Classical Novel Writing and Ethnic Perspectives:

Saul Bellow
Ralph Ellison
classical = term applied to mean a return to the realist
vein against the more experimental modernists /
postmodernists writer that were contemporary to these
two writers
An identical return is not possible; classic writers
aim to render the reality of American life / write the
American novel in clearly referential manner but
modernist techniques / existentialist ideas seep
through the realist goal measure of their
originality.
Lionel Trilling in his essay Manners, Morals, and the Novel (The
Liberal Imagination, 1950):
A true fiction of manners to be impossible in America because
the texture of American social life is too thin to grant manners
more than a passing interest in our lives.
Novel of manners: work of fiction that re-creates a social
world, conveying with finely detailed observation the customs,
values, and mores of a highly developed and complex society
(e.g. Edith Whartons House of Mirth)
However, Trilling failed to notice that this kind of fiction had already
been written (e.g.: Henry James, Edith Wharton, F. S. Fitzgerald,
etc.) & was being written at the time: Saul Bellow
Born in Quebec (French-speaking province of Canada) to Yiddishspeaking parents recently fled from Russia learning to live in
between two cultures (or more) his genius in portraying manners,
particularly in 3 books:
Seize the Day (1956)
Herzog (1964)
Humboldts Gift (1957)
Ego (emotions; mood) & the World (History) create the main conflict
in his novels
The Adventures of Augie March (1953) Augies discovery that
elation is a form of patriotism

From this point of view, in this battle between the highly charged
emotional Ego & the World, Bellows books can be sorted generally into:
Depressive books, i.e. the Self giving in to the World: Dangling
Man (1944), The Victim (1947), Seize the Day (1956), Mr.
Sammlers Planet (1970)
Expansive books, i.e. Feeling & the Self overcome the World
and come to terms with it.
Henderson brings home a cub instead of a lion; the
comedy of the Self
End: self-transcendence [ parodied in Kerouacs Big
Sur, and Mailers Deer Park]
Parody of the questing bourgeois Self speaking of love but more concerned with its
own improvement & fulfillment egotistic quest
Bellow is a moralist: his heroes ability to face up to what is given
(historically or psychologically) is usually the moral point of view of
each book
The Bellowian hero is modernist, as he internalizes the conflict and
the world; confronted by his inner choices and his emotions

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Thus, WW II, the Holocaust, the decline of the west, which could be
approached socially and which are the main themes of Dangling
Man (1944), The Victim (1947), Seize the Day (1956), Mr. Sammlers
Planet (1970) are interior realities whose influence upon the
emotions of the heroes is their point of entry into fiction.
A diary (preoccupation with the Self) modernist
The idea of dangling afforded Bellow a limbo-like state for the
protagonist; this technically leads to disarrangement of
temporal & spatial perspectives.
Undifferentiated time transforms ordinary procedures into
contingency: there were formerly banking days, washing
days, days that began events and days that ended them; It
is difficult to feel Tuesday from Saturday
Spatial dimensions also touched: the room as cage, trap &
refuge; his sense of things, his perspectives end in the walls
The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
Responses to the counterfeiting of ideas & feelings that
developed in the decade after the war
This time: although Augie, a picaresque character ( a Huck
Finn of the 1940s), confronts the World and does not allow it to
ensnare his Self. He proves that the individual will can become
hostage to the very energies feeding it (important for the postwar American novelists)
Augie in the depression years in Chicago (1929-1934) & grown
up in 20 years Bellow is here a social & moral observer:
growth of the nation (coming to terms with it).