A RHETORIC of DIGRESSIOH the Discursive Critique of Ratiocentrisa in the Major Novals of Middle Bellow 1953-1975 Mark Dennis
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A RHETORIC OF DIGRESSIOH The Discursive Critique of Ratiocentrisa in the Major Novals of Middle Bellow 1953-1975 Mark Dennis Crimmins A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto Copyright 1999 National Library Bibliottréque nationale 1*1 of Canada du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographie Services services bibliographiques 395 Weilingtm Street 395. nie Wetliigtm OttawaON K1A ON4 OctawaON K1AON4 -da canada The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive Licence allowing the exclusive permettant à la National Library of Canada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or seii reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in rnicrofonn, vendre des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electronic formats. la fome de microfiche/film, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format électronique. nie author retaïns ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantid extracts fiom it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. A Rhetoric of digression: The Discursive Critique of Ratiocentrism in the Major Novels of Middle Bellow 1953-1975 Doctor of Philosophy, 1999 Mark Dennis Crimmins Department of. English University of Toronto One of the most striking formal attributes of Saul Bellow's fiction is its digressivity, and the tendency of Bellovian narrative to wander and return is particularly pronounced in the long fiction of the author's middle period (1953-1975). From The Adventures of Augie March (1953) to Humboldt's Gift (1975), by way of Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), and Mr. Sammlerfs Planet (1970), Bellow's novelistic fiction manifests an incremental shift of emphasis from plot to theme and from action to reflection. Both the articulation of theme and the representation of reflection-4ncreasingly the former by means of the latter--are accommodated by the creative variety of digressive means Bellow employs to effect suspensions of the narrative of event. At least four major patterns of digression can be discerned in middle Bellow: dialogic, narratorial, epistolary, and meditative. By means of dialogues that are monologic in Augie and univocal in Sammler, narration that is eccentric and discursive in Henderson, epistolary techniques that are peculiar to Herzog, and detailed representations of meditative withdrawals that are unique to Humboldt, Bellow voices his fundamental protest against the modern world: secularism and science, by subordinating other human faculties to reason, have given humankind an impoverished conception of itself and its abilities. Refusing to be bound by secular dogmas or the scientific world view, Bellow employs a rhetoric of digression to provide a space within his fiction where his counterposition ernerges in a counternarratlve 6f affirmation, the principal' tenets of which are the existence of the soul, the primacy of the imagination, and the necessity of suprarational epistemology. iii Acknowledgments This thesis could not have been written without the generous financial support of the Department of English and the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto. The author also wishes to acknowledge the generous financial assistance of Dennis Crimmins, Rita Hesketh, Lily St. John, and Jennifer Andres. Professor Greig Henderson of the Department of English, University of Toronto, provided constructive supervision and criticism and demonstrated end12ss patience with the many drafts and revisions. Throughout the composition of the thesis, my conversations about Bellow with Jennifer Andres generated many helpful insights, as did my conversations regarding critical methods with Jonathan Butler. TABLE O? CONTENTS 1 Introduction: Positional Play: "The Spirit of Alternatives." 2 Dialogic Digressivity: The Tale of Talk in The Adventures of Augie March. 3 Narratorial Digressivity: Tenderson's ' Restless Seeking. 4 Epistolary Digressivity: Herzog and the Limits of Letters. 5 Dialogic Digressivity: The Lesser Art of Univocal Dialogue. 6 Meditative Digressivity: Four Doctrines of Religiocentric Reflection. 7 Conclusion: A Rhetoric of Digression. 8 Works Consulted. CHAPTER 010E : IlOTRODUCTIOlQ Positional Play: "The Spirit of Alternatives" "Intricate metamorphoses suggest intelligent intenteu --Kenneth Trachtenberg in More Die of Heartbreak "And listen here, 1 am not digressing at dl." --Ijah Brodsky in "Cousins" . "Man is the lord of counterpositions." --Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain 1ntroduction With the publication of The Actual in 1997, the total shape of Saul Bellow's fictional oeuvre received significant additional resolution. Given his publishing record over the last decade or so, this most recent volume (easily the slightest and probably the weakest of his five exercises in the art of the novella) has the air of valedictory fiction. In fact, with its funereal emphasis and its cemeterial conclusion, The Actual approaches the haunting status of testarnentary art. In the twelve years since the publication of his last full-length novel, More Die of Heartbreak (1987), the author has published five books. First, he broke precedent by publishing two paperback originals, A Theft (1989) and The Bellarosa Connection (1989). Subsequently, in 2 Something to Rernember Me By (1991), these two novellas were bound together with the eponymous short story and a brief foreword. This collection and the second volume of Bellow's nonfiction work, It All Adds Up (1994), add an element of conscious mernorial and deliberate summation to the latest phase of Bellow's career. In a broader sense, the scaling down of the Bellovian fictional enterprise began- after the publication of Humboldt's Gift in 1975 and the Nobel prize which followed it in 1976. Martin Amis incurred a measure of scorn from Gennan editor and critic Gerhard Bach (Seventy-Five 8) for having the prescience, in 1984, to christen the period inaugurated Sy The Dean's December (1982) "late Bellow" (8), but the subsequent work of the author validates this judgment. Amis's characterization of Bellow's final phase as one of "last things, leave-taking, and final lucidities" (8) is somewhat oblique, but he detects the fundamental shift which occurred in Bellow's work after Humboldt. In view of the large body of excellent scholarship devoted to Bellow's entire development as a novelist, this dissertation, the first full-length study of the period it seeks in part to define, confines its examination to the novels of Bellow's middle period, which is defined here as the era beginning with The Adventures of Augie March (1953) and ending with Humboldt's Gift (1975). On the merits of these two novels and the three published in the period which 3 separates them, Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog ( l964), and Mr. Sammler's Planet ( IWO), Bellow's literary reptation most solidly rests. In his introduction to the Modern Critical Interpretations volumes on Bellow, Harold Bloom, for example, safely identifies "Bellow's principal works" as Augie, Herzog, and Humboldt (Bellow 1). By excluding Bellow's other novels and novellas--dong with his short stories--£rom my examination, 1 do not intend to imply that these other works are of any less significant literary value. Indeed, Seize the Day (1956), though a work of narrower scope than the novels considered in this study, is still widely regarded as the author's masterpiece, vying with Herzog for this honour. Bellow's short fiction, too, is of considerable merit and has recently received the long- overdue and extensive attention it deserves in Marianne Friedrich's study, Character and Narration in the Short Fiction of Sauî Bellow (1995). My own approach to Augie, Henderson, Herzog, Sammler, and Humboldt is an attempt, through formal analysis, to elucidate the evolution of Bellow's digressive style and to highlight the relation between the author's digressivity and his ongoing project of sounding objections to rational orthodoxies and secular dogmas. As 1 do this, 1 employ a nurnber of terms which require definition at the outset. The most important of these is digression itself. The most common meaning of this term today is, according to The 4 Oxford English Dictionary, "to deviate from the subject in discourse or writing" (4: 657-658). In this dissertation, 1 take the subject of the five novels under consideration to be the plot, the sequence of events forming the main story. Because Bellow's style is extremely digressive, 1 limit my investigation to the principal digressions or systems of digression in the novels, passages which hold the progress of the plot in notable or repeated suspension. This study is concerned with four major categories of digression: dialogic, narratorial, epistolary, and meditative. By dialogic digression, 1 mean a temporary departure, during dialogue, from the dual verbal exchange which facilitates character portrayal and interplay to a monologic exposition of theme in extended speech. This is the focus of my analysis in the second and fifth chapters of this study. 1 employ the term narratorial digression to refer to the way in which a first-person narrator may, in telling a tale, depart from a simple, chronological recitation of a sequence of events. Bellow's use of this type of digression is the primary focus of my third chapter. Epistolary digression is the term 1 use to describe the system of plot suspensions represented by Moses Herzog's correspondence, a selection of which 1 examine in chapter four. In chapter six, 1 use the term meditative digression to refer to the imaginative mental withdrawals which fom an integral part of Charlie Citrine's narrative. 1 use the term 5 digressivity to describe a general state or quality of digression. Bellovian digressivity, for example, is the general digressive quality peculiar to Bellow, which contrasts considerably, Say, with Homeric digressivity.