Be a Member of this BLOG

Search This Blog

May 28, 2011

Dangling Man: Saul Bellow


Try as I might, I’ve never connected with Saul Bellow’s prose. My first attempt was The Actual, his penultimate work, and his shortest. A few pages in and I was lost. Then, The Adventures Of Augie March, the novel that signalled his worth as a writer: after reading the opening page repeatedly, I knew I couldn’t continue through the whole book doing so, and abandoned it.

There’s something about Bellow, though, that makes me persist. It’s probably the perception of him as one of the best American writers, what with other writers citing him as their favourite. By not reading him, I’m surely missing out; in reading him, I’m more than likely missing the point. In order to grapple with the beast it seemed a logical idea to dismiss his better known novels as an introduction and to head back to the start, to Dangling Man (1944)under the impression that his earliest work may offer a way in to his style before it solidifies him as that great American writer.


Dangling Man is the journal of Joseph, a young man who resigned his job at a travel bureau seven months before, expecting to be drafted into the army, instead finding himself ‘dangling’ due to complications that he describes as “a sort of bureaucratic comedy trimmed out in red tape.” Rather than get a job for now - “As a 1A I could not get a suitable one, anyhow” - he opts for staying at home, living off his wife’s wage, rarely venturing out, and with little company other than his own thoughts, all jotted down.
In loneliness and bureaucracy, there are echoes of Kafka’s The Trial, and a Joseph caught up in it all confirms the nod. Bellow, however, is not so concerned with the situation of bureaucracy, instead using it as the springboard into a mildly philosophical story about destiny.
Six hundred years ago, a man was what he was born to be. Satan and the Church, representing God, did battle over him. He, by reason of his choice, partially decided the outcome. […] But, since, the stage has been reset and human beings only walk on it and, under this revision, we have, instead, history to answer to. We were important enough then for our souls to be fought over. Now, each of us is responsible for his own salvation, which is in his greatness. And that, that greatness, is the rock or hearts are abraded on.
Admittedly, as stories go, Dangling Man is short on incident, given that Joseph rarely leaves his room, but there are a number of great set pieces as the frustration of living within one’s mind - and Joseph’s mind, given his journal’s literary references and philosophial meanderings, is highly intelligent - takes its toll and cracks appear. It may not be a metamorphosis in the mould of Gregor Samsa, but the once easy-natured man he was has found himself prone to violent outbursts.
There is nothing to do but wait, or dangle, and grow more and more dispirited. It is perfectly clear to me that I am deteriorating, storing bitterness and spite which eats like acid at my endowment of generosity and good will.
In all his wanderings - physical and mental - Joseph’s problem is destiny. Unable to live up to the lofty expections of his making and “unwilling to admit that I do not know how to use my freedom” he not only seeks, but needs solace in the Army, where he need not think for himself. At the beginning, Joseph’s choice to keep a journal, in “an era of hardboiled-dom” is a seen as contrarian to the mores of society:
Do you have feelings? There are correct and incorrect ways of indicating them. Do you have an inner life? It is nobody’s business but your own. Do you have emotions? Strangle them.
The journey from individual thinker, an outcast from society, to one willing to strangle his own self is an interesting premise. Where one would expect - perhaps because it’s clichéd - to see someone fight for their individuality, Dangling Man talks of belonging. In reading it, and understanding it to a degree, and even quite enjoying bits of it, I find that I may just see the case for belonging myself - to those that praise him, that is.

2 comments:

  1. Note - these are more or less the remarks I made at the American Literature Association conference in Boston in May, 2013 with the exception of some improvisation I injected concerning Bosley Crowther, Manny Farber, and Sam Peckinpah and what I believe their works can contribute to understanding DeLillo. I also used graphic examples from the films of Tarnatino and Kubrick to illustrate how auteurs repeat images from film to film.
    http://postmoderndeconstructionmadhouse.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. I couldn't get the theme that Below wants to communicate through this novel. Is it a depiction of the 1940s severe economic life of Joseph's generation and its psychic effects on the young people?

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.

All Posts

" Indian "Tomb of Sand A Fine Balance A House for Mr. Biswas Absurd Drama Achebe Across the Black Waters Addison Adiga African Ages Albee Alberuni Ambedkar American Amrita Pritam Anand Anatomy of Criticism Anglo Norman Anglo Saxon Aristotle Ariyar Arnold Ars Poetica Auden Augustan Aurobindo Ghosh Backett Bacon Badiou Bardsley Barthes Baudelaire Beckeley Bejnamin Belinda Webb Bellow Beowulf Bhabha Bharatmuni Bhatnagar Bijay Kant Dubey Blake Bloomsbury Book Bookchin Booker Prize bowen Braine British Brooks Browne Browning Buck Burke CA Duffy Camus Canada Chaos Characters Charlotte Bronte Chaucer Chaucer Age China Chomsky Coetzee Coleridge Conard Contact Cornelia Sorabji Critical Essays Critics and Books Cultural Materialism Culture Dalit Lliterature Daruwalla Darwin Dattani Death of the Author Deconstruction Deridda Derrida Desai Desani Dickens Dilip Chitre Doctorow Donne Dostoevsky Dryden Durkheim EB Browning Ecology Edmund Wilson Eliot Elizabethan Ellison Emerson Emile Emily Bronte English Epitaph essats Essays Esslin Ethics Eugene Ionesco Existentialism Ezekiel Faiz Fanon Farrel Faulkner Feminism Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness Ferber Fitzgerald Foregrounding Formalist Approach Forster Foucault Frankfurt School French Freud Frost Frye Fyre Gandhi Geetanjali Shree Gender German Germany Ghosh Gilbert Adair Golding Gordimer Greek Gulliver’s Travels Gunjar Halliday Hard Times Hardy Harindranath Chattopadhyaya Hawthorne Hazara Hemingway Heyse Hindi Literature Historical Materialism History Homer Horace Hulme Hunt Huxley Ibsen In Memoriam India Indian. Gadar Indra Sinha Interview Ireland Irish Jack London Jane Eyre Japan JM Synge Johnson Joyce Joyce on Criticism Judith Wright Jumpa Lahiri Jussawalla Kafka Kalam Kalidasa Kamla Das Karnard Keats Keki N. Daruwala Kipling Langston Hughes Language Language of Paradox Larkin Le Clezio Lenin Lessing Levine Life of PI literary Criticism Luckas Lucretius Lyrical Ballads Macaulay Magazines Mahapatra Mahima Nanda Malory Mamang Dai Mandeville Manto Manusmrti Mao Marlowe Martel Martin Amis Marx Marxism Mary Shelley Maugham McCarry Medi Media Miller Milton Moby Dick Modern Mona Loy Morrison Movies Mulk Raj Anand Mytth of Sisyphus Nabokov Nahal Naidu Naipaul Narayan Natyashastra Neo-Liberalism NET New Criticism new historicism News Nietzsche Nikita Lalwani Nissim Ezekiel Niyati Pathak Niyati Pathank Nobel Prize O Henry Of Studies Okara Ondaatje Orientalism Orwell Pakistan Pamela Paradise Lost Pater Pinter Poems Poetics Poets Pope Post Feminism Post Modern Post Structuralism post-Colonialism Poststructuralism Preface to Shakespeare Present Prize Psycho Analysis Psychology and Form Publish Pulitzer Prize Puritan PWA Radio Ramanujan Ramayana Rape of the Lock Renaissance Restoration Revival Richardson Rime of Ancient Mariner RL Stevenson Rohinton Mistry Romantic Roth Rousseau Rushdie Russia Russian Formalism Sartre Sashi Despandey Satan Sati Savitri Seamus Heaney’ Shakespeare Shaw Shelley Shiv K.Kumar Showalter Sibte Hasan Slavery Slow Man Socialism Spender Spenser Sri Lanka Stage of Development Steinbeck Stories Subaltern Sufis Surrealism Swift Syed Amanuddin Tagore Tamil Literature Ted Hughes Tennyson Tennyson. Victorian Terms Tess of the D’Urbervilles The March The Metamorphsis The Order of Discourse The Outsider The Playboy of the Western World The Politics The Satanic Verses The Scarlet Letter The Transitional Poets The Waste Land The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction The Wuthering Heights Theatre of Absurd Theory Theory of Criticism Theory of Evolution Theory of Literature Thomas McEvilley Thoreau To the Lighthouse Tolstoy Touchstone Method Tughlaq Tulsi Badrinath Twain Two Uses of Language UGC-NET Ukraine Ulysses Untouchable Urdu Victorian Vijay Tendulkar Vikram Seth Vivekananda Voltaire Voyage To Modernity Walter Tevis War Webster Wellek West Indies Wharton Williams WJ Long Woolfe Wordsworth World Wars Writers WW-I WW-II Wycliff Xingjian Yeats Zadie Smith Zaheer Zizek Zoe Haller