Lecture 2:

Introduction to the American 1950s - Major cultural and political directions (continued).1950s
American Fiction (I): Classical Novel Writing and Ethnic Perspectives - Saul Bellow and Ralph
Ellison.
classical = term applied to mean a return to the realist vein against the more experimental
modernists / postmodernists writers 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.
The Adventures of Augie March (1953) Augies discovery that elation is a form of patriotism.
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.

The Adventures of Augie March

Subject: It features the eponymous Augie March who grows up during the Great Depression and
it is an example of bildungsroman, tracing the development of an individual through a series of
encounters, occupations and relationships from boyhood to manhood.
Its protagonist may be said to represent the modern Everyman (an ordinary individual), an individual
struggling to make sense of, and succeed in, an alienating world. The novel is also specific to the
American literary canon in that it celebrates the capacity of the individual to progress in society by
virtue of nothing more than his own "luck and pluck." This idea is stated explicitly in the opening and
most famous lines of the novel, in which the narrator defines himself as an American. This was an
important act of self-definition for the author and narrator, both immigrants to America. It also
establishes the dual meaning of "America" in the novel: that is, the physical and political "America,"
as well as the more figurative "American" as a state-of-mind:
I am an American, Chicago bornChicago, that somber cityand go at things as I have taught
myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes
an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus,
and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the
door or gloving the knuckles.
This celebration of the individual determines Bellow's presentation of fate in the novel. Things simply
happen to Augie, one after another, with no evident story arc or hint as to where his adventures are
leading. This contributes to the sense that Augie, as the Everyman, is lost in a chaotic world, but it
also enhances the sense that the Everyman, as an autonomous creation, is in control of his own
fate. By turns, Bellow exposes the alienating forces of the American city, while revealing the great
opportunities that it offers.

Plot: The story describes Augie March's growth from childhood to a fairly stable maturity.
Augie, with his brother Simon and the mentally abnormal George have no father and are
brought up by their mother who is losing her eyesight, and a tyrannical grandmother-like
boarder in very humble circumstances in the rough parts of Chicago. Augie drifts from one
situation to another in a free-wheeling mannerjobs, women, homes, education and
lifestyle.

Augie March's path seems to be partly self made and partly comes around through chance.
In lifestyle he ranges from near adoption by a wealthy couple who spoil him, to a struggle
for existence stealing books and helping out friends in desperate straits. His most unusual
adventure is his flight to Mexico with the wild and irrepressible Thea who tries to catch
lizards with an eagle. Thea attempts to convince Augie to join her in this seemingly
impossible task.

His jobs include general assistance to the slightly corrupt Einhorn, helping in a dog training
parlour, working for his brother at a coal-tip, and working for the Congress of Industrial
Organizations until finally he joins the merchant navy in the war.

Augie attracts and gets involved with a string of different women. Firstly a casual
acquaintance as a youth, he gets engaged to a wealthy cousin of his brother's wife.
However, through a scandal not of his fault, he is discarded. After a casual affair with
Sophie, a Greek hotel maid, he is swept off by Thea, whom he had met when living with the
rich Renlings and who forecast their relationship even though he loved her sister. After the
fiasco in Mexico, where he suffered a terrible accident on a horse, he and Thea began
drifting apart; he spending his time playing cards and she hunting for snakes and lizards in
the mountains. Their inevitable split came the night he agreed to drive another woman,
Stella, to another town to escape her troubled boyfriend. After the break-up, Augie returned
to Chicago and picked back up with Sophie until joining the merchant navy and heading to
New York. There he met up with Stella again and married her.

All through the book, Augie is encouraged into education, but never quite seems to make it;
he reads a great deal for himself and develops a philosophy of life. Something or somebody
always tends to crop up, turning his path before Augie seriously considers returning to
education.

During the war, his ship is sunk and he suffers a difficult episode in a lifeboat with a man
who turns out to be a lunatic. After rescue, he returns to Stella and the book ends with them
living a slightly dubious existence in France, he involved in some fairly shady business
deals and she attempting to pursue a career in acting.

Style: a picaresque style that dates back to the earliest origins of the European novel. However,
according to the Academy, Bellow uses this episodic traditional form to investigate modern concerns:
"the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be
called the dilemma of our age." With an intricate plot and allusive style, he explores contrasting
themes of alienation and belonging, poverty and wealth, love and loss, with often comic undertones.
The picaresque style favors an episodic approach to story telling. It centers on a rascally
character jumping from place to place, job to job, and even into the ivory towers of high-class
society. Our rascal is none other than the likeable Augie March.

It is in the structure of the novel that the differences between the Adventures of Augie March
and the traditional picaresque novel become evident. Like the traditional picaresque, the
modern novel is episodic; the plot moves through a series of independent adventures. In the
traditional picaresque, these episodes are self contained, united by the presence of the hero,
the tone of the narrative, a small number of characters who reappear occasionally, and
sometimes by an underlying theme. Each of the episodes exists for the aim of showing some
parts of society that can be put into satire.
Augies picaresque qualities, especially his love of life, his resilience which enables him to
bounce from defeat and his hope in the presence of failure, his acceptance of himself as he is
and the world the way he finds it are exhibited in the ending of his adventures. In fact, it is only
the character of Augie that the novel comes close to the picaresque form. That is to say, his birth
and background are those of the typical picaro; he must seek outside his home environment to
find not only opportunity but also knowledge. Augie learns something from each adventure
which he experiences, either about himself or the nature of his quest for a good fate. Although
each experience brings a greater degree of self-awareness, the character of Augie does not
essentially change throughout the novel, a trait which is unlike the genre: his good humor, his
zest for life, his hope for the future, the quality in himself which he calls larky, are all as
strongly present at the beginning of the novel as at the end. Near the end of his story, Augie tells
Mintouchian that he will never force the hand of fate to create a better Augie March, nor change
the time to an age of gold (AAM, p. 485).