Moving outwards: Consciousness, discourse and attention in Saul Bellow's fiction

A Contrast Consider the following passages from the first chapter of Saul Bellow's Herzog. Moses Herzog is riding in a cab through the streets of New York on his way to catch the train to Vineyard Haven: They made a sweeping turn into Park Avenue and Herzog clutched the broken window handle. It wouldn't open. But if it opened dust would pour in. They were demolishing and raising buildings. Avenue was filled with concrete-mixing trucks, smells of wet sand and powdery gray cement. Crashing, stamping pile-driving below, and, higher, structural steel, and hungrily going up into cooler, more delicate blue. Orange beams hung from the cranes like straws. But down in the street where the buses were spurting the poisonous exhaust of cheap fuel, and the cars were crammed together, it was stifling, grinding, horrible!(1) What we see here is as much Herzog as it is New York. Everything becomes a symbol of his inner state: the noise and violence of the streets, the derelict condition of the cab, the pressure, congestion and confinement. Even the girders of the new building, interminably and hungrily going up into cooler, more delicate blue, are Herzog's desperate search for some zone of resolved consciousness and his sense of oppression at the city's greedy appetite for the projection of its life to the utmost possibility. But as he rides to Grand Central, Herzog recalls family departures of his childhood from the Grand Trunk Station in Montreal: The locomotive cried and the iron-studded cars began to move. Sun and girders divided the soot geometrically. By the factory walls the grimy weeds grew. A smell of malt came from the breweries. train crossed the St Lawrence. Moses pressed the pedal and through the stained funnel of the toilet he saw the river frothing. Then he stood at the window. water shone and curved on great slabs of rock, spinning into foam at the Lachine Rapids, where it sucked and rumbled (H, pp. 32-33). Here the child is looking outwards; everything is allowed simply to be itself. In the first passage, the world is drawn inwards, to become a symbolic confirmation of one man's consciousness. In the second, everything is held delicately free of the assimilating pull of symbolism; the world resists incorporation, remains itself. first assimilates the world to character; the second moves outwards in attention to the world itself. These distinct modes of representation offer a starting-point for a fresh look at the two principal tendencies within Bellow criticism. On the one hand, there are those who see his fiction as the record of an inward journey, from outer to inner truth, from the confusions of discourse to the truth of the heart.(2) For such critics, Bellow is one kind of romantic: the romantic of inner, immanent truth, of direct illumination, of the ascetic inward journey to self-knowledge. On the other hand, those who have argued against this view tend to see Bellow as a different kind of romantic, a devotee of inclusion, brotherhood and community. For them, the important journey that he describes is that from the separateness of individual life to the morally sustaining connectedness of a shared humanity.(3) It will become clear that my broad sympathy is with the second position; Bellow does, in the end, insist that full humanity is found in the acceptance of a contract that links us to others in ethical mutuality. But the power of his work does not lie in what, so stated, is a familiar and unexceptionable position. sharpness of Bellow's insight emerges in his dissection of what is involved in mutuality as against individualism, and of what, in extreme conditions, the precursors of such a shift might turn out to be. To move to community rather than individuality, commitment rather than separation, is for him an act neither of pure freedom nor of simple moral illumination; it is the product of a history which begins in the pre-ethical, at a stage in which consciousness is hardly aware of acting morally, but out of which moral action is born. …

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