Resisting Alienation:a Study Of Saul Bellow’s Fiction

The three decades following the Second World War was of profound significance in the history of the United States. With its booming economy, and rapidly developing science and technology in that period, the United States was undergoing sweeping and far-reaching social, political and cultural transformations. Abundance led to the expansion of the middle class, the Cold War to fear and anxiety, and social disturbances in the1960s to a "horizontal" society. It is against that context that Saul Bellow’s five novels and two short stories are examined in this dissertation, and they are considered, to a great extent, as part of the response made by Saul Bellow to some issues, generated by the social, political and cultural transformations in that period, with which American society was confronted at that time. The five novels are The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Henderson the Rain King, Herzog (1959), Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), and Humboldt’s Gift (1975), and the two short stories "A Father-to-Be"(1955) and "The Old System"(1967). This dissertation explores those works from a social-historical perspective.In Bellow’s view, alienation is part of modern life and is the result of social modernization. Urbanization and the development of science and technology bring about too much chaos, confusion and distraction, and all this presses, seduces and misleads man to fall into a state of alienation, in which his relations to himself, to his fellow men, and to nature are eclipsed or distorted. But unlike high modernists, Bellow refuses to accept the idea that man is doomed in such a condition. Instead, he believes that man can resist and overcome alienating forces.Therefore, the question under inquiry is as follows:What strategies do the protagonists of the above-mentioned works employ to resist alienation? This study revolves around these questions:What strategies do the protagonists in Bellow’s works employ to defend their independence and give meaning to their life? How do they construct their identities in the social context at that time? And how do they see the relation of individual and society?This dissertation mainly consists of three chapters. The first chapter deals with The Adventures of Augie March and Henderson the Rain King. In the1950s, while booming American economy was on the way of transforming, in Bauman’s words, from "heavy" into "light", homogenization generated enormous anxiety throughout the country. In the meantime, the Cold War between the United States and Russia, breaking out immediately after the Second World War, plunged the country into fear and anxiety. Those two works can be considered as Bellow’s response to that situation. In the former novel, Augie resists conformity, namely, being disciplined, by employing his mobile or "fluid" strategies; in the latter, alienated by fear of death and emptiness of life, Henderson adopts similar strategies to travel so far as Africa, and move on from Arnewi to Wariri. Both novels show aspirations and anxiety of America in the1950s, and also cast light on Bellow’s faith in human’s capacity to transcend the limits imposed by time and space.The second chapter explores Herzog and Mr. Sammler’s Planet. The1960s was a key period for the US in the process of transforming from the "vertical" society to the "horizontal" one. In that decade, while "plural equality", an integral element of a horizontal society, was gaining more momentum, severe clashes broke out between "horizontal" forces like Civil Rights Movement, the Student Movement, Counterculture and "vertical" ones which stood with the existing order. American society struggled through a period of transformation from old to new, which is often bewildering, confusing, disturbing, and frustrating. Herzog and Mr. Sammler’s Planet can be regarded as Bellow’s efforts to capture that mood in the form of novel. Herzog turns to "writing and memory," namely, discursive strategies, to reconstruct the network of social relationship and his social identity that he has lost while Mr. Sammler resorts to "non-writing and memory," also discursive strategies, to construct his identity. They both demonstrate conflicts and agony of American society in that turbulent decade. These two works form a turning point in Bellow’s writing career, shifting from its obsession with the outside world to the inner one, with Herzog and Mr. Sammler more devoted to the "inner law".The relation of individual and society is one of the long-debated issues among Western scholars. The third chapter is concerned with the manner in which Bellow’s protagonists’deal with it. Central to European and American individual consciousness is the isolated individual. One of the alienating effects is that one is preoccupied with only oneself, ignoring the value of human relationship; the other is that one is reduced to a being who has no ideals and no moral code, who cherishes nothing above his personal interests. While Bellow’s protagonists identify with American individualism, they are different from other individualists:"We-I balance" is part of Bellow’s fiction, and also integral part of its protagonists’lives as a balance force. For Bellow’s protagonists, who are devoted to individual freedom, autonomy and independence,"we-I balance" is of the same worth as well. They try to keep themselves balanced between the two identities so as to prevent the alienating effects caused by individualism. In a sense, while Bellow’s fiction identifies with the Meritocracy myth, it is also an effort to criticize the myth.In the works covered by this study, Bellow’s protagonists identify with American individualism, at the centre of which is the isolated individual, but they also dedicate themselves to "we-I balance" to try to keep off the alienating effects. All those works reveal the identity crisis with which intellectual individuals in American and European societies are confronted, brought about by economic development, and scientific and technological advancement since the Second World War. Bellow is a humanist trapped in a dilemma, who casts spotlight on the crises and challenges with which humanism is confronted in contemporary America and other Western societies. He is an idealist who struggles to hold onto his faith while dramatic contemporary economic, cultural and social transformations produce overwhelming impact on American society. Bellow’s power, like those of his protagonists, results more from his inner faith than from outside reality.