Since Herzog Saul Bellow has been developing his own quite unique kind of novel. Like Virginia Woolf (though he wouldn't thank me for the comparison) he has gradually discovered a form of fiction in which plot counts for extremely little, but which is open enough to include almost everything. Of course Bellow's minimal plots are very different from Virginia Woolf's: instead of house-parties and village fêtes there are divorces, court cases, deaths. The setting is urban—usually Chicago, which is seen as the archetypal modern city—and the cast includes hoodlums, media men, academics and politicians. The "almost everything" also differs from Virginia Woolf's, for it includes all the horrors of slums and big cities, the rapes and muggings and killings, the greed for fame and money, and the monstrosities that go on over the whole world. Bellow wants to get Bokassa and his jewels as well as Idi Amin, Guatemala as well as Czechoslovakia, Vietnam as well as Auschwitz into his books. These must be nothing less than a long hard look at the whole of our civilization as it now stands, or totters.
Some might admire the ambition, others, more cannily, recognise its dangers. For who is Saul Bellow to tell us how we live and how we should live? Why should we listen to him rather than to anyone else? Bellow's speeches in propria persona are often no more than the public airing of prejudice; a book such as To Jerusalem and Back leaves us predominantly with a sense of the author's bigotry and arrogance. But in fiction all that is changed. Bellow, half-aware of the problem, never gives the impression in his novels that what is being said about the state of the world is being said by himself or is to be taken as the final truth on the matter. Just as important are who is saying it and why, and what pressures the character is under at the time. As with Wittgenstein we cease to listen to what is being said and instead watch the speaker's gestures. For those rantings tell us more about the character than about the objective situation. Indeed, one of Bellow's points, forcibly brought out in The Dean's December, is that there is no "objective situation", that the journalists—even super-journalists—and the scientists—even marvellously humane and concerned scientists—do not and cannot give it to us "how it is", for "it is" only how we grasp it. And this does not mean that understanding remains irremediably subjective, but that in order really to understand what is going on we must ourselves make an imaginative effort. Understanding will never simply reveal itself, it is never simply information which we can add to our existing stock; it comes only at a cost, as the result of a painful shedding of defences.
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