological collapse for decades now. But even without that immanent collapse, and here we return to a regular theme of mine, where is the labor and the energy going to come from if everyone is entitled to the modern, Western way of life? The left's critique of capitalism has, in my view, generally failed to take this into account, taking for granted the necessity and desirability of being "modern". We've bought wholesale into the culture of ever-continuing and -expanding consumption, the apolitical notion of economic growth (apolitical because placed outside of politics and all too much left-wing political thinking), all lip service to the contrary notwithstanding. Sammler is going on about morals and sexual mores, which is easy to laugh at and dismiss, but it's classic misdirection, perhaps even of himself. The real "full bill of demand and complaint . . . presented by each individual" is that of modern conveniences and air conditioning and cars and iPods and the Internet and everything else. Enlightenment? Maybe. But it's Modernity, and all the assumptions and expectations, political, economic, cultural, that's out of hand. What will we do about it? What can we do about it? Is it possible to think an inclusive polity that does not depend on unsustainable features of modern life?

Appropriately Insular

Two weeks ago at The Elegant Variation, Mark Sarvas posted in four installments his interview with Joseph O'Neill, author of Netherland. Much of the interview is of little interest to me, but I admit that I made a point to skim through the whole thing because Sarvas hinted ahead of time that they were going to be getting into the much-blogged-about Zadie Smith essay from last Fall, in which Smith discussed Netherland alongside Tom McCarthy's Remainder (for example, I wrote about it here, and, sort of, here). In the event, that particular part of the interview doesn't really go anywhere terribly fruitful. Nevertheless, there are a few interesting points I'd like to highlight, since they have bearing on questions that some of us have been discussing of late. I'm posting this now as a placeholder, which I hope will lead into future posts on these topics.

First, from the third part of the interview, in reference to Nobel Committee member Horace Engdahl's controversial remarks about the alleged insularity of contemporary American fiction:

TEV: Do you think that this question of the insular nature of contemporary American fiction afflicts the younger generation in a way that it didn't the Mailers and the Roths and the Bellows?

Joseph O'Neill: No, I think part of the problem for the young generation may be that they're not insular enough. I mean, Updike and Bellow and Roth achieved their finest, most resonant effects by disregarding conventions of universality. You wrote about what American Jews, or what you have you, were up to in these little towns, and the world followed you.

TEV: Very particular and very personal.

Joseph O'Neill: Yeah. There is no space between these writers and their concerns. You rarely get the sense with them that they are just trying to write a novel. I’m talking about their most successful work. And I think they were appropriately insular with regard to their raw materials.

"Appropriately insular". Whatever one thinks of the particular writers mentioned (I'm much higher on Roth and Bellow than I am on Updike, and I couldn't possibly care less about Mailer than I do), this is an excellent observation. I think it speaks to something important about literature, and has bearing on discussions about writing in general, modernism, post-modernism, and so on.

Then in part four they finally come around to addressing Smith's piece:

TEV: Because I agree with you. It's interesting that you have brought up Zadie Smith because I was going to ask about her next. I think that a lot of people draw the wrong kind of conclusions with a piece like the one that she wrote. I think that it sets up some false oppositions. I feel like this form of the novel is capacious enough to accommodate all different styles

Joseph O'Neill: Yes.

TEV: And the notion that one has to chose [sic] between Netherland or Remainder just seems silly. I liked Remainder a great deal, as well. I don’t feel that they're mutually exclusive, that one must declare an allegiance.

Joseph O'Neill: I'd actually read and liked Remainder before that piece. And I thought it was a perfectly good piece of writing. I'm not sure I would describe it as unconventional, not least because that description, as I've said, would not mean very much.

TEV: Yes. But I think that some of the sentiments that she expresses hold sway among this younger generation of writers, whether it’s people coming out of the McSweeney’s School or the purveyors of the uber-ironic, the tendency toward a hip nihilism or something like that that. That they mistrust, in essence, the idea of a beautiful sentence. Some people find that corny, the notion of a beautiful sentence.

Joseph O'Neill: Well, it depends on how you define them as beautiful. I mean, you know, Foster Wallace wrote many beautiful sentences. I mean, there's nothing but beautiful sentences in his work. Even though he had a particular way of doing it. What makes a sentence beautiful, for me, is its conscientiousness. A hip, ironic sensibility is not necessarily conscientious. Neither is a sensibility that latches on to dusks and dawns and roses.

Obviously O'Neill is put in a weird position, having to comment on such an essay, but TEV sets the terms of the discussion in a not very helpful fashion. Though he's not wrong to observe that Smith set up a false opposition of sorts, I would argue that the much celebrated "capaciousness" of the novel is actually a problem (and by the way think that TEV is one of those who drew "the wrong kind of conclusions" from the essay). But I'll leave further remarks for future posts.

More on Biblical narration and The Adventures of Augie March

Recently I suggested that Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March was in some respects like the Bible in its mode of narration. I had intended to say more about it but did not want to weigh down that earlier post. I won't go into great detail here, either, but I do want to mention something about how it was that I arrived at this idea. As part of this effort, I have since discussed "The Bible Open and Closed", an essay in which Gabriel Josipovici argues that the Bible's basic mode of narration is open (admittedly, that entry is more of a report than anything else). In fact, it was re-reading The Adventures of Augie March that once again brought Josipovici's argument to mind, prompting me to re-read the essay (which is of course much shorter than The Book of God, in which the same argument, among others, is dealt with in greater detail).

This, then, is the passage from Augie March that caught my attention in this regard (Augie, here, is working for his brother Simon at the latter's coal yard):

"Well," he said to Happy and me, "why don't you two take the car and go see some of the dealers? Try to drum up some trade. Here's five bucks for beer money. I'll stay here with Coxie and try to get that back fence in shape. They'll steal us blind [if] we don't do something about it." Cox was the handyman, an old wino in a slap-happy painter's cap that looked like an Italian officer's lid. He sent him scouting along the fence of the Westinghouse plant for old planks. Coxie worked for hamburgers and a bottle of California K. Arakelian's sherry or of yocky-dock. He was watchman too, and slept on rags back of the green lattice before the seldom used front door. Off he limped--he carried a bullet, he claimed, from San Juan Hill--by the mile-long big meshed fence of the corporation in which such needs as fences were met by sub-officers' inviting contractors' bids a tight steel net permitted all to look in at the vast remote shimmer, the brick steeples, the long power-buildings and the Vesuvian soft coal under the scarcely smeared summer sky and gaudiness.

It's that final detail about Coxie--"he carried a bullet, he claimed, from San Juan Hill"--that did it. Then I notice the other character details--he works for hamburgers or a bottle of sherry; sleeps on rags--do some of the same suggestive work. This character never appears again, but a life is briefly allowed to emerge here, before sinking back into the narrative, without any laborious back-story being filled in.

Again, I don't want to over-sell the comparison with the Hebrew Bible (not least because my experience with the Bible is highly limited!)--obviously, for just one example, Augie is the center of his own narrative. But I think such passages as the one quoted above, in the details I've highlighted, as well as Augie's general refusal to assign a meaning to his life and his uncertainty about it all, suggest an approach to literature that is more in the tradition of narrative, as argued by Josipovici, than in that of the novel, dominated as it is by story or even plot.

On Re-reading The Adventures of Augie March

Shortly after Dan Green announced his TRE Prime site, collecting his more substantial Reading Experience posts, I re-encountered this piece in which he articulated his dislike of Saul Bellow's fiction. The occasion for the original entry was an essay by J.M. Coetzee that appeared in The New York Review of Books, reviewing the Library of America volume collecting Bellow's first three novels. In his essay, Coetzee offers fairly tepid judgments of the novels under review (The Dangling Man, The Victim, and The Adventures of Augie March). It is in particular Coetzee's take on The Adventures of Augie March that interested Dan in his piece. Coetzee notes its "lack of dramatic structure and indeed of intellectual organization" and judges that "[t]he book becomes steadily less engaging as it proceeds. The scene-by-scene method of composition, each scene beginning with a tour de force of vivid word painting, begins to seem mechanical." Dan goes him one better and calls Augie March "basically unreadable"; it is, he says, "badly written" and "terribly paced".

It so happens that I was in the middle of re-reading The Adventures of Augie March when I re-read Dan's post, after reading The Victim the previous week. I have since finished reading it. I admit that I first read Dan's judgment (and Coetzee's) with some excitement. I'd liked some of the little Bellow I'd read at the time but did not understand the source of his reputation. And I'd had some troubles of my own with his work. So I was sympathetic to the criticism they leveled, but in truth my excitement had more to with weariness than with my own opinion of the quality of Bellow's fiction: I was tired of reading not only about how great he was supposed to be, but in particular about how he was The Great American Novelist; I was especially tried of hearing this from certain high-profile British writers and critics, namely Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Ian McEwan, and to a lesser extent, James Wood. It was their attention to his Americanness that irritated me most of all, I think. Amis' devotion, his claiming of Bellow as his literary father, especially made me gag (and this was before I'd gone sour on Amis). As for my own judgments, I'd loved Herzog (but even this judgment was reinforced here, as Coetzee rates it highly and for Dan it is the only Bellow novel deserving to be called "a superior work of fiction"), liked Humboldt's Gift and, to a lesser extent, the somewhat similar Ravelstein, and disliked Henderson the Rain King.

The Adventures of Augie March seemed to be of a different category. I remember finding it tough slogging, though overall I'd have told you that I enjoyed it. I could almost imagine co-signing Coetzee's assessment, if his critical words could somehow be admitted in the service of a more positive review. I was certainly not willing to go as far as Dan Green--even if I did indeed find certain sections literally unreadable: that is, I could not read them; I stumbled, unable to make the sentences move, tripping up on adjectives and nouns employed in weird ways, on grammatical oddities.

Re-reading Augie March, I found that I can see why I had trouble the first time, and I can see why one would find it virtually unreadable, if approached from the wrong angle. There were still passages that stopped me short, when I found it very difficult to continue without an effort of sheer will. However, I wonder if this isn't my problem rather than the book's, as if in these sections I'm still trying to force the book to be something it's not. Because when I was in the right frame of mind, I enjoyed the hell out of it. This is writing, often ramshackle, but writing, alive on the page. I have a hard time seeing how Dan could call it badly written. And it seems to me that Coetzee's problems are beside the point. Augie may live a charmed life of sorts, as Coetzee complains, but he is an amiable presence (and I'm not so sure his life is so charmed after all). There is no real plot, of course, but this is pure narrative. Adjectives pile up, images, insane lists, descriptions, quick, offhand characterizations: Augie sees. Sees a lot. It is this seeing that interests me, as well as what I'd like to call an occasional Biblical quality to the narrative. In both of these elements Augie March is like a much shorter, hard-scrabble In Search of Lost Time, if I may be so bold (following Josipovici, in his comparison of Proust's narrative mode with that of the Bible). Not that Augie's project is anything like Marcel's--he doesn't seem to be in search of his past or invested in literature in any way similar to Marcel. Augie is essentially writing his memoir, from a certain, though by no means completely, settled vantage point. His memory doesn't explode on him, recovered through his senses; he is simply remembering, and telling. Yet, though he could be said to be outside the timeframe covered in the novel, he manages to invest his writing with an element of in-the-moment discovery, creating writing out of it all. He's remembering, but not imposing meaning retroactively, even if along the way he tries to tell us--or himself--what he's about.

If this were a proper review, I'd be quoting passages demonstrating this seeing, this writing. But it's not; these are my impressions (and besides, I didn't do a good job of keeping track of passages I especially liked). It's true that there are times when the novel sags a bit--it's no coincidence, I think, that Coetzee identifies the Mexico sequence as signaling for him that something was amiss, for these chapters are considerably less compelling, on the whole, than the time spent in Chicago, where Augie himself is more at home; no doubt it could be argued that this is intentional, that of course Augie's memories of Chicago are more vivid than those of the strange time in a strange land. Nevertheless, my attention did wander. But on the whole, I developed a much greater appreciation for what Bellow is up to in general, as well as here, in this novel. It's a great book.

Noted: Saul Bellow

From The Adventures of Augie March:

It's really kind of tremendous how it all takes place. You'd never guess how much labor goes into it. Only some time ago it occurred to me how great an amount. She came back from the studio and went to take a bath, and from the bath she called out to me, "Darling, please bring me a towel." I took one of those towel robes that I had bought at the Bon Marché department store and came along with it. The little bathroom was in twilight. In the chauffe-eau machine, the brass box with teeth of gas burning, the green metal dropped crumbs inside from the thousand-candle blaze. Her body with its warm woman's smell was covered with water starting in a calm line over her breasts. The glass of the medicine chest shone like a deep blue place in the wall, as if a window to the evening sea and not the ashy fog of Paris. I sat down with the robe over my shoulder and felt very much at peace. For a change the apartment seemed clean and was warm; the abominations were gone into the background, the stoves drew well and they shone. Jacqueline was cooking dinner and it smelled of gravy. I felt settled and easy, my chest free and my fingers comfortable and open. And now here's the thing. It takes a time like this for you to find out how sore your heart has been, and, moreoever, all the while you thought you were going around idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It's internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or have requital, and therefore in yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself! Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast.