Introduction: Saul Bellow and Humanism

Abstract

‘One of my themes is the American denial of real reality, our devices for evading it, our refusal to face what is all too obvious and palpable.’¹ Thus Saul Bellow, speaking about his novel The Dean’s December (1982). The reality to which he refers, and the suggestion that there is in American culture a desire to escape into an inauthentic version of reality are concepts which bear upon the central aesthetic and ethical tenets of his writing. He has said that ‘without art, it is impossible to interpret reality … the degeneration of art and language leads to the decay of judgement’.² Bellow’s novels have shown an increasing concern with the haemorrhage to ‘real reality’ in America, caused by that culture’s indifference to anything but what Charles Olsen once called the ‘poor crawling actuarial “real” ’.³ The novelist must, Bellow believes, ‘find enduring intuitions of what things are real and what things are important. His business is with these enduring intuitions which have the power to recognise occasions of suffering or occasions of happiness, in spite of all distortions and blearing’.⁴ There is in Bellow’s thought none of that philosophical scepticism about the nature of reality which has so characterised the postmodern literary aesthetic over the past 25 years.⁵