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Saul Bellow, John Updike, and the Modern/Postmodern Divide

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Saul Bellow, John Updike, and the Modern/Postmodern Divide Blissful Realism: Saul Bellow, John Updike, and the Modern/Postmodern Divide Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Jansen, Todd Edward Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 02/10/2021 09:05:54 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/312513 1 BLISSFUL REALISM: SAUL BELLOW, JOHN UPDIKE, AND THE MODERN/POSTMODERN DIVIDE by Todd E. Jansen ____________________________ A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2013 2 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Todd E. Jansen, titled Blissful Realism: Saul Bellow, John Updike, and the Modern/Postmodern Divide and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. _______________________________________________________________________ Date: 5/3/2013 Edgar Dryden _______________________________________________________________________ Date: 5/3/2013 Charles Scruggs _______________________________________________________________________ Date: 5/3/2013 John Melillo Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement. ________________________________________________ Date: 5/3/2013 Dissertation Director: Edgar Dryden 3 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that an accurate acknowledgement of the source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his or her judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author. SIGNED: Todd E. Jansen 4 DEDICATION To Heather, Finn, and Milo 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………….6 INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………...7 CHAPTER 1: “MARVELOUS QUALITIES VAGUELY COMPREHENDED”: THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH AND HERZOG …………………………..37 CHAPTER 2: “THE STRAIGHT LINE OF PARADOX”: RABBIT ANGSTROM …………...106 CHAPTER 3: “PANTING AFTER MEANING”: INVISIBLE MAN AND LOLITA ………………………………………………………………………....171 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………………....233 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………………..269 6 ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the reaction of many post-WWII American authors against the modernist privileging of form. These authors predicate their response upon what I call “blissful realism,” a term which reflects an unlikely conflation of the critical work of Roland Barthes and Georg Lukács. I argue that Saul Bellow and John Updike are exemplars of a larger post-war contingent, including Flannery O'Conner, Bernard Malamud, Joyce Carol Oates, and John Cheever, to name a few, who use the liminal space between the waning of modernism and a burgeoning postmodern sensibility to complicate and critique modernist formalism while exploring (and often presciently critiquing) the nascent ontological inclinations of postmodernism. The characters within their novels endeavor to declare and maintain their autonomy by , through, and against their contact with a cold reality and defining ideological structures. This tension is mirrored in the aesthetic project of the authors as they work by, through, and against modernist strictures. This dissertation also offers a comparison between Bellow and Updike and the work of Ralph Ellison and Vladimir Nabokov in an effort to distinguish and delineate blissful realism from “late modernism.” The concluding chapter posits that recent “post-postmodern” work draws heavily on its blissful realist predecessors. Many contemporary authors’ concerns with subjective autonomy, authenticity, and notions of transcendence, in spite of postmodern declarations to the contrary, offer different sensibilities and political possibilities that turn away from irony, play, and image toward agency, meaning, and morality. 7 INTRODUCTION Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language. – Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text Great realism, therefore, does not portray an immediately obvious aspect of reality but one which is permanent and objectively more significant, namely man in the whole range of his relations to the real world, above all those which outlast mere fashion. Over and above that, it captures tendencies of development that only exist incipiently and so have not yet had the opportunity to unfold their entire human and social potential. To discern and give shape to such underground trends is the great historical mission of the true literary avant-garde. – Georg Lukács, “Realism in the Balance” In the concluding chapter to Aesthetics and Politics , a collection which traces the realism/modernism debate between the thinkers and writers Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and others, Fredric Jameson writes, “In these circumstances indeed, there is some question whether the ultimate renewal of modernism, the final dialectical subversion of the now automatized conventions of an aesthetics of perceptual revolution, might not simply be … realism itself!” (“Reflections” 211). The “circumstances” of which Jameson writes are those of a co-opted and 8 exhausted modernism. Written fourteen years before his Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), in this essay Jameson finds the revolutionary not in a nascent postmodernism—postmodernism becomes rather a capitulation to and vital participant with capitalism in his view—but in the possibility of a resurgent realism. If we see modernism, as Jürgen Habermas puts it, “revolt[ing] against the normalizing functions of tradition,” and “liv[ing] on the experience of rebelling against all that is normative” (5), what happens when that aesthetic has become the norm? A return to realism might be the most “revolutionary” move a writer could make. While it is tempting to read Jameson’s declaration as tongue-in-cheek, my argument rests on this premise: that the realist fiction of the post-WWII period was not, as John Barth has argued, a kind of “pre-modernism” (“Replenishment” 195), but rather a reaction to and rethinking of modernist aesthetics. Authors of what I am calling “the divide” (in reference to the modern/postmodern divide) return to a formal realism,1 but one that absorbs and utilizes the aesthetic innovations of modernism, resituating the mimetic, paradoxically, as “avant-garde.” The divide is not, however, to be equated with the term “late modernism,” but is a break from that tradition as well.2 1 I am, of course, referring to Watt’s “formal realism,” the “narrative embodiment” of “the premise, or primary convention, that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience, and is therefore under an obligation to satisfy its reader with such details of the story as the individuality of the actors concerned, the particulars of the times and places of their actions, details which are presented through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary forms .” Yet, “Formal realism is, of course, like the rules of evidence, only a convention; and there is no reason why the report on human life which is presented by it should be in fact any truer than those presented through very different conventions of other literary genres” (32 italics mine). 2 Jameson writes in the conclusion to Postmodernism , “And we should probably also make some place … for what Charles Jencks has come to call “late modernism”—the last survivals of a properly modernist view of art and the world after the great political and economic break of the Depression, where, under Stalinism or the Popular Front, Hitler or the New Deal, some new conception of social realism achieves the status of momentary cultural dominance by way of collective anxiety and world war” (305). Authors of the divide were less concerned with social realism and its attendant politics, however, and more with an aesthetic response to modernism. The term “divide” should be distinguished, too, from Huyssen’s “Great Divide.” While Huyssen’s term refers to “the categorical distinction between high art and mass culture”
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