Can the novel, at the end of the twentieth century, still speak public truth? This is a question that has haunted Saul Bellow's fiction since Joseph, in Dangling Man, could find no connection between his private experience and the historic realities of war. But it is more than an issue for a single writer. The conscious problem of our culture since Bellow's first fiction appeared in the 1940s has been the survival of the individual before the dominating public realities of political and economic power, and this is a problem that Bellow, in his first novel, forcefully identified. For the novel as a literary form, however, the problem has been the inversion of that. For fiction, the secure ground has been private experience; more and more the novel has withdrawn into the particularities of individual consciousness, has surrendered the larger issues to politics, history, and cultural theory. Though Bellow's fiction recognizes the novel's historic investment in individual experience—his own work is centered on a succession of powerful individualities, such as Henderson, Herzog, and Sammler—it has nevertheless always been his aim to characterize the public life of the age, to make some statement of larger truth. The public understanding of contemporary experience is an aspiration that neither Bellow's characters nor their creator have ever abandoned.¹

But how can the novel move from the private and subjective to public statement? The Dean's December engages this problem directly, and, I shall argue, embodies an answer. This is a novel which, since its publication in 1982, has often been unfavorably judged as displaying what are claimed to be Bellow's characteristic failings: of characterization, of tone, of the achievement of a proper distance between creation and polemic. Bellow has been accused of writing a solipsistic fiction, dominated by the consciousness of one individual who is presented uncritically and who, in important respects, may be Bellow himself. The result, it is argued, is a univocal fictional world, in which other characters, events and places are reduced to the perceptions and meanings of the central consciousness; where, finally, public reality is excluded by the weight of an idiosyncratic individualism which is Bellow's own (see, for example, the discussions by Jonathan Wilson and John Updike).² My contention is that in The Dean's December Bellow shows himself aware of this danger. He tries to plot a route from individual consciousness to public truth, and he does so by freeing both the central character and the novel itself from an inappropriate burden of totalizing explanation, so as to clarify the true resources of the novel for engaging with the public reality of the world.

For the novelist the road to public truth necessarily lies through private consciousness, and Bellow's point of departure is Dean Corde, who is attempting the same journey. Like the novel, Corde is trying to move from the enclosure of private awareness to truthful general statement, to the word that his time needs to hear. But how should he measure his success? Bellow has a clear criterion; there is for him one fact of shared experience which tests both the individual's ability to engage with the common terms of existence and the novel's ability to declare the truth of the age, and that is the fact of death. For Bellow death is the central public fact of the age, the hard kernel of twentieth century history. The life of the time is written in loss and death, on a scale and with a pervasiveness that confound both individual consciousness and the resources of fiction.³ It is in these terms that one must give an account of Chicago in the 1970s and of Bucharest under Ceausescu; the bottom line, in both cases, is human dereliction, violence, murder. Bellow's practice insists that we will know when an individual has found a way through to this common reality; there will be an adequation of consciousness to the enormity of the public fact. In the same way it will be possible to recognize fiction that has breached the bounds of individualistic subjectivity to enter the common domain; the lineaments of the age will be recognizable in the novel's adequacy to historic loss and death.

If loss and death are the object, the test of the public truth to be attained, they also identify for Bellow the means for the attainment of that object; it is through an enactment of loss that the individual, and the novel as an expressive form, discovers a route from private awareness to public understanding. This movement begins in apparent strength. Like Bellow in his fiction, Corde begins in possession of impressive discursive resources for a truthful and inclusive account of his world. As he draws on the understandings of historians, philosophers, social theorists, criminologists, a totalizing truth seems within reach; Corde in his essays, like Bellow in his intellectually acute and articulate fiction, promises us the summative truth of our age. But this power is stripped away, laid aside under the pressure of loss and of death, and only thus can the reality of public truth be attained. A word exists for this paradoxical fulfilment of power through its relinquishment, and that word is kenosis: an emptying, a pouring out.⁴

TOTALIZING INTERPRETATION

What must be relinquished, both by Corde and by the novel itself, is any claim to a totality of explanation. Bellow is clear that the strongest bid to be the voice of public truth in the contemporary world comes from the discourse of theorizing interpretation in its various forms, journalistic and academic. Drawing as it does on a conglomerate of ideas and interpretations from historians, political scientists, psychologists, philosophers, and social theorists, this discourse aspires to an inclusive account of the world: its ambitions are total. Yet for Bellow its failure is equally total; no real understanding is conveyed.⁵

This force is represented in the novel by Dewey Spangler, whose aspiration it is to rise above the level of journalism to become a philosopher-commentator in the tradition of André Malraux, able to cast an interpretative eye across all areas of contemporary experience from society to politics to developments in the arts, linking private experience and public event in a seamless account of the twentieth-century world. In the article that he writes after his meeting with Corde in Bucharest, Spangler ranges through personal reminiscence, psychology, recent history, contemporary social politics, technological change, even urbanology. He invokes the intellectual inheritance of the West by naming Rousseau, Kant, Ortega, Benda and Malraux.⁶ Nothing is excluded and everything may be evidence for a conspectus that acknowledges no limits.

As his treatment of Spangler shows, Bellow has profound objections to such inclusive enterprises. But the hubris of theorizing interpretation is not for him its only, or even most important, failing. It can only attain to the totality that it seeks by becoming depersonalized, by adopting a position away from any specific location in the world. Theory claims to speak for everyone, to be general truth; but this everyone is also no one. The most inclusive account of things is everyone's truth and no one's, without rooting in the understandings of any particular life. This Bellow exemplifies in Spangler's article. Though it starts from friendship and personal reminiscence, it is, as Corde instantly registers, an act of betrayal; it makes of the personal simply more grist to the mill of high-level theorizing, more evidence for the total interpretation toward which it aspires. Nor is this a specific deficiency in Spangler; all that he is doing is to follow the grain of the discourse that he inhabits, which is founded on the exclusion of the personal and the individual, even when it speaks of the personal and the individual.

It is that exclusion which makes theorizing discourse a tempting answer to the individualist enclosure of the novel, and Bellow has on occasions succumbed to that temptation. But The Dean's December stands as a surrender of the ambition to total explanation, both for the main character and for the novel itself. Through an individual and a textual kenosis, Bellow's text works to clarify the true weight of the novel in the public discourse of its time.

CORDE'S PROGRESS: THE KENOTIC REHEARSAL OF DEATH

Corde begins as the articulate, concerned humanist, the interpreter equipped with all the necessary tools; he feels the historical obligation of the American man of letters to speak the word required by his time. But he finds himself in Romania, where his equipment is less obviously apposite, and his initial sense of the redundancy of his interpretations becomes a deeper loss as he lives out a rehearsal of death.

Through the days of Valeria's dying he is dispossessed of the grand theoretical ambition to make inclusive sense of the world; and this takes place in a country where dispossession is the unrelenting daily reality of people's lives. In Bucharest Corde sees the layered debris of dead eras, held vestigially in the aging memories of those who are themselves relics of the past. Beneath Ceausescu's Romania lie early idealistic communism, Iron Guard fascism, the nineteenth-century Paris-worshipping bourgeoisie, the ancient inheritance of Byzantium. Under the weight of the present dictatorship all these are as flat as the corpses of the rats squashed in the earthquake. To be a Romanian, Corde realizes, is to live within historical stripping and divestment, to be haunted by worlds that have been denounced, ignored, torn away or buried.

On a personal level, there is the same dispossession. Valeria has lost her early political hopes, her government job, her standing in society, her husband, her daughter, and now her ability to speak or to move; finally she confronts, with full awareness, the loss of her life. Minna is about to lose her mother, Gigi her sister. Back in Chicago Ricky Lester has lost his life, and his wife her husband; even Dewey Spangler, following surgery, is forced to take a forward look to his own dissolution, and Corde's cousin, Max Detillion, is moving down the same track, facing “neither virus nor bacteria, but erotic collapse” (71). Dewey makes Corde aware of his own accumulated losses: the early promise only partly fulfilled, the brilliant career he might have had. Even the Chicago in which they grew up has vanished under the polished grandeur of the present, and the youthful Dewey has also gone: “since then each of them had died at least three or four times” (122).

Corde's own experience is a progressive divesting, beginning with his hurried departure from Chicago and his arrival in Bucharest. There the normal supports of his life are withdrawn. A man of words, he has no Romanian and cannot speak; a journalist addicted to events, he cannot read the newspapers. He is unable to feed even on simple observation; for fear of the Securitate, Minna warns him not to walk the streets, and he is effectively confined to one room. Worst of all, his ideas and theories no longer fit the world in which he finds himself; as an explainer and interpreter, he is deprived of the power to interpret or explain. Guesswork is all that remains to him, hunches about why the hospital-manager Colonel behaves as he does, or why the concierge Ioanna both betrays Valeria's family and loves them. In all these ways, Corde has to learn to do without, and the ineluctable cold of a Bucharest apartment in late December gives all these deprivations a tangible force.

At the heart of Corde's kenosis, though, is a vicarious dying, a rehearsal of death. This is foreshadowed by his uncomfortable memory of falling into the sea while fishing with the child Mason Zaehner on Cape Cod. Though less finally than Valeria in the hospital or Rick Lester as he plunges from the window, Corde has had the experience of seeing the world pass from his control, of falling into what might have been a final dispossession: “the great weight of the dark green water, and the sky upside down, vast clouds, bottoms up … he couldn't get a grip in the slime of the breakwater, and the boy was too small to help” (54).

But Corde's true induction into death comes through his involvement with the deaths of Ricky Lester and Valeria. Corde admits himself touched by Lester's death to a degree that he would not have expected: “his feelings took him by surprise. Something seemed to be working its way upward. … The pressure on his heart was especially heavy, unpleasantly hot and repulsively melting. He had no use for such sensations; he certainly didn't want the kid's death bristling over him like this” (33). It is as though the boy's death has entered Corde's body. He tries to understand this in his usual way, by converting the experience into a general theory: “Corde believed that it was the evil that had overtaken the boy that did it” (33), an evil which characterizes contemporary reality as a whole. But his reaction to Ricky's corpse is inescapable personal; there is a look on the dead boy's face that he cannot explain except as the instant recognition of absolute loss.

Valeria's dying takes Corde even deeper into death. He has time to imagine all the stages of dispossession as they must be for her, the loss of the power to speak, to see, to move, to write even a few letters on a page: “no control, thought Corde. Can't manage” (129). After her death, Valeria's rings are sawn from her fingers. Corde imagines her cremation as a final and brutal stripping-down: “at this very instant Valeria might be going into the fire, the roaring furnace which took off her hair, the silk scarf, grabbed away the green suit, melted the chased silver buttons, consumed the skin, flashed away the fat, blew up the organs, reached the bones, bore down on the skull” (218).

Corde shares this reduction as he lives through the dereliction of these days; the unnatural heat and cold of the crematorium, the wintry desolation of the cemetery, the presence of the impoverished and decayed mourners from a defunct world all work on him to dissolve his resistance to a brutal and invasive reality. Interpretative ingenuity seems beside the point. Meanings become irrelevant and only the crudest choices have any weight: “as between frost and flames, weren't flames better?” (211).

THEORY, NATURALISM, PATHOS

Corde lives through a rehearsal of death and comes to know the reality of loss. Yet his experience makes it no easier for him to say what his times need to hear. Confronted as he is by the death-founded realities of communist Romania and of Chicago hardened to the casual killing of a young woman locked in the trunk of a car, he finds that he has less and less to say. Alongside his personal kenosis, his sharing in the dispossession of the dying, Corde loses his aspiration to offer a totalizing account of his world; he ceases to believe in the power of discursive interpretation to encompass contemporary reality.

Corde is “a man of words,” but now words seem not to help him any more; they seem “words of the wrong kind” (65). Deprived of Western papers, he only half-misses his daily fix of news: “he was really in two minds about the news. At home he read too many papers. He was better off without his daily dose of world botheration, sham happenings, without newspaper phrases. Nothing true—really true—could be said in the papers” (58). Corde feels betrayed by that currency of theorizing discourse which overlooks the immediate and the particular in favor of the total, which becomes an evasion of the truth of experience: “the increase of theories and discourse, itself a cause of new strange forms of blindness, the false representations of ‘communication,’ led to horrible distortions of public consciousness” (124). Yet he knows that theorizing is a perpetual itch with him; it threatens to swamp his conversation with the American ambassador, who “listened to Corde's explanations (or bombast), but obviously he didn't care to discuss Western humanism, civilized morality, nihilism East and West” (68). Corde himself acknowledges that “this kind of abnormal, professorial Plato-and-Aristotle stuff is the kiss of death” (104).

But where is the way out of this facile pseudo-understanding? In his Harper's articles Corde has attempted to escape the depersonalizing clutch of theory through descriptions of the horrors of contemporary Chicago: the prison, the County Hospital, the drug rehabilitation center. Here Corde the journalist works from the literary tradition of naturalist description, a tradition which in its time made a bold claim to be public truth. Naturalism claims authority by recording a public world as it is, with all its deformations; and Corde detects in himself a sense that this is his mission, “as if he had been sent down to mind the outer world, on a mission of observation and notation” (208). This is a tradition that claims to discard theorizing; it makes sense of the world by displaying an unarguable, objective reality:

The ancient County Hospital, yellow, broad and squat. The surrounding neighborhoods have decayed and fallen down. In the plain of collapse, this mass stands almost alone. Beyond the clearings the giant forms of the business district are gathered close. Between the antennae of the Sears Tower a rotating light blinks out. The weather is gray.

(166)

Dereliction, decay, desertion, exclusion: it is as though the objects themselves were their own interpretation. Theory is not needed; brutal realities speak for themselves.

But Corde finds himself as uneasy with these passages of supposedly unarguable truth as he is with his freewheeling theorizing. No less than his interpretations, these descriptions reflect his own compulsions; behind them lies a reading of reality no less personal or a priori. Naturalist description deals in the representative; it converts particulars into instances of some precedent truth. In that sense, it is a kind of theorizing. Its apparent objectivity is therefore vulnerable to the personal view, the private obsession, and Corde finds himself guilty in that respect. He sees that his descriptions did not come from meticulous observation and “nonattachment,” but from “objectivity (no, impartiality) intoxicated” (163); his very wish to be detached has become driven and obsessive. “Something had come over him” (165), and that something was an emotional need to heighten and intensify.

Each detail of his account of the dialysis ward at the County Hospital now strikes him as self-indulgent, as loaded with personal need and impulse, and so betraying the public truth that the articles were supposed to convey: “I am guided by a Filipino nurse through old tunnels, baked dry by mammoth boilers. The pipes drip rusty water. By the door of the morgue, wheeled stretchers line the walls. The dried blood would be scraped from them if there were staff enough, but there is no money” (166). Pathos is now in the ascendent, and feeling has come to operate as a false guarantor of truth. This Valeria has spotted: “he went over the passages marked by Valeria to see whether they formed a pattern. She would have been more interested in his emotions, his character, than in Chicago” (165). The pattern revealed is an emotional one; she has marked his outbursts and understood that the manner of the article has more to do with Corde than with Chicago. He asks himself why Harper's should be expected to print “this sort of stuff” (168).

In such passages pathos overlies theory, but only to conceal it; and Corde comes to see that neither theory nor pathos will give him the truth of his world. As he looks back from the forced detachment of Bucharest, Corde realizes that the more intensely he felt about the fate of the Chicago underclass, the more his analysis of their lot went askew: “something went wrong. He wrote about whirling souls and became a whirling soul himself, lifted up, caught up, spinning, streaming with passions, compulsive protests, inspirations. He experienced, as he saw when he looked back, a kind of air anarchy” (192). The discursive anarchy of limitless interpretation is found to be complicit with an inner anarchy of feeling, and both reflect, rather than describe, the anarchic world that they set out to understand.

PUBLIC FAILURE AND PRIVATE TRUTH

By such a route Corde comes to distrust the project of totalizing interpretation. In the theoretical looseness and emotional indulgence of his commentary on the contemporary world, Corde now sees yet another feature of its disorder, of the end-time in which every indulgence is permitted. This strikes him most painfully after Valeria's death and burial, at the end of his conversation with Vlada. Even his concern for virtue and vice now seems to him no more than whimsically personal, another self-indulgence within the general disintegration: “I personally think about virtue, about vice. I feel free to. Released, perhaps, by all the crashing. And in fact everybody has come under the spell of ‘last days.’ Isn't that what the anarchy of Chicago means?” (274).

It is Minna's grief at the death of her mother that brings home to Corde just how stripped he is of the power to interpret and explain. In the face of her loss no explanations or generalizations will help, and there is no place for factitious emotion; at this most painful moment in his wife's life, the expert explainer is reduced to silence. She appeals to him: “Can you help me to deal with this a little? … It's black in the room, and even blacker and worse outside. It goes on and on and on, out there.” Corde is the one who should have the answers, but “swamped with death he was supposed to bail out with a kitchen cup of psychology” (252-53). The virtuoso of human meanings does his best; he talks of schizoid modern personality, of Jung's comparison of the civilized psyche to a tapeworm, identical in all its segments. But from Minna comes the most direct denunciation of his entire discursive habit: “What comfort is it to hear that everybody is some kind of schizophrenic tapeworm? I tell you how horrible my mother's death is, and the way you comfort me is to say everything is monstrous. You make me a speech. And it's a speech I've heard more than once … You lecture me. You lecture. I could make you these speeches now” (259-60).

Corde leaves Bucharest stripped of his journalistic-academic ambition, to give an inclusive interpretation of his world. Yet this kenotic reduction leaves him free to recognize what theory might have prevented him seeing: the enormity of the fact of death, on a personal level in his wife's loss, and by extension as the founding reality of the public world. Death so encountered is not a theory or an explanation but absence; nevertheless an absence which is pervasive and corroding. It constitutes a link between private experience and public truth; through Valeria's death and Minna's loss, Corde comes to recognize a deadly presumption underlying human affairs: that some are properly consigned to death. Whether in Bucharest or Chicago, the deep unspoken division in human society is between the doomed, those who are tacitly assumed to be disposable, and those who do the disposing. Minna is blinded by her grief, but that is the public truth of things:

He saw how it was, undisguised, when she looked at him—the blank of death. Her mother's death had taught her death. Triviality was insupportable to her. Her judgment was rigorous, angry. She wanted no part of his journalism, articles, squalor. Suburban pimps or smart-ass lawyers beneath contempt and the great hordes, even of the doomed, of no concern to her, nor the city of destruction, nor its assaults, arsons, prisons and deaths.

(284)

The theorizing is brushed aside, but for Corde the fact of recognition remains: whether in Bucharest or Chicago, it is taken as read that there are those for whom death is proper.

Corde sees this with increasing vividness as the novel proceeds, but he does not translate his insight into theory or make it the pivot of an explanation of his world. It comes to him as a recognition out of numerous specific encounters; its impact is silencing, it leaves him less willing to speak. The Corde who has this recognition is no richer than he was before; his stock of understandings has not been increased, his ability to verbalize in the manner of Spangler is diminished, not enhanced. The kenosis continues even in the moment of public and historical recognition. But this stripping-away allows for the re-emergence of a world no longer hidden behind the project of totalizing interpretation. He goes back to Chicago released to a personal truth: “the world began to edge back again, to reveal itself … he was minutely aware of things, and the source of this awareness was in his equilibrium, a very extensive kind of composure” (278). At the core of this equilibrium is a new capacity to face death, learned among the shades of Bucharest. He sits on the porch of his Chicago apartment and looks across the lake: “Did the bars remind you of jail? They also kept you from falling to your death” (286). Death is still there, and the bars will not save him for ever; but he finds in himself a way of contemplating death that is not horror at the murderous anarchy of the Chicago streets or the political massacres of Eastern Europe. Looking across the water is “like being poured out to the horizon, like a great expansion. What if death should be like this, the soul finding an exit. The porch rail was his figure for the hither side. The rest, beyond it, drew you constantly as the completion of your reality” (286).

Corde's rehearsal of death has not ended with his departure from Bucharest, yet without the Bucharest experience he would not have reached this point. That was where, most brutally, the pouring out began; but he has to go further, and when he reaches Mount Palomar with Minna, he is reminded of how radical that emptying has to be. They ride up to the telescope, into the great dome, and Corde recalls the dome of the crematorium:

He came inevitably back to the crematorium, that rounded top and its huge circular floor, the feet of stiffs sticking through the curtains, the blasting heat underneath where they were disposed of, the killing cold when you returned and thought your head was being split by an ax. But that dome never opened. You could pass through only as smoke.

(306)

There mortality had all the worst implications; it was both final confinement and futile dissolution. But at Mount Palomar “the living heavens looked as if they would take you in. Another sort of rehearsal, thought Corde. The sky was tense with stars, but not so tense as he was, in his breast. Everything overhead was in equilibrium, kept in place by mutual tensions. What was it that his tensions kept in place?” Human tension is no longer antithetical to the nature of things, a species of anarchy; instead it is part of an order larger than itself, “as if you were being informed that what was spread over you had to do with your existence, down to the very blood and the crystal forms inside your bones” (306).

At the close of his journey through the novel Corde has found a way of contemplating death, a balance within that may be adequate to the personal fact of loss. He has also been shown the common grounding of worlds as different as those of Bucharest and Chicago in the consignment of some to death. But his mystical inner vision is unshareable (he does not even offer it to Minna), and his recognition of what cultures will always deny is exactly that—a recognition, not an abstraction out of which explanations can be spun. Certainly neither the vision nor the recognition provides him with any language in which to deal truthfully with the public pain of Chicago. Corde's mystical gaze has been eastward across the lake; but “at his back [is] the city, unquiet, the slum and its armies just over the way: blacks, Koreans, East Indians, Chippewas, Thais and hillbillies, squad cars, ambulances, firefighters, thrift shops, drug hustlers, lousy bars, alley filth” (279-80). There violence, desolation and death are not suspended; Corde, in his moment of private illumination, has (literally) turned his back on them.

THE KENOSIS OF THE NOVEL

So Corde's project fails: he does not find a way from individual consciousness to a truthful and adequate public statement. His induction into death as a constitutive given of human affairs does not issue in the defining truths that his Harper's articles had groped for; the mystical language of inner composure has nothing to say to public violence and social desolation. But Bellow's novel goes beyond the frustration of Corde's enterprise. Starting as it must from the focused individuality of his vision, it builds beyond that to a level of statement that engages with the central historical realities of the twentieth century.

The necessary step is for the novel to undergo its own kenosis; to relinquish, like Corde, any ambition to a totalizing interpretation of the world. This begins in Corde's abnegation of interpretative authority; what Corde gives up, the novel can hardly retain. But the novel's self-divestment goes further than that of the main character. There is also a kenosis specific to the text, and it has to do with the dominance of individual awareness. Though Corde provides the perspective from which the world of the novel is seen, his control is not complete; subtly but pervasively, the novel relinquishes the limitation of that perspective, moves beyond it into an area that Corde does not construct. Though Bellow never forgets that the novel begins from individual perception, his delicate management of point of view enables him to establish a level of common experience, and with that the possibility of public truth. Formally this is done by constant movement between the main character's perceptions and observations that, though available to him, do not depend upon him. A passage such as that describing the arrival at the cemetery illustrates this very clearly. My italics indicate only those parts of the passage that depend strictly on Corde:

So they set off in a group. They walked through the cemetery. It was dense with stones and obelisks. The newer monuments were protected from the weather by heavy plastic sheets fastened with belts and ropes, and rattling in the wind. In Chicago, middleclass families covered their furniture with this material; here it was the obelisks and their fresh gilt inscriptions that were protected. No melancholy pleasant winter sunshine now, the weather again turned dark, windy. At the Raresh grave more mourners were waiting.

Considering the season, the color of the grass was surprisingly fresh. Could there be some special source of warmth underneath? There were tapers in large numbers, leaning every which way. Some were sheltered in lanterns but the gusts came down on the rest. The old cousins had seated themselves on benches, and the gypsy beggars crowded up behind—a wild lot, but that was customary, so no special notice was taken of their demented behavior.

(265-66)

The kenosis exemplified here is of the novel itself. As Bellow's narrative steps away from Corde, it leaves behind his project of inclusive interpretation, his inability to resist each significant detail, each telling contrast or comparison. The project of inclusive interpretation is identified as a function of Corde's individuality; this is how his mind naturally engages the world. But the novel opens up a territory beyond that, an area not of interpretation but of common recognition. Beginning from Corde's experience, from his induction into death, the novel deploys that experience to illumine a public world; what he has learnt as an individual functions within the novel as a perspective from which the historic truth of dispossession and loss becomes visible. But it is made visible not as explanation, not as theory, but as a directed perception of a world.

It is here that the novel finds its authority for public statement. Because it is rooted in individual perception, the perspective of the novel will have location and direction; it will be recognizably partial, unable as a form to aspire to total interpretation, whatever the ambitions of the individuality it represents. But because fiction can go beyond the individuality which is its point of origin, it is able to establish common ground and the truth of that ground. We, as readers, are also perceivers of Corde's world; we share his perceptions but we also go beyond them in the interweaving of Bellow's narrative. We are invited into an area of common perception; and in that area we can make common connections and discover shared meaning.

BELLOW'S PUBLIC TRUTH

It is in this dimension of the text that Bellow is able to realize a truth that transcends the enclosure of individualism, whether of character or of novelistic form. How this transition is accomplished is well illustrated in a passage such as the following, also from the scene in the cemetery. A workman attempts to place Valeria's ashes in a niche in the memorial stone:

Regulations must have changed since the stone was raised. The cylinder was too large. Uncle Teo and others moved in to examine the difficulty. There was just a shade of difference in the dimensions and if only a few chips of granite were knocked away from the opening the tube might slide in. On instructions from Uncle Teo and the cousins, the workman applied his chisel, tapped once or twice and then swung his hammer widely—two, three blows. Fragments sprang from the back of the monument, and then the material around the socket crumbled. This was not granite, it was cement. The rounded shoulder of the monument came off, slid down. Gigi did not faint away but she slumped against Corde … Now the lashed sheets of plastic over the surrounding obelisks clattered hard as if to give it away that it was not solid marble they were protecting but a façade.

(266-67)

Almost nothing of this (after the first sentence) is Corde's; though the manner is that of naturalism, there is now nothing of the controlling obsession, the distortion toward pathos, that marked Corde's account of the County Hospital. Instances are not being stacked up as evidence of some prior judgment, nor are details being made to carry Corde's personal feeling. Bellow's description is entirely particular; yet the passage conveys much of the truth of Ceausescu's Romania, a public truth of history overshadowed by the pervasive twentieth century realities of loss and death. The domination of arbitrary rules; the surviving strength of families and connections; shoddiness and general incompetence; individual resourcefulness against the odds; the sham appearance of grandeur; violence; decay; the casual disregard of human feeling; the mounting human cost in loss and disappointment, enduringly born: all this and more is there, and it comes not from Corde but from the texture of the narrative as it lays aside the priority of his perspective and establishes common ground beyond it. There is in this a kenosis of the text which is typically that of the novel; as it relinquishes its dependence on its founding strength, its access to individual awareness, so it attains a larger truth.

The truth of the common ground opened within Bellow's novel is the presence and power of death as a working presumption in human societies, however much they, in their different ways (America or Romania) trumpet the possibilities of life. This truth begins in Corde's recognitions but goes beyond them; as Bellow takes us beyond Corde's interpretations, into the crumbling poverty of underclass Chicago or the desolation of a Bucharest cemetery, he enforces a constitutive truth of the century, a truth of the public realm. But Bellow's novel rises to this level of public statement not by theoretical interpretation or by becoming a texture of symbol (none of these details ceases to be what it is); instead it offers us particulars in which we see a pattern that has meaning but which is not dependent on any previous interpretation. Whatever abstractions or generalizations follow, they will be ours. There is a parallel here between the position of the controlling consciousness in the novel, and the position of the reader. Just as the novel must begin from some individual perspective, so reading can only take place from the perspective of the reader. But as the novel is able to go beyond the individuality that founds it, so our reading has to go beyond the meanings and interpretations that we bring to the text; and in both cases, the movement is into an area of common reality that does not negate the individuality either of character or reader but connects individuals in the recognition of a shared world.

Corde's personal preoccupations prevent him from speaking the truth about Chicago; but through that same individuality, partial and personal as it is, Bellow advances to a shared reality and captures a public truth of its time. Most importantly, this is the truth of the complicity of twentieth century societies with a silent presumption for death; but he also, and rarely for a Western writer, catches some of the truth of a particular society at a particular time. Bellow's novel captures the surreal semi-detached satellitism of Ceausescu's 1970s Romania, of a communist state lazy in its ideology but energetic in its brutality, built on a past not obliterated but contemptuously disregarded, on the relegation of humane instinct to a matter of bureaucratic indifference. He catches the combination of patriotic idealism with foreign coercion, of spurious claims to independence with ruthless internal repression, of headline-winning grandiosity with poverty and squalor. Bellow's novel conveys all this not as a matter of theory but as recognition; yet it is more than an individual truth. According to the manner of the novel, we are given entry to this world through the eyes of an individual, but what we see is the public truth of a society rooted and mired in its history, complicit in all its aspects with the pervasive realities of loss and death.

Notes

1. For example, Bellow's comment in his essay “There Is Simply Too Much to Think About” (1992): “We feel heavy when we recognize the limits of our effectiveness in the public sphere, when we acknowledge the weight of the burden laid upon us and the complexities we have to take into account—when we become aware of the impoverished state of public discussion” (171). Saul Bellow, It All Adds Up (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 170-77.

2. John Updike, “Toppling Towers Seen by a Whirling Soul,” Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 255-63; Jonathan Wilson, “Bellow's Dangling Dean,” Literary Review 26, no. 1 (1982), 165-75.

3. That Bellow sees death as the public fact that challenges consciousness is clear from a comment such as this, from his essay “The Distracted Public” (1990): “In an age of enormities, the emotions are naturally weakened. We are continually called upon to have feelings—about genocide, for instance, or about famine or the blowing up of passenger planes—and we are all aware that we are incapable of reacting appropriately. A guilty conscience of emotional inadequacy or impotence makes people doubt their own human weight” (156). In It All Adds Up, 153-69.

4. The primary text is Paul's Epistle to the Philippians, 2: 6-8, where the idea is related directly to the experience of death; Paul interprets Christ's kenosis, his emptying himself of the glory of God, as defined by his acceptance of crucifixion: “who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant … and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (RSV 1946).

5. See, for example, this comment from “The Distracted Public”: “Of course, the ceaseless world crisis, otherwise known as the chaos of the present age, is not the work of the communications industry and its Information Revolution; but for our peculiar pseudoknowledge of what is happening, for the density of our ignorance, and for the inner confusion and centerlessness of our understanding, for our agitation, the communicators are responsible. Intellectuals and universities, from the ideological side, also have much to answer for” (160).

6. Saul Bellow, The Dean's December (London: Penguin Books, 1982), 293-99. Hereafter cited parenthetically.