Tuesday, April 05, 2005
NOVELIST SAUL BELLOW DIED TODAY
The San Francisco Chronicle has posted an article about him which is dated tomorrow. If you check out this article, you will be getting your news a day early. (Don't try taking it to the stock market, though):
Saul Bellow, the 1976 Nobel Prize-winning Canadian-born writer whose groundbreaking 1953 novel "The Adventures of Augie March" helped craft the template for half a century of first-generation American fiction, died Tuesday in his home in Brookline, Mass. He was 89.
"The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists -- William Faulkner and Saul Bellow," Philip Roth said Tuesday. "Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the 20th century."
Word-sozzled, life-hungry, Bellow's semi-autobiographical antiheroes marked the close of World War II by crashing the country club of American literature. They chiseled and loved, they humped and swore, and they did it in a vernacular that owed a leg-breaking debt to Yiddish, and borrowed from Greek and Latin to pay it back.
I never did master reading Bellow. Just couldn't get into his way of thinking, and didn't know why. Then a couple of years ago while researching Rudolf Steiner for the Spiritual Counterfeits Project I found out why. Bellow had a different worldview as the reviews of Humbolt's Gift at the Saul Bellow Society website explains:
HG, unlike other novels, explores the dialectical tension between human ideals and human actuality, between the spirit and the void, within the framework of Steiner's anthroposophy—a new influence on Bellow's fiction. Connects Steiner's thought with that of the American transcendentalists and with Goethe's World-Conception. Bellow uses Steiner's ideas to foster a more complete defense of man.
And:
Examines the use of rational and apparently neutral discourse as it defines the modernist's project using Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia or competing discourses. Shows how the appearance in the text of an occult discourse deriving from Rudolph Steiner's turn-of-the-century lectures on anthroposophy has caused critical debate, but may now be explained by further reference to Bakhtin's concept of interillumination as a means of deprivileging language.
Well, you can't have an Anthroposophical worldview and a Christian worldview at the same time, though Steiner would have claimed to be Christian, I suppose. Back when I tried to read Bellow, I just knew something wasn't right, and was darn glad I didn't inhabit the world I found in his book.
