Darkness at Noon: Le Malheur of Capitalism in Bellow’s Later Novels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The crisis of capitalism, or what Saul Bellow dubs “the crisis of knowledge”, crystallizes the way he deconstructs and subverts the roots of modern American culture. The concepts of “darkness” and “Malheur” embody the tragic fate of capitalism and the end of history to recall Baudrillard and Fukuyama. Colin Davis relates this intellectual atmosphere to Lyotard’s theory of “after knowledge” and the postmodern condition, Lévinas’s “after ethics” and Althusser’s “after hope”. Fictionally, Bellow epitomizes this cultural backdrop in modern America by addressing the decline of civility, the agony of the artist, the end of humanism and morality in a society which is dominated by the crowd of low culture to cite Williams. Conceding that the novelist identifies “darkness”, “noon”, “Malheur” and “capitalism” with Derrida’s premises of deconstruction and Foucault’s insights about episteme theory and the archeology of knowledge, it becomes then fundamental to underpin how he gives theory and philosophy an overriding role in the purification of humanism from the burden of materialism and capitalistic democracy. Special focus is on Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), Humboldt’s Gift (1975) and The Dean’s December (1982) as they illustrate Bellow’s gestures of deconstructing the negativity of capitalism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".