Sex Critical Essay | Sarah Blacher Cohen

Sarah Blacher Cohen

SOURCE: "Sex: Saul Bellow's Hedonistic Joke," in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 2, No. 2, Autumn, 1974, pp. 223-29.

In the following essay, Cohen comments on Bellow's depiction of sex as "the comic leveler" in The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler's Planet.

The humor in the relationship between men and women in Saul Bellow's novels rests not so much on the pandemonious clashes between male and female, but on Bellow's portrayal of the laughable nature of sex itself. The young Bellow protagonist regards copulation as a rollicking animal game in which he eagerly participates. Although he experiences some difficulty in learning the rules and familiarizing himself with the other players' techniques, he plunges headlong into the game. He enjoys taking an amoral holiday from his quest for a distinctive fate; he welcomes the refuge it affords from those "imposers-upon, absolutists"¹ who want to conscript him to their...
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