SOURCE: Goffman, Ethan. “Between Guilt and Affluence: The Jewish Gaze and the Black Thief in Mr. Sammler's Planet.” Contemporary Literature 38, no. 4 (winter 1997): 705-25.

Representations of blackness as dangerous, primitive, and highly sexualized, deeply implanted in European and American society, inescapably infiltrate Jewish American literature. Perhaps the most concentrated such image appears in the form of the black thief in Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), a work lumped by Mariann Russell together with Bernard Malamud's The Tenants and John Updike's Rabbit Redux as reducing blacks to “a convenient metaphor for the disturbing elements in white society and … in the last analysis, not an image of black culture, but a mirror image of the prevailing white culture” (93). Have Jews, themselves so long the objects of dehumanizing stereotypes, assimilated to the point where the Jewish gaze is indistinguishable from dominant American society? In Mr. Sammler's Planet, with its depiction of a black pickpocket and the violence he inflicts upon a Jewish observer, it becomes hard to separate Jewish and dominant cultural anxieties regarding social breakdown, anxieties especially acute at the end of the tumultuous 1960s.

Placing Bellow's novel in an immediate context of social disruption and black anti-Semitism, L. H. Goldman claims that “because this work lacks the detailing of events that led to this disruption in [black and Jewish] relations, the statement that is preserved for posterity is a racist one” (187). Goldman assumes that Bellow's depiction of black primitivism and violence is a reaction to black nationalist rhetoric, especially as directed against the figure of the Jew. Certainly the portrayal of youth rebellion and ethnic struggle in the 1960s in New York City is closely related to contemporaneous social events; yet black nationalism and the breakdown of the black-Jewish alliance are not dealt with in Mr. Sammler's Planet. Rather the black thief is a direct symbol of anxiety about crime, more generally rooted in a larger ideology which renders blackness as the antithesis of civilization. Goldman is right in perceiving the black figure as an allegorical presence symptomatic of social breakdown, but wrong in implying that a Jewish perspective explains the thief's symbolic nature. Rather, the thief is a compact, dramatic version of a recurring Euro-American mythologization: blackness as the primitive, the carnal, the return of the repressed. Any Jewish perspective, at least in the novel's initial thematic development, is eclipsed by that of dominant society.

If, however, Mr. Sammler's Planet symbolically reduces blacks to icons of primitivist energy, its portrayal of Jewish history undermines this mythologized sign of Otherness, revealing the arbitrariness of racialist distinctions.¹ By exploring Sammler's personal history as embedded in a larger Jewish history, the novel gradually unveils a counternarrative of terror inflicted upon marginalized peoples culminating in a moment of identification between Jew and black. The story of Artur Sammler's life is schizophrenic, a psychotic, nonsensical record of events featuring wild swings—from cultivated European to Holocaust victim to materially secure American—which eradicate social boundaries along with notions of a stable civilization. Through the course of the novel an alternative emerges to the dehumanizing reductions of the thief, an unfolding sympathy, although only in muted form, since the contradiction between black as frozen symbol and black as historical subject is never resolved. The irrational fluctuations of Jewish history elicit an anguished search for meaning, a submerged guilt never explicitly analyzed by Sammler (despite his incessant social analysis). By the conclusion, a Jewish concern with the outcast, a disgust at the disproportionate violence inflicted upon the thief, leads to a cry for sympathy, for an end to the brutality which dominant ideology once brought to Sammler and now brings (albeit indirectly) to the thief.

The novel's thematic structure is unwieldy, based upon an interplay between civilization and barbarism, opposing concepts between which Artur Sammler is precariously balanced. To Sammler, civilization emanates from the European Enlightenment, while barbarism, symbolized by blackness, is epitomized by the twin events of the Holocaust and the upheaval of the sixties. Yet Nazism, the antithesis of civilization, originated far from Africa on Europe's fertile ground. The Holocaust depended upon mind, bureaucratic planning, control of every detail of its victims' bodies to the point of obliteration. Conversely, sixties radicalism, as depicted in Bellow, emphasizes freedom of the body, a playing out of all physical and sexual impulses, an invasion of the physical, the dark Other, into the substance of the New World.

Although Sammler is a product of a cultural philosophy that rejects Jewish particularism in favor of European civilization, his Holocaust experience obstructs such a position. Europe may just as easily be the source of a new, and terrifyingly efficient, kind of barbarism. Drawing upon Max Horkheimer's and Theodor Adorno's characterization of the Enlightenment's incessant drive toward total mastery, Kurt Dittmar argues, “The Holocaust, the system of the German concentration camps, was based on the ultimate self-sufficiency of purely rational organization (Mind) and at the same time on the ultimate reduction of human existence into mere corporality (Body), thus presenting itself—and this indeed is Bellow's perspective—as the final result, the ultima ratio of the Enlightenment” (79). An arrangement privileging mind over body, driven to organize, classify, dissect, and control is unbalanced, out of harmony with the human state in relation to its environment. Prior to the Holocaust, Sammler supported Enlightenment idealism in a specific form championed by H. G. Wells, as he explains in a speech at Columbia University:

the project was based on the propagation of the sciences of biology, history, and sociology and the effective application of scientific principles to the enlargement of human life; the building of a planned, orderly, and beautiful world society: abolishing national sovereignty, outlawing war … a service society based on a rational scientific attitude toward life.

(41)

Sammler can no longer countenance this utopian dream. Hyper-rationalism—organization, bureaucracy, centralized planning—was twice a failure in extreme-opposite versions, the Nazi one of absolute racial hierarchy, and the communist, which gave all power to a small elite which claimed for itself a primary control over history.² The status of such intermediate solutions as the (pseudo)-socialist bureaucracy which extends over Western Europe is of no concern to Sammler, who dismisses the entire rationalist project as “a kind-hearted, ingenuous, stupid scheme” (41). In rejecting his prewar optimism, Sammler follows the only path possible after his encounter with the Nazis, after surviving the mass grave they dug for him and his kin (137). Wells's manuscript lies buried in this grave, as does Sammler's conception of European civilization.

Europe is the origin point of this failed civilization and of its antithesis, Nazism, the nihilistic endpoint of such schemes. America, too, is defined by a barbaric opposition to civilization, a liberalism taken to nihilistic excess—an extreme represented by the black thief. Yet the parallel implied between Nazism and sixties radicalism is exaggerated, at the very least. Even aside from their enormously different results, the two movements are irreconcilable in basic character. Nazism's starting point is exclusion, clear demarcation followed by escalating marginalization of the Other. Sixties radicalism, while it may have led to an excess of (sometimes violent) rhetoric, defined itself through inclusion, through acceptance, and (at least partial) incorporation of an increasing array of Others, most notably of the black Other.

The assumptions against which sixties radicalism revolted are defined in Sammler's initial cosmology, wherein Europe is the source of the highest ideals of civilization, while Africa represents an opposition against which Europe may be defined. In Henderson the Rain King, published eleven years prior to Mr. Sammler's Planet, Africa acts either as an antidote to civilization—a lesser (orientalist) civilization with its own ancient wisdom—or, as it imitates the West, as a debased version of European civilization. In the earlier novel, women remain at home, a hindering influence simultaneously representing the constraints of civilization and lacking the emotional maturity and wisdom to travel beyond those constraints; in Mr. Sammler's Planet these traits are extended to America's callow, uninformed youth. The primal figure of such primitivist debasement is the black thief.

Bellow's America is a site of struggle between two metaphysical world-views, one represented by Europe, the other by Africa. New York City, the archetypal scene of cultural hybridization defined amid struggle, is “like an Asian, an African town. … You opened a jeweled door into degradation, from hypercivilized Byzantine luxury straight into the state of nature, the barbarous world of color erupting from beneath” (7). Hybridization is portrayed here not as the creation of new artistic forms and aesthetic sensibilities but as a mishmash of misplaced societies, a surface decadence covering primitive emotionalism. Sammler continues to be informed by his European rationalist roots; from his perspective no “real” civilization is possible; in place of European culture one finds a “hypercivilization,” which should be read as “pseudocivilization,” as glittering facade, orientalism hopelessly entangled with African barbarism.³

New York's radical decadence, which privileges body, sensation, physical experience, seems puny after the horrific destruction of the Holocaust. Yet the novel is incessant in its attacks upon the cult of youth, portrayed as hedonistic, narcissistic, ignorant, and—a crystallizing symbol for all of these—sexually wanton. Sammler's Columbia speech draws the ire of a young radical who declaims to the crowd, “Why do you listen to this effete old shit? What has he got to tell you? His balls are dry. He's dead. He can't come” (42). Sixties radicalism is represented as a barbaric carnival, intolerant of those who might question its premises; youth has no wish to hear the arguments of this civilized and justly cynical old man. Freud's reduction of the human experience to sexuality, as popularized by Wilhelm Reich, is taken literally here: one is one's sexuality. Physical pleasure is the common denominator of our hedonistic society, channeled, though Sammler ignores this point, by capitalism to the most basic of pleasures, bought and sold or otherwise exchanged. America's radical youth, despite their radicalism, are products of the very society they criticize; the sexual revolution is a consumerist utopia, the search for ultimate individual fulfillment, one end result of Enlightenment's privileging of the self.

Sammler's critique of sixties radicalism is directed against a youthful culture which partakes of only a latter-day debasement of European philosophy. Psychosexual urges, instant gratification, arrested development—this is the philosophy of the youth movement. Sammler judges this debasement of Western heritage to be the legacy of the sixties counterculture, America's contribution to world culture.⁴ The youthful characters in Mr. Sammler's Planet are all, to one extent or another, versions of this debased creature in a perpetual state of immaturity. So Sammler's niece Margotte engages in pseudointellectual discussion beyond her understanding; his daughter Shula steals a manuscript on Wells's The Future of the Moon (symbolically stealing the rationalist inheritance); his nephew Wallace floods his house searching for hidden money; Wallace's friend Feffer generates wild aerial photography schemes; Sammler's niece Angela follows a debauched path of sexual experimentation ending in divorce and insists upon divulging every detail to Sammler. This host of straw figures is perfectly happy to dispense blame upon themselves: “I'm a different generation,” says Wallace; “I never had any dignity to start with” (241); “I was a dirty little bitch,” admits Angela (153). There's something conniving even about these confessions, as though by admitting their weaknesses Wallace and Angela have abrogated responsibility and can continue their self-indulgences. They place themselves within an array of little Others, self-caricatures nibbling away at the foundations of Western society as represented by Sammler. Wallace's excuse, his category of Otherness, is youth, “a different generation” which has never experienced the trials of a Sammler. Angela adds to youth the category of femaleness which, throughout Bellow, signifies an irresponsibility, a debased understanding.⁵ Femininity is that category of Otherness which the masculine protagonist can never escape, an incessant disturbance which he perversely thrives on, defining by contrast his own somber wisdom.

More ominous than female Otherness—indeed the overarching symbol of Otherness from which all others emanate—is blackness, the African darkness transposed to America. Besides its sexual connotations, an extrarational force already awakened by femininity, blackness conveys the threat of violence. Sexuality, of course, endangers one's self-control, drawing the masculine to the feminine, destabilizing the neat categories which order the world. Marriage is the institution which controls sexuality, places it in its proper category and allows the ordered propagation of society. The disruption of categories, the sexual freedom of the sixties, is, in Mr. Sammler's Planet, linked to blackness. Angela's orgiastic behavior, her flouting of propriety, exemplifies “a sexual madness … overwhelming the Western world” (66), a madness exemplified by the dark, primitive peoples with their assumed violations of Western marriage norms. When Shula steals the Wells manuscript,

suddenly she too was like the Negro pickpocket. From the black side, strong currents were sweeping over everyone. Child, black, redskin—the unspoiled Seminole against the horrible Whiteman. Millions of civilized people wanted oceanic, boundless, primitive, neckfree nobility, experienced a strange release of galloping impulses, and acquired the peculiar aim of sexual niggerhood for everyone.

(162)

The symbolic meaning of blackness could not be more explicit: the primitive, the rawest physical urges, absolute sexual abandon. The repressed returns not in a brief eruption but in an oceanic gushing, the heart of darkness unleashed in the putative heart of civilization. The passage makes sarcastic use of the “radical” point of view, which considers “the unspoiled Seminole” as the archetype of innocence, of freedom prior to the constraints of civilization, of “the horrible Whiteman.” That vast terrain of the primitive, the ocean of the preconscious, which awaited Henderson's investigation as well as his play, takes on an utterly different character transposed outside its boundaries. The African belongs in Africa: only there can he be a prince. Displaced to America, the African takes on a role which in Bellow seems proper only for the white (male) explorer and so threatens the boundaries of civilization.

Blackness as oppositional to civilization is, of course, a myth, having nothing to do with any biological or cultural characteristics or with African American society in its day-to-day functioning. Black culture, diffused into white society, loses its social and communal meanings and becomes a hollow symbol, an instrument of rebellion. In twentieth-century America, the evolving adaptations of black music by flappers, hipsters, and hippies employ the myth of blackness as transgression. James Baldwin critiques the mystique of black sexuality:

But why should it be necessary to borrow the Depression language of deprived Negroes, which eventually evolved into jive and bop talk, in order to justify such a grim system of delusions? Why malign the sorely menaced sexuality of Negroes in order to justify the white man's own sexual panic?

(230)

The equation of blackness with forbidden sexuality, with taboo forays, with a dangerous mixture of sex and violence, is a creation of white society to account for its own suppressed needs. Where blacks provide such services, in an underground economy of prostitution and drug dealing, it is under duress from a system which provides few options. The underground economy is a creation of dominant society, which conceals services it nevertheless demands. Similarly, the various black styles adapted by white society, especially as they move from the fringes to the mainstream, are transformed into a consumer-culture version of rebellion, a product draped upon the body, emanating from the stereos and mouths of the middle class.⁶ And yet in Mr. Sammler's Planet the archetypal symbol of the blatant hedonism created by this wealth is a black man, the mythic meaning of blackness condensed onto a physical—and by definition dehumanized—object.

As a hypermythologized symbol, the black thief may seem active, dynamic, larger than life, yet spied upon by Sammler he is reduced to an object of spectacle and gossip, the exemplar of primitivism under the scrutinizing gaze. Dominant mythologization renders its object simultaneously larger and smaller than life. Sammler imagines the criminal spying his “civilized face,” a projection marking Sammler as a product of Europe, of Old World customs crammed uncomfortably into a New World setting. Still he observes, fascinated, from the vantage point his height gives him, the pickpocketing—invading notions of personal autonomy and property—on this barbaric New York City bus. He imagines himself imagined as “a tall old white man (passing as blind?)” observing “the minutest details of his crimes. Staring down. As if watching open-heart surgery” (5). Sammler constructs his own gaze as that of the scientist, the physician engaged in the minute details of biology, engrossed in veins and blood and pumping muscle, the diagrammer of scientific rationalism as it grasps the living heart, the center of life. Yet having survived the Holocaust, Sammler, as symbolized by his blindness in one eye, can no longer idealize such a version of civilization, such detached observation. His awareness of the limitations of his own gaze parallels an increasing rationalist distrust of its infallibility. The day of the privileged unidirectional gaze is over; the exemplar of European civilization becomes gradually conscious that the Other is in fact sentient, is bitterly watching his own objectification. The black Other gazes back, analyzes Sammler, and plots a reaction (rather like the freed colonies warily watching their European former masters).

Sammler's perspective on the black thief, the perspective of the narratorial consciousness, is limited to two seemingly opposite stereotypes, the criminal and the African prince—seemingly, because the criminal is merely an aberrant version of the prince due to displacement from his African environment. The black appears to Sammler gorgeously attired, with stately bearing, an Americanized gangster version of the prince:

The dark glasses, the original design by Christian Dior, a powerful throat banded by a tab collar and a cherry silk necktie spouting out. Under the African nose, a cropped mustache. Ever so slightly inclining toward him, Sammler believed he could smell French perfume.

(10)

This is an orientalized version of the African, a corruption exhibited with the stately demeanor of civilization through careful grooming, a Europeanized scent, a designer label. From these trappings of “civilization” his African power threatens to burst forth, as repeatedly conveyed through animal imagery, beginning with his first appearance, when he displays “the effrontery of a big animal” (5), a primitive power barely contained, indeed paradoxically enhanced, by his designer suit. Stolen from Africa, the prince is utterly misplaced, reduced to the pettiest of crimes, while still exuding his royal aura. He brings to mind Harlem Renaissance poet Helene Johnson's description of a black dancer, a minstrel figure initially ridiculous whom the poet finally imagines dancing in Africa “black and naked and gleaming. / … Gee, I bet he'd be beautiful then all right” (79). Johnson compares this figure to a bottle of sand from the Sahara desert displayed in the Harlem library: “That's what they done to this shine, ain't it? Bottled him. / Trick shoes, trick coat, trick cane, trick everything— / all glass—.” The black criminal too is a displaced figure alienated from his surroundings, or rather recreated as something new, a discordant bricolage adapted to its new environment yet somehow not adapted.

If Sammler draws one set of conclusions from this figure, his younger, more Americanized relatives draw another, one consistent with the rationalist gaze yet also with the naiveté of a youthful liberalism. Margotte's reaction is one of incessant analysis:

To Margotte it was fascinating. Anything fascinating she was prepared to discuss all day, from every point of view with full German pedantry. Who was this black? What were his origins, his class or racial attitudes, his psychological views, his true emotions, his aesthetic, his political ideas? Was he a revolutionary? Would he be for black guerrilla warfare?

(14-15)

Margotte epitomizes the worst rationalist excess of “German pedantry” mixed with the superficial sophistry of America. To her, the discussion is a game, one in which she ostensibly delves more deeply, and hence sympathetically, into the black's point of view than would a European, but which undercuts any seriousness by its childish disregard for the consequences of her questioning. Like Sammler on the bus, she slices and analyzes this figure, verbally dissects him, reducing him to a specimen upon a table. Her easy mention of guerrilla warfare displays the irreverence of the New Left. Several times removed from any reality of blood and bullets, she is free to explore violence through rhetoric.

Sammler, unlike Margotte, faces the reality of the criminal as their confrontations intensify. The criminal's forceful display of his genitals is effective as a symbolic device of the primitive state, the “sexual niggerhood” overtaking America, though quite absurd as a plausible response to Sammler's intrusiveness. Black male sexuality threatens the edifice of “civilization” signified by the abstract phallus, the ideological construction of a monolithic civilization naturalized as the only rational social order. The phallic order is neuter, mental, removed from any actual sexuality. In opposition to this abstract construct is the myth of blackness whereby, according to Frantz Fanon, “[i]n relation to the Negro, everything takes place on the genital level” (157). The repressed physical returns projected onto the black so that “one is no longer aware of the Negro but only of a penis; the Negro is eclipsed. He is turned into a penis” (Fanon 170). This extreme dehumanization, the reduction of a human being to a part, is literally true in Mr. Sammler's Planet. The black thief, as he moves toward cornering Sammler, is transmuted below the level of the human. In the actual revelation of black-as-penis, animal metaphors abound: the genitals emanate an otherworldly aura, exist as a mysterious organism, huge and alien: “It was displayed to Sammler with great oval testicles, a large tan-and-purple uncircumcised thing—a tube, a snake; metallic hairs bristled at the thick base and the tip curled … suggesting the fleshly mobility of an elephant's trunk” (49). This fantastical description is of nothing real but emanates from the imagination, from a simultaneous fear of and fascination with sexuality (that submerged mystery released in modern America), from a terror of the black Other, of one's own exaggerated, all-consuming sexuality objectified as an alien, uncontrollable thing. Blackness represents also the youthful libido, the sexual revolution, a love fest denied Sammler, earlier repressed by that civilization he so admires, now represented by an organ with which he cannot compete. The snake/organ is the serpent which disturbed the garden of Eden, “that which, in God or Adam, remains beyond or outside the sublimation of the Word” (Kristeva 143). Taboo sexuality is unleashed, a disturbance in the symbolic order, a threat to the hierarchy of power. The organ's uncircumcised state flouts the safe and clean and known, establishing an identity alien both to Jewish tradition and to rationalistic Western medicine, the twin pillars of “civilization.”

Within Bellow's version of the debased ideology of the sixties, the organ goes well beyond its biological functions, threatening the demarcations of the symbolic order. To Sammler it appears as “a prominent and separate object intended to communicate authority. As, within the sex ideology of these days, it well might. It was a symbol of superlegitimacy or sovereignty. It was a mystery” (55). It is Slavoj Zizek's Thing, “das Ding, the impossible-real object of desire. The sublime object is [to Lacan] ‘an object elevated to the level of das Ding’” (194). It is, to Sammler, “the transcending, ultimate, and silencing proof” (55). This transcendence cannot itself be defined or given form. To Zizek, “[w]hat the object is masking, dissimulating, by its massive, fascinating presence, is not some other positivity but its own place, the void, the lack that it is filling in by its presence” (195). The fetishized, religious object stands in for an emptiness, takes on an imagined meaning whose dimensions it cannot possibly conform to. Kafka describes the sage who envisions “some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something that he cannot designate more precisely either, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least.” Similarly, the thief's penis is given a symbolic weight it can in no way bear or resemble (of a mystery so undefined that even the idea of resemblance is impossible). Added to this is the historical weight given its black alienness, its representation of a history and meaning marked by a vast divide between the dominant cultural gaze and the actual subjects of that history.

The penis, then, transgresses conventional structures and repressions, subverting the dominant order. If on the bus the thief breaks the invisible contract of property rights which rules daily interaction, what he represents is hugely disproportionate to this minor transgression. Sammler's relatives, in discussing the penis, glamorize its size and power. Through seeking meanings appropriate to their voyeuristic version of rationalist curiosity, they participate vicariously in transgression (though the novel, in its initial description of the organ, has already fetishized and mythologized it far more than do the relatives). Told about the incident, Feffer exclaims, “‘Stupendous! … What the devil was it like?’ He was also laughing. … ‘How big a thing was it? You didn't say. I can imagine’” (121). Any danger inherent in the situation is overlooked; the thief becomes a novelty act. Wallace, too, interrogates Sammler: “Was it sixteen, eighteen inches? … Would you guess it weighed two pounds, three pounds, four?” (185). The penis becomes an object of imaginative speculation, of bizarre exaggeration regarding the nature of the Other. The satiric edge is obvious, pointed not at the thief but at Wallace. The humor derives superficially from the speculative fantasies of youth culture, but this is merely the innocuous-looking tip of an enormous iceberg, the barely hidden substratum of racial fantasies themselves a mask for dominant cultural anxieties. Perhaps that we're now able to satirize these fantasies is a sign that their psychic dominance is subsiding. Still, their continued existence can only mean a continued mythologization of blackness, albeit transformed from threat to escapade. Blackness remains defined by the wishes of dominant culture; African Americans are reduced from a specific group with its own history and culture to mythic icons.

African American society, then, is notable by its absence in Mr. Sammler's Planet, which sets up a myth of blackness lightly deconstructed by humor satirizing white youth. To Sammler, though, blackness remains threatening; the thief's pinning of Sammler is certainly not a comic moment but a crystallized representation of Western civilization's besiegement. Yet the novel's climax undermines the primal power of blackness, creating an instant of cathartic sympathy with the criminal. Blacks remain marginalized, to Sammler a recurrent object of mystery, yet finally realized as always susceptible to the repression authorized by dominant society. The youth upon which the novel heaps such scorn appear right to trivialize the thief's power; the real power remains in the service of the privileged.

By 1970 the Jewish image had shifted to the point where a Jew could be represented as brutally enforcing the dominant order, a dramatic change when one remembers that Mr. Sammler's Planet was written a mere twenty-five years after the Holocaust. No longer the abject victim, the Jew takes on a new role in the person of Eisen, policing a social order which has long oppressed Jews. Eisen, whose name means “iron” (he is given no first name), and who forges artworks out of bronze metals commemorating Israel's 1967 victory, is described by Sander Gilman as one who “like Israel, has strengthened himself, has become a ‘muscle Jew'” (373). The Israeli warrior is both a reaction to centuries of oppression and humiliation and a return to the narrative of the biblical Hebrews who fled from slavery and, through military valor, claimed the Promised Land. The Jew is no longer a sickly, stunted bookworm but a prime physical specimen triumphantly reclaiming Israel not only as soldier but as farmer draining swamps, making the desert bloom.⁷

The surprisingly critical attitude apparent in Mr. Sammler's Planet toward the muscle Jew is bound up with the protagonist's Holocaust experience. As an exemplar of European civilization, Sammler had his Jewish awareness forced upon him by the rise of the Nazis. The meaning of his lineage is determined entirely by external forces. His birth heritage is that of a highly assimilated Jew eagerly adopting the attitudes of a version of rationalism which believes in dialogue rather than violence. The tradition of talk rather than action, of refusing violence when possible, is also integral to European Jewry, to the shtetl culture. In escaping the Holocaust, becoming a partisan warrior, Sammler has forced upon him a new identity removed from all he's believed in. He renounces every attempt at compassion or understanding. When a German prisoner pleads, “Don't kill me. Take the things. … I have children” (139), Sammler shoots unhesitatingly. The detailed portrayal of the prisoner—the description of his physical characteristics, of his fear—creates sympathy, humanizes this component of the Nazi war machine (a humanization of which the Germans deprived their Jewish victims). The situation justifies Sammler's killing yet also brings him closer to the level of the oppressor, not just in his actions but emotionally. War may preclude mercy, yet Sammler moves far beyond killing through necessity. Reconstructing the act, he remembers he learned “[t]o kill the man and to kill him without pity, for he was dispensed from pity” (141). Such an amoral nihilism echoes the Nazis in puny microcosm, derives from the regularized efficiency of their slaughter. Beyond this the act is one of revenge, beyond revenge of barbaric pleasure described by Sammler as “joy” (140), for “he himself knew how it felt to take a life. Found it could be an ecstasy” (141). This is the ecstasy of complete domination over another, the climax of the will to power, control taken to one possible extreme.

Sammler's transformation from peaceful intellectual to blood-thirsty killer is compelled by an extreme situation which demands complete remaking of self. Marked for extermination, first by the Nazis, then by the advancing Russian forces, Sammler becomes “[o]ne of the doomed who had lasted it all out” (140). He joins Bigger Thomas in a state of existential deprivation from which the only salvation is murder: “And now the idea that one could recover, or establish, one's identity by killing, becoming equal thus to any, equal to the greatest. A man among men knows how to murder. A patrician” (145). Bigger Thomas murders from a state of absolute deprivation, both material and intellectual. That Sammler, the epitome of privilege and education, could be reduced to such a condition forces a recasting of definitions. “Civilization” becomes a problematic term; its constructed nature is unveiled, as differences between Jew and black and black and white dissolve. We are what society makes us, following a script written externally. Civilization is not an innate quality; once acquired it is not always retainable. We are creatures of circumstance. In his astonishing plunge from the civilized elite planning a utopian future for humanity to the outcast Other considered fit only for extermination, Sammler exemplifies vulnerability to external definition.

If Europe is the site of Sammler's plunge to a condition of absolute nihilism and America the site of a hybrid corruption of misplaced cultures, Israel, the remaining great hope for world Jewry, fares little better. Discussing Bellow's depiction of Israeli military power, Andrew Furman remarks, “Ultimately, Bellow uses Sammler's sensitive perspective toward Eisen's violence and the violence of the Six-Day War to illustrate the very real moral costs of Israeli might” (53). Sammler's later reflections over his own acts of violence, as in his ironic comment that one establishes “one's identity by killing,” are in concert with his reaction to Israeli violence, leaving little room for faith in the redemption of the international Jewish reputation through military triumph. Visiting the Sinai battlefield in 1967, Sammler reflects sardonically, “It was a real war. Everyone respected killing” (251). The ideal of the noble warrior-Jew is derided by the Arab corpses Sammler witnesses: “The clothes of the dead, greenish-brown sweaters, tunics, shirts were strained by the swelling, the gases, the fluids. Swollen gigantic arms, legs, roasted in the sun. The dogs ate human roast” (250). The only comparable carnage in Mr. Sammler's Planet occurs at the Nazi mass gravesite, replicated in miniature through Sammler's act of killing. Violence begets violence; the Holocaust begets, but also justifies, Sammler's killing; the persecution of the Jews and their continuing danger excuses Israel's wars. The focus on the Sinai carnage should not be interpreted as a simple condemnation of Israel, for its urgent situation is dramatized. Sammler, though described as “No Zionist,” hurries to Israel when “for the second time in twenty-five years the same people were threatened by extermination” (142). Self-preservation is the final determinant of Jewish action.⁸

Israel is a scene of Jewish angst, of wrenchingly contradictory attitudes regarding that country's critical role in Jewish survival and the fierce new image it provides for a people long characterized as nonviolent. Eisen, like Sammler a crippled Holocaust survivor, finds his identity among the muscle Jews. If Sammler's blinded eye forces an increase in the perceptiveness of his remaining good eye, and an awareness of its limitations, Eisen's crippled leg is a straight-forward symbol of stunted emotions, of the inert helplessness inflicted upon the Jewish people. Sammler considers that “Eisen certainly deserved to be cared for, and that was one of the uses of Israel, to gather in these cripples” (155). In fleeing to Israel, Eisen establishes the manhood denied him by history through reclaiming a singular, mythic image, a warrior redemption. His journey to America is motivated by a similarly simplistic goal: material success (155). He strives to become the postwar international Jew, using his newfound mobility to build identity through whatever means is most convenient. Sammler, by contrast, flees to America to reestablish his intellectual moorings in a new context; though demoralized and besieged from all sides, he attempts to reshape some moral ideal. In New York City, Eisen and Sammler, their life stories so parallel, their characters so different, meet under the sign of the black Other. Although the thief is portrayed as powerful and dynamic, as everything the ghetto Jew is not, he in fact occupies the position to which the Jew was relegated in Europe: ghettoized, immobile, an object of dominant society's projections.

Now characterized by mobility, both geographic and intellectual, Sammler and Eisen have taken on the freedom of the international post-Enlightenment elite. Emotionally this freedom takes a quantum leap in the hands of Sammler's youthful relatives; devoid of notions of history or responsibility, for them the Other has lost its taboo status. Their thrill-seeking, voyeuristic attitude propels a confrontation with the thief. Feffer, through his photography, focuses the scientific eye on the thief not out of rationalist inquisitiveness but for his own material benefit and self-aggrandizement, the final extension of the privileging of self characteristic of the Enlightenment, intensified and externalized in capitalist, consumer-oriented America. The thief becomes a commodity to be framed, packaged, and sold to Look, the magazine for the curious eyes of the masses. The naive Feffer ignores the lesson of his own contemporary history, of civil rights marches and black nationalism, that African Americans will not act endlessly as passive objects. The black figure as active subject fully emerges in the thief's assault on Feffer.

Yet black power proves something of a charade. Despite their presence in the American psyche, despite the civil rights movement and Black Power, African Americans remain largely segregated, disadvantaged, at the mercy of dominant cultural whims. Finally the Other, whose mysterious strength seems to increase until the novel's climax, is revealed as helpless before the forces which created it. Society controls and channels both actual black communities and the commodity of blackness. At the scene of the assault, the state, though well equipped to prevent and punish violence, doesn't need to intervene. Eisen, once an object of the ultimate state terror, now himself undertakes the job of legitimized violence, of containing the Other. Sammler, by contrast, feels helpless: “extremely foreign—voice, accent, syntax, manner, face, mind, everything, foreign” (287). Psychologically he returns to the outsiderhood which the Nazis had imposed upon him, sharing with the black the status of victim. This is the alienation of the Diaspora Jew whose conscience contests the muscle Jew. When he realizes the coming brutality, Sammler urges, “Don't hit him, Eisen. I never said that. I tell you no!” (291). More than the helpless Diaspora Jew, Sammler chooses—from a position offering real choice—against violence. As the pickpocket lies bleeding on the asphalt, Eisen replies to Sammler's objections: “You can't hit a man like this just once. When you hit him you must really hit him. Otherwise he'll kill you. You know. We both fought in the war” (291). The warrior Jew, the Jew remade as violent enforcer, is compelled to savagery. Sammler, who assumed the warrior mentality when fighting the Nazis, proves unwilling to do so as an agent of dominant society. If in the Holocaust Jews are devoid of choice regarding their dehumanization—able to choose only passive death or, in a few cases, brutal violence—Eisen and Sammler are now able to make a broader moral choice. By actively opposing Eisen, Sammler renounces his wartime self, the partisan of the Polish forest who joyfully slaughtered a German soldier. He has chosen the inheritance of the Diaspora Jew, nonviolence when possible.

In the America of Mr. Sammler's Planet, Jews no longer occupy the position of outsider; it is African Americans who are the marginalized, victimized presence. As Feffer and the thief, Jew and black, battle for power, the outsiders watching and debating are largely Jewish. Jews are now the privileged, observing the spectacle of the Dark Other, deciding his fate. Jewish thoughts, emotions, motivations are the focus here. The primitive black figure begets violence by the Israeli Eisen, the warrior Jew. Only in defeat is the black humanized, displayed for the watching crowd as an object of sympathy as he “bled thickly on the asphalt” (291). A flicker of the common past emerges in the figure of the Other surrounded and bleeding, the Other who was once the Jew. Yet the thief remains passive, described only briefly, an object for the moral judgment of Jews.

Eisen's speech—“When you hit him you must really hit him”—reveals the dilemma of Israel, of national conflict driven by desperation, resulting in cycles of brutality. The Jewish situation relative to African Americans provides an oblique commentary on that of Israel. On the one hand, guilt generated by the Arab-Israeli conflict becomes a mechanism of humanization which applies toward the black thief. On the other hand, the thief remains exteriorized, a mechanism, an object for reflecting Jewish concerns. The absence of African American society in Mr. Sammler's Planet leaves the thief an empty sign of blackness, a symbol that can only preserve conventional stereotypes. Though humanized through his final vulnerability, he is, throughout the novel, an emblem of exotic excitement, of primeval fear, and finally of Jewish guilt. Jewish history, the mechanism driving Sammler to nonviolence and pity, provides only a brief, problematic connection to the thief. The meaning of Jewish suffering and marginalization as it relates to moral choice, to American identity, remains unresolved. The American Jewish community, poised between a history of ghettoization and a comfortable assimilation, a hitherto almost unimaginable living out of the American dream, faces diminishing reason to care about another ghettoized people. Although the Jewish past continues to shape Jewish perceptions and reactions, almost imperceptibly history fades and so too, perhaps, does the meaning of the term “Jewish American.”

Notes

1. Since modern anti-Semitism is primarily a racialist doctrine, this essay treats stereotypes of, and discrimination against, Jews as ideologically akin to such treatment of blacks.

2. See The Dean's December for Bellow's depiction of communist bureaucracy.

3. See Edward W. Said's Orientalism, particularly his discussion of a mythological “classical Oriental grandeur” (79) which may surpass Europe in style but never in cultural and moral value.

4. This critique prefigures that of Allan Bloom, Bellow's University of Chicago colleague, who describes the end product of centuries of rationalist thought as an atomistic, atavistic individual saturated by sexuality and rock music, “A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of organism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy” (75).

5. Bellow has often been attacked for shallow, misogynist portrayals of women. Ada Aharoni, while admitting that, as perceived through the consciousness of the always male protagonists, Bellow's women “do not have the same depth of emotional, moral, and intellectual complexity as the heroes,” argues that as they have evolved, the novels have “given us a vast and rich gallery of convincing and vivid women of all kinds” (95). In a similar defense of Bellow, Gloria Cronin upholds his portrayals of women as ironically deconstructive: “in spite of Bellow the author, the text has its own agenda as it deliberately examines the Western intellectual traditions of misogyny that have so clearly marked Sammler and Bellow both” (100).

6. Such rebellion is often of style more than substance, chosen from a luxury of options (except when the Vietnam War provided a discernible threat to the children of the middle class). So Alice Walker declared, in 1967, “there are so few Negro hippies because middle-class Negroes, although well fed, are not careless. They are required by the treacherous world they live in to be clearly aware of whoever or whatever might be trying to do them in” (255). How different from the host of privileged youth who surround Sammler, flaunting their sexuality, engaging in wild schemes, oblivious to their protected status.

7. The antithesis of the warrior Jew is the figure of the Fool, a representative of the Diaspora, the ghetto Jew. The Fool's meekness and patience are celebrated, though often with a measure of parody, in such figures as Isaac Bashevis Singer's “Gimpel the Fool.” The satire becomes bitter in Isaac Loeb Peretz's “Bontsha the Silent.” Rather than being a moral triumph, Bontsha's silence is portrayed as a lack of character.

   The utter futility of Jewish silence became evident in the Holocaust, when millions of Jews went to their deaths afraid to protest. Jean Amery, an Italian Jew interned at Auschwitz, refused to submit nonviolently to Nazi beatings and developed a philosophy of “returning the blow,” of retaliating in any form possible. He reflects upon punching the prisoner foreman: “My human dignity lay in this punch to his jaw—and that it was in the end I, the physically much weaker man, who succumbed and was woefully thrashed, meant nothing to me” (90-91). By contrast, Israel operates from a far more powerful position.

8. Bellow's nonfiction work To Jerusalem and Back (1976) pleads for “the survival of the decent society created in Israel within a few decades” (25) but is riven by guilt at the treatment of Arabs. The Egyptian dead described in Mr. Sammler's Planet reappear, in virtually the same language, in Bellow's experience as a battlefield correspondent, when he sees corpses that “swelled, ballooned, then burst their uniform seams. They trickled away; eyes liquefied, ran from the sockets; and the skull quickly came through the face” (Jerusalem 59). Such a grotesque image makes martial glorification difficult, to say the least. Bellow agonizes over Israel's militarism but stringently maintains his final justification for Israel—the need to assure that the Holocaust not repeat itself, for Jews “amongst the peoples of the earth, had not established a natural right to exist unquestioned in the lands of their birth” (26). Furman further discusses connections between Mr. Sammler's Planet and To Jerusalem and Back.

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———. Henderson the Rain King. 1959. New York: Penguin, 1976.

———. Mr. Sammler's Planet. New York: Viking, 1970.

———. To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account. New York: Viking, 1976.

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