Race, Style, and the Soul of Saul Bellow's Prose

Abstract

‘WHO IS THE TOLSTOY OF THE ZULUS? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read him.’1 What Saul Bellow said in 1988 during an interview with the New York Times Magazine has damaged his reputation. His views on race, and culture more broadly, don’t make him a fashionable writer. In a soundbite culture, where an individual remark is enough to remove an author from the serious regard of the politically conscientious, it would seem that those passionate about his work should redirect attention away from the interviews, and towards the fiction. Bellow is often championed as a stylist, one of the greatest prose writers of the twentieth century; a defensive action, perhaps, on the part of his admirers, as if style could ever be divorced from content. Cynthia Ozick describes a celebratory symposium of 2005 at which James Wood, Martin Amis, and Ian McEwan waxed lyrical over Bellow’s prose. Arguing, however, that ‘language – the acclaimed style – cannot be the whole’ of his achievement, she asks where was the century, the century that Bellow’s reality-stung inquisitiveness traversed almost in its entirety, from Trotsky to Wilhelm Reich to Rudolf Steiner, where was the raw and raucously shifting society he knocked about in, undermined, reveled in, and sometimes reviled? Where was his imagined Africa, where were the philosophies he devoured, where were the evanescent infatuations he pursued, where was the clamor of history…?2 But Bellow’s infamous remark about Zulus and Papuans doesn’t only reveal his ignorance of African literary culture and his fear of the black presence in US life; it also expresses a, to him, essential aspect of the creative imagination. Bellow wanted ‘the soul to speak out at the dinner table’, and no doubt felt he was doing, in his ‘Zulus and Papuans’ gambit, something …