EXPLAINING THE SELF: A CONTEXTUAL STUDY OF SAUL BELLOW, PHILIP ROTH AND JOSEPH HELLER. DAVID LEON GIDEON BRAUNER PhD THESIS UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON ProQuest Number: 10044352 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10044352 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 ABSTRACT I offer an exploration of the work of these three contemporary novelists, focusing on the phenomenon of self-explanation - both in the sense of justifying oneself, and o f seeking to define the nature o f selfhood. I identify three roles in which (and against which) these self-explanations take place; as writers o f comedy, as Jewish writers, and as American writers. Although these roles overlap, I treat them as distinct for the purposes o f structural clarity and contextualise them by locating them in related literary and cultural traditions. I am particularly concerned with the ambivalent attitudes that these writers display towards these roles; with the tensions between - and within - their theory and practice. The thesis is divided into three chapters, framed by an introduction and conclusion. Each chapter begins with a survey of some of the meanings attached to the terms "comedy", "Jewish" and "American" as generic labels, before moving on to a detailed analysis o f a number o f texts (by Bellow, Roth and Heller, and by others whose work shares these contexts) informed by these meanings. These close readings, which form the heart o f the thesis, are divided within each chapter into three sections (one for each o f the three writers). Though contextual rather than comparative in emphasis, cumulatively the thesis provides an evaluation of their works, both in relation to each other and in terms of their larger literary-historical significance. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction; Explaining The Self 6 Saul Bellow 9 Philip Roth 24 Joseph Heller 36 1. Explaining Comedians: Superiority, Relief, Incongruity 40 The Search For a Poetics o f Comedy 40 Masturbation and Its Discontents; or Serious Relief: 54 The Freudian Comedy o f Philip Roth Four Superior Solemn Buffoons: 95 Comedy As Alibi in Saul Bellow High Anxiety and Low Comedy: 125 Incongruity in Joseph Heller 2. Explaining Jews: Assimilation, Authority, Authenticity 152 The Jewish Writer and the Literary Jew: 152 The Search For Identity Joseph Heller and the Jewish Biblical Novel: 170 The Question o f Authority Philip Roth and the Jewish Other: The Question o f Authenticity 209 Saul Bellow and Jewish Memory: The Question o f Assimilation 227 3. Explaining Americans: Myth, History, Conformity 245 The American Writer and the American Novel: 245 The Search For Identity Myth Vs. History: Philip Roth and the Baseball Novel 266 Fear, Regression and Conformity: 302 Joseph Heller and the Business Novel Collaborative Myths o f Self-Creation: 332 Saul Bellow and the American Artist As Split Self Conclusion 355 Works Cited 358 For my parents, Jacob and Irène Brauner, and my wife. Arme Button. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to take this opportunity to thank all those who have helped me complete this thesis. I am particularly indebted to the British Academy, for the Major State Studentship that enabled me to survive financially, to my supervisor, Danny Karlin, for his sensitive and careful reading o f my work, and to my father, Jacob Brauner, for his help with logistical computing problems. In addition, I would like to thank Dan Jacobson, for his helpful comments on some of my early chapter drafts, and Peter Swaab, Henry Tang, Lisa Fields and Juliet John, for their words o f wisdom. Above all, however, I would like to thank Anne Button, for her moral and intellectual support, and for the love she has given me over the past two years. INTRODUCTION: EXPLAINING THE SELF You can never explain yourself enough. (Heller 1995) You seem always to feel that you have to explain what nobody is asking you to explain - your right to be ... (Roth 1988a; 193) Inquire a little and I'll tell you all. I was still explaining myself in full to people who couldn't have cared less. (Bellow 1975a: 483) It seems only appropriate for a project which focuses on self-explanatory strategies to begin with an explanation o f itself. Perhaps the best place to start is with the title. By the phrase "Explaining the S elf I mean to indicate an interest in self-explanation in two different (but related) senses: the practice of defending, justifying, or vindicating oneself; and the attempt to describe, characterise, or define what a self, or the self is, or might be.* The study is "contextual" structurally and methodologically; I hope that the contexts I offer are illuminating, but o f course they do not pretend to be all-encompassing (my critical strategies are eclectic and pragmatic, rather than systematic or dogmatic). In each of the three main chapters, I concentrate on one context - comedy, Jewishness, Americanness (though they clearly overlap, I treat them as distinct for the purposes o f structural clarity) to whose significance the authors themselves and/or others have * * In my use o f the term "explanation" I deliberately exploit the ambiguity that David- Hillel Ruben draws attention to: "in speaking of an explanation, one might be referring to an act o f explaining, or to the product o f such an act" (Ruben 1990: 7). Similarly, I intend the word "explaining", as used in the titles of the three chapters of the thesis, to be understood as a description both of an activity characteristic of the authors in their guises as comedians, Jews, and Americans, and of their attempts to define the nature of comedy, Jewishness, and Americanness. 7 drawn attention. Through a series o f close readings of a number of central texts, I discuss the ways in which these writers' self-explanations encourage or discourage, clarify or obscure, such contextualisation. Each chapter is divided into four sections, one devoted to each of the writers, and an introductory section that examines some of the possible significations o f the terms "comic", "Jewish", and "American", respectively. It remains to explain my choice o f writers. They obviously have in common the contexts which I explore; they are contemporary American-Jewish comic novelists. There are many others who fall into this category however (Malamud, Elkin, Friedman etc.), so why these three? Partly out o f personal interest, certainly; but also because o f the similarities and contrasts in their careers and in their literary reputations. Whereas Harold Bloom is able to write with confidence, in his introduction to the M odem Critical Views volume devoted to Bellow, that "the canonical status of Bellow is already assured" and, moreover, "By general critical consent, Saul Bellow is the strongest American novelist o f his generation" (Bloom 1986: 1), no such consensus can be found regarding Roth and Heller.^ While Bellow has amassed a huge body of 2 A view echoed by Keith Opdahl, who calls him "our leading novelist" (Opdahl 1970: 3), by John Bayley, for whom Bellow is "the first American novelist o f his generation to raise both the special problems and the special possibilities of post-war fiction" (Bayley 1975 in Bloom 1986: 102), by Malcom Bradbury, who sees Bellow as a "great modem novelist" (Bradbury 1978 in Bloom 1986: 146), by Josephine Hendin, for whom "Bellow is easily our finest elegaic and nostalgic writer" (Hendin 1979: 110), by Irving Howe who calls Bellow "the best living American novelist" (quoted in Harris 1980: 33), by Allen Guttman, who argues that "no American novelist since Melville has dared more successfully than Bellow to dramatize the intellectual life" (Guttman 1987 in Cohen 1987: 127), by Robert Alter, who nominates Bellow as "the strongest American stylist since Faulkner" (Alter 1994: 38), by Philip Roth, for whom he is "the country's most accomplished working novelist" (Roth 1985b: 280), and by Martin Amis, who delivers this panegyric: whereas the claim o f his contemporaries remain more or less unresolved, Saul Bellow really is a great American writer. 1 think that in a sense he is the writer that the twentieth century has been waiting for ... Bellow has made his experience resonate more memorably than any living writer. (Amis 1986: 200) criticism (there are over thirty books devoted solely to him, as well as countless articles and sections o f books, and the Saul Bellow Journal), and there has been a steady stream o f work on Roth, critical attention to Heller, after a glut o f articles on Catch-22 in the sixties and early seventies, has been dwindling ever since (James Nagel's observation, made ten years ago, still applies: "well over half the important criticism on Heller is addressed to his sensational first novel" [Nagel 1984: 1] ). Why this disparity in status? Partly, perhaps, it is due to the volume o f their output (to date, in book form. Bellow has published nine novels, two collections of short stories, four novellas, a book about Israel, a play, and a collection o f essays; Roth twelve novels, three novellas, a collection o f short stories, a satire, a collection of essays, and a memoir o f his father; Heller six novels, two plays, and an account o f his struggle with Guillain-Barré syndrome, co-authored with Speed Vogel); partly to its quality (certainly neither Bellow nor Roth has written anything as poor as Heller's sections oiNo Laughing Matter, or Closing Time, nor, arguably, on the other hand, have they written anything as powerful as Something Happened), but certainly a great deal to do with the mysterious workings o f the literary establishment.