"Modern writers sin," he says, "when they suppose that they
know, as they conceive that physics
knows or that history
knows. The subject of the novelist is not knowable in any such way." The creature's sheer biological persistence suggests that the density of modern civilization does not preclude valuable individual life. Bellow posits a tacit natural knowledge, "far deeper than head culture," and, to free himself from "the cliches of 'culture history,'" calls on "some power within us" to "tell us what we are, now that old misconceptions have been laid low."
Bellow's search for a form to express his intimate knowledge has involved the development of a style. From his "commentator within" he receives "words, phrases, syllables." In voice he finds a source of form and value. Accordingly, he has moved away from the chronology of cause-effect sequence, as in The Victim (1947), to fiction shaped by the dynamic of verbal gesture, as in Henderson the Rain King (1959). The pivotal work is Augie March, where with Augie's "free-style" manner Bellow began to evolve what Irving Howe calls "the first major new style in American prose fiction since those of Hemingway and Faulkner."
A persistent criticism of Bellow is that he merges with his protagonists.
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