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Saul Bellow's Hidden Theme Keith M CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Iowa Research Online Masthead Logo The Iowa Review Volume 10 Article 2 Issue 4 Fall 1979 Strange Things, Savage Things: Saul Bellow's Hidden Theme Keith M. Opdahl Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.uiowa.edu/iowareview Part of the Creative Writing Commons Recommended Citation Opdahl, Keith M.. "Strange Things, Savage Things: Saul Bellow's Hidden Theme." The Iowa Review 10.4 (1979): 1-15. Web. Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0021-065X.2512 This Contents is brought to you for free and open access by Iowa Research Online. It has been accepted for inclusion in The oI wa Review by an authorized administrator of Iowa Research Online. For more information, please contact [email protected]. "Strange Things, Savage Things": Saul Bellow's Hidden Theme Keith M. Opdahl sum from among the words that might up Saul Bellow in the way that or "The South" does William Faulkner "courage*' does Ernest Hemingway, we Iwould choose "sensuality''?surprisingly, I admit, since seldom think of treats sex Bellow in this light. Bellow with neither the explicitness of John Updike nor the mysticism of Norman Mailer. His protagonist struggles not to to over or sex get the girl but get her away from her. Because is something on Bellow's women impose the men?I think of Stella tempting Augie in The a Adventures of Augie March or Ramona in Herzog entertaining distracted and a resentful Moses?the Bellow protagonist is really something of prude. mere use If the existence of this theme is striking, however, Bellow's of it to are even more so. and the degree which it has shaped his work By "sensual" Imean that area of life that encompasses both intense sensation and sexuality, terms the first somehow becoming the second. And in these the sensual in not a matter Bellow's work is of human relations (a subject explored by nor Victoria Sullivan) of sexual hygiene (see Robert Boyer's "Attitudes toward a matter Sex in American 'High Culture' "), but of setting and metaphysics. Sex is everywhere and nowhere; it permeates Bellow's imaginative world with an overwhelming presence and yet is seldom remarked by the protagonist. In a sense are same character the very real Bellow's protagonists all the and suffer same are so predicament: they victims of the forces that lie behind sexuality, women to that the anger of their is nothing compared the threat that lies just beyond the vision?the threat of an immense and angry force to which sexuality belongs. Bellow uses in to define our in the universe. To his sex, short, place most the sensual exists on a continuum with the imagination, interestingly, so energies that drive the universe and is related to them: the sensual may hint at what we dramatize at times our which we are, may creaturely existence, must to be central fact Bellow makes concrete in his master accept healthy?a us our ly evocation of faces and bodies?and may at other times remind of or sees as a perishable physical being, which the mind the spirit cosmic to our man putdowrr, the dying animal which consciousness is tied. Is really an so a accident of nature? Bellow doesn't think for minute, and the special sex a potential in for tenderness and force, love and exploitation makes it litmus test of reality. a And what kind of evidence exists for such reading? The best evidence lies as we to in the structuralist approach, seek the central tale which Bellow new a returns, dressing old bones in clothes. Sensuality provides remarkably coherent explanation of the evolution of Bellow's fiction. But Bellow's imag 1 University of Iowa is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to The Iowa Review ® www.jstor.org embodies this theme as and so too when we them do the ery well, plumb motives of his characters. To seek evidence for this theme is soon to suffer an a embarrassment of riches, for Bellow has hidden his theme in peculiar way, as to or more to though he sought be found out, perhaps accurately hoped hide our it, like Poe's Purloined Letter, in the foreground of vision. Bellow dismiss es so the sensual in his work by making it central, and he does not because or a he thinks it irrelevant is himself prude, but because of the metaphys ics?the ambitious his view. To examine the theme of sensu metaphysics?of to career a ality in Bellow's work is realize that his has been shaped by one fascinating and ambitious attempt to solve by means of his imagination most our of the hoariest and vexing of philosophic problems. I Like just about everything else in this world, Bellow's fiction could be given a a Freudian interpretation. Each of his protagonists suffers from problem that makes sex one of the novels' centers. I don't mean a Masters and kind Johnson at a more or of disability, though Herzog hints one, but general emotional intellectual anxiety expressed indirectly. All the protagonists suffer some sort a of sensual guilt, for example: Joseph of Dangling Man remembers boyhood fear that he contained "something rotten," and sexuality makes Asa Leventhal in The Victim extremely nervous. The protagonist of Henderson the Rain King women begins his narrative by discussing the he has abused, and Herzog has a reaction to strong sexual abuse?his face gets hot and his breath becomes as troubled well it might since he's recently discovered he's been cuckolded. Bellow's fiction is also Freudian in the way it plays off male against female. woman a Again and again, the is replaced in the protagonist's life by male, a and particularly by father figure. Leventhal has lost his wife Mary for a a summer, leaving gap Allbee fills. Tommy Wilhelm has put women behind him to seek a father, while Henderson flees his wife for the African Prince women a Dahfu. In Mr. Sammler's Planet the compete with dying man for Sammler 's attention. Charles Citrine must in Humboldt's Gift learn to shut out as the world?defined in part his sexy girlfriend?and Joseph in Bellow's first novel is left alone all day by his working wife, which encourages the visit of a dubious male. Bellow's women are most in their absence then: the "present" protagonist so a often feels childishly abandoned, and seeks not much lover as a parent, a especially father who will love and express confidence in him, sending him a sense as forth with of his worth. In this Bellow's fiction is presexual, the a protagonist seeks the personal strength that would make sexual relationship But then the father also awakens certain intense possible. figure emotions, for 2 many of the novels find their climax in the violent death of the father figure, a resented or mixed currents of affection and suggesting sensuality perhaps, hostility. Such patterns reveal depths that may be troubled, particularly since the so avert a protagonists obviously their eyes. They live in world charged with a onto sexuality they don't dare recognize, perhaps because they project it the on as world. Joseph of Dangling Man (1944) comments everything but sex, his to long wait for the draft inWorld War II gives rise thoughts of determinism and death. And yet he describes few scenes that don't have a sexual tinge?a are a party in which tipsy women hypnotized and insulted; family dinner in a an which Joseph spanks his nubile niece; series of dreams in which "ancient on figure"?pushy, ingratiating, repulsive?kisses Joseph the lips. Joseph is in fact a fastidious young man, and his growing bad temper, which finally makes as as him volunteer for the army, providing the novel's plot, derives much an anything from his rejection of unclean world. "I go in the body from to to nakedness clothing and in the mind from relative purity pollution," he as says of his daily rising. The pollution ismalice, but it is also sexuality, Joseph describes almost in sexual terms. mother-in-law everything Joseph's "powders are herself thickly, and her lips painted in the shape that has become the awoman universal device of sensuality for all women." A lamp post is bending over a to curb. Joseph spanks his niece "with her long hair reaching nearly the floor and her round, nubile thighs bare." Is Bellow aware of this theme? I suspect not, at least in this first novel. For an when Joseph visits the sensual Kitty, with whom he'd had adulterous affair, and finds her with another man, he shuts it from his thoughts, feeling rather a sense of the world's uncleanliness as he returns home in a streetcar general a . a a filled with "a young soldier and girl both drunk," and women in short of the conductor out on skirt, whom, Joseph says, remarked^'she's business,' a to showing his yellow teeth in smile." On his way Kitty's he had imagined a the city to be "swamp where death waited in the thickened water, his lizard jaws open." a Students of Bellow's work will recognize connection between Joseph's dreams, moreover, and the homosexual rape described in Herzog. In Dangling an at Man Joseph dreams of himself in alley dusk: set to Suddenly I heard another of footsteps added mine, heavier one even and grittier, and my premonitions leaped into fear before I felt a touch on my back and turned.
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