THE PROVOCATION OF SAUL BELLOW: PERFECTIONISM AND TRAVEL IN THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH AND HERZOG by ADAM ATKINSON 2007 A dissertation presented in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts in English University of New South Wales Australian Defence Force Academy School of Humanities and Social Sciences ii * I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgment is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project’s design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged. ____________________________________ Adam Atkinson 30 June 2007 iii iv Abstract A consistent feature of Saul Bellow’s fiction is the protagonist’s encounter with one or more teaching figures. Dialogue with such individuals prompts the Bellovian protagonist to reject his current state of selfhood as inadequate and provokes him to re-form as a new person. The teacher figure offers a better self to which the protagonist is attracted; or, more frequently in Bellow, the protagonist is repelled by both his teacher and his own current state to form a new, previously unrepresented self. This thesis argues that Bellow’s self inherits and modifies the perfectionist philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, in a literary reinterpretation that parallels Stanley Cavell’s philosophical revaluation of the American Transcendentalists. In Emerson and Thoreau, and in Cavell’s reading of perfectionism, the self is attracted onward only by a better representation of selfhood in another, while Bellow’s self may also be, and often is, provoked by a repellent other to inhabit a new form of selfhood. This thesis takes the evolution of selfhood in Bellow to be structured by travel. In The Adventures of Augie March, Augie’s movement between selves is impelled by conversation with teacher figures and paralleled by his unending journeys. In Herzog, Herzog’s self-transformations and travels are provoked by reading and writing, and by the ecstasy of loss revealed to him through apostrophic conversations with the dead and absent in a series of unsent and mental letters. Letter-writing, the provocation for Herzog’s self-perfection, becomes a form of travel in Herzog. This thesis further argues that Bellow’s travelling self is a critical response to two poles of modern subjectivity, structured by European mythologies of travel: Bellow’s fiction is critical, first, of a Hegelian, egoist mode of selfhood structured after the Odyssey; but equally critical of examples of Levinasian openness to the Other, patterned on Abraham’s exile. Bellow does not accept either the Odyssean or the Abrahamic mode of selfhood on its own, recognizing oppressive possibilities in both. Travelling selfhood in Bellow, initiated by conversation with others, both fuses and rereads Odyssean and Abrahamic constructs within a new, but perpetually unfinished American mode of self- perfection. v vi Acknowledgements A few words of thanks are due, first to my supervisors Susan Lever and Jeff Doyle. Both have made this a stronger dissertation through their invaluable criticism and advice. Most of all, I have enjoyed talking over coffee or debating and laughing over wide range of film and literature. Thank you both, Susan and Jeff. Thanks are due also to the staff at the Academy Library, at the Australian Defence Force Academy. Edith Hackworthy and others unknown to me provided a crucial service, quickly supplying books and articles while I was off-campus, and were particularly helpful and patient in the final months before submission. I am also grateful for the long hours given by my proofreaders: my partner Courtney Chester and my mother Cathy Atkinson. And many thanks to Johanna, Michael, and Charlie Burnett who provided room and board and kept me sane while I was in Canberra to finish and submit this thesis. vii viii Table of Contents Abstract ..........................................................................................................................v Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................vii Abbreviations ................................................................................................................xi I. SAUL BELLOW’S PHILOSOPHY OF DIRECTION ................................................................ 1 Orientation...........................................................................................................1 Saul Bellow and Modernism .............................................................................. 10 II. BETWEEN ATHENS AND JERUSALEM: ODYSSEUS AND ABRAHAM ................................ 19 The Efficient as Well as Final Causes of Travelling .......................................... 21 Hegel and Levinas ............................................................................................. 27 III. THE JOURNEY OF AUGIE MARCH: BELLOW AND EMERSON......................................... 35 Emersonian Perfection in Augie March ............................................................. 36 Instructions in Reality ....................................................................................... 49 Polarities: Bellow and Emerson Apart ............................................................... 76 IV. READING HERZOG: BELLOW AND THOREAU ............................................................. 83 Senses of Herzog: Reading and Writing............................................................. 85 Quotidian Herzog .............................................................................................. 90 Losing Madeleine: Theatricality ...................................................................... 104 Lawyers and Lovers: Himmelstein and Ramona .............................................. 108 Herzog’s Letters and Thoreau’s Epigraphs ...................................................... 112 Disembarking: Odysseus on the Shore ............................................................. 120 WORKS CONSULTED .................................................................................................... 127 ix x Abbreviations AM Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March. CHU Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism. CW Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life. E Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures. ETE Stanley Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes. H Saul Bellow, Herzog. SN Saul Bellow, “Some Notes on Recent American Fiction.” TA Emmanuel Levinas, “La trace de l’autre.” TI Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini, essai sur l’extériorité. TJB Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account W Henry David Thoreau, Walden: or, Life in the Woods. WCM Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. xi xii I. SAUL BELLOW’S PHILOSOPHY OF DIRECTION Where are we going? Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality” Where do we find ourselves? Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience” Emerson and Thoreau may be taken as philosophers of direction, orienters, tirelessly prompting us to be on our way, endlessly asking us where we stand, what it is we face. Stanley Cavell, Senses of Walden Orientation Saul Bellow’s novels repeatedly describe their protagonists in encounters with individuals possessed of “a teaching turn” (AM 67). From Augie March (The Adventures of Augie March (1953); hereafter AM) to Moses Herzog (Herzog (1964); H), to the autobiographical Chick in Ravelstein (2000), Bellow’s characters are continually provoked by others—friendly or otherwise—to reinterpret themselves and their current self-standing. Conversation reveals in others a previously unattained position of selfhood to which the Bellovian protagonist aspires; or, as is most often the case in Bellow, the protagonist responds to another’s provocation by shifting to a new position of selfhood, attained previously neither by himself (Bellow’s protagonists are always male) nor the other. The preoccupation of Saul Bellow’s novels with the revaluation of selfhood and conversation places Bellow, or the texts that bear his name, with nineteenth-century American philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, among Stanley Cavell’s provocative “philosophers of direction”, described in the third epigraph to this chapter. 1 Stanley Cavell means by “philosopher of direction”, an individual who persistently asks the questions posed by Derrida and Emerson above: “Where are we going?”— “Where do we find ourselves?” The philosopher of direction, in another word, questions his standing and provokes the reader in turn to question her own. By challenging the reader, Cavell’s philosopher invites her to test her inheritance, to reread and reinterpret herself: “Where do I stand now?” Importantly, as Cavell suggests of Emerson and Thoreau, the philosopher of direction does not retire after posing the directional question once, but is “endlessly” inclined to provocation, “tirelessly”,