The Nobel Prize in Literature 1976
Saul Bellow
 |
Swedish Academy The Permanent Secretary |
Press Release
When Saul Bellow published his first
book, the time had come for a change of climate and generation in
American narrative art. The so-called hard-boiled style, with its
virile air and choppy prose, had now slackened into an everyday
routine, which was pounded out automatically; its rigid paucity
of words left not only much unsaid, but also most of it unfelt,
unexperienced. Bellow's first work, Dangling Man (1944),
was one of the signs portending that something else was at
hand.
In Bellow's case, emancipation from the previous ideal style took
place in two stages. In the first, he reached back to the kind of
perception that had found its already classic guides in
Maupassant, Henry James, and Flaubert, perhaps, most of all. The
masters he followed expressed themselves as restrainedly as those
he turned his back on. But the emphasis was elsewhere. What gave
a story its interest was not the dramatic, sometimes violent
action, but the light it shed over the protagonist's inner self.
With that outlook the novel's heroes and heroines could be
regarded, seen through and exposed, but not glorified. The
anti-hero of the present was already on the way, and Bellow
became one of those who took care of him.
Dangling Man, the man without a foothold, was thus a
significant watchword to Bellow's writing, and has, to no small
extent, remained so. He pursued the line in his next novel,
The Victim (1947) and, years later, with mature mastery in
Seize the Day (1956). With its exemplary comand of subject
and form, this last novel has received the accolade as one of the
classic works of our time.
But with the third story in this stylistically coherent suite, it
is as if Bellow had turned back in order at last to complete
something which he himself had already passed. With his second
stage, the decisive step, he had already left this school behind
him, whose disciplined form and enclosed structure gave no play
to the resources of exhuberant ideas, flashing irony, hilarious
comedy and burning compassion, which he also knew he possessed,
and whose scope he must try out. The result was something quite
new; Bellow's own mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle
analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and
tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic
conversation with the reader - that too very entertaining - all
developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating
insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to
act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the
dilemma of our age.
First in the new phase came The Adventures of Augie March
(1953). The very wording of the title points straight to the
picaresque, and the connection is perhaps most strongly in
evidence in this novel. But here Bellow had found his style, and
the tone recurs in the following series of novels that form the
bulk of his work: Henderson the Rain King (1959),
Herzog (1964), Mr Sammler's Planet (1970), and
Humboldt's Gift (1975). The structure is apparently
loose-jointed, but for this very reason gives the author ample
opportunity for descriptions of different societies; they have a
rare vigour and stringency, and a swarm of colourful,
clearly-defined characters against a background of carefully
observed and depicted settings, whether it is the magnificent
façades of Manhattan in front of the backyards of the slums
and semi-slums, Chicago's impenetrable jungle of unscrupulous
businessmen intimately intertwined with efficient criminal gangs,
or the more literal jungle in the depths of Africa, where the
novel, Henderson the Rain King, the writer's most
imaginative expedition takes place. In a nutshell, they are all
stories on the move, and, like the first book, are about a man
with no foothold. But (and it is important to add this) a man who
keeps on trying to find a foothold during his wanderings in our
tottering world, one who can never relinquish his faith that the
value of life depends on its dignity, not on its success, and
that the truth must triumph at last, simply because it demands
everything except - triumphs. That is the way of thinking in
which Saul Bellow's "anti-heroes" have their foundation and
acquire their lasting stature.
We are currently working on the web site. Please report errors or problems.
