A rhetoric of digression: The discursive critique of ratiocentrism in the major novels of middle Bellow, 1953--1975

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. Sammler's 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---increasingly 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 emerges in a counternarrative of affirmation, the principal tenets of which are the existence of the soul, the primacy of the imagination, and the necessity of suprarational epistemology.