I found it somewhat dull, but I didn't actively dislike it. It's a real shame that it's the only work of his that I've yet read. I am a sorry excuse for an English major!
Wow, weird. I've only read Ravelstein. Though I did read a quote from Herzog today, because there's one at the beginning of Ian McEwan's Saturday, which I just started.
I haven't read Ravelstein, but I'm pretty sure y'all need to read something else besides. I'll bet that there's one of his stories in an anthology you have around. Otherwise, I can definitely recommend Herzog.
I loved "Him with His Foot in His Mouth," about an academic who tends to speak before thinking. In one exchange, after a campus librarian tells the guy his baseball cap makes him look just like an archaeologist, he replies, "And you look like something I dug up."
Henderson the Rain King, on the other hand, was just awful.
I'm not a Bellownick--the only novel I've read is Henderson the Rain King (great for the first few chapters, then he goes to Africa). I put Herzog down after a while because--well, to quote Jules Feiffer, "Bellow is the only man alive who can whine in essay mode." (I may pick it up again sometime.)
But you have to read "A Silver Dish." That's the story that makes me realize I need to read a lot more Bellow. (I think it's in Him with His Foot in His Mouth; it's also in The Best American Short Stories of the Twentieth Century, and quite right too.)
I like Bellow lots. Especially Augie March and Herzog. Salon published a rather uncharitable review of his work today, to commemorate his death. Which brings to mind: when, if ever, is an accusation that a work of art is "solipsistic," not a signal of poor analysis?
In fact, you could use solipsistic to describe The Matrix, Total Recall, or other "brain in a vat" type movies. But then the response would be "yes, that's the point."
Maybe now is when I reveal that, when I was reading Zuckerman Bound, I had the sneaking thought, "Isn't this a concept album about how hard it is to be a rock star?" (Roth, not Bellow, to avoid confusion.)
I've not read it. I guess my real problem with the term "solipsism" as it's used in literary criticism, is that I'm not sure what it actually criticizes. If it merely means "navel gazing," well some pretty good literary works have been navel gazing. See Portrait of the Artist, etc.
If it means something more than navel gazing, what does it mean? Solipsism is an actual philisophical problem. I would be punching far above my weight to try to say much about philosophy here, but I do know that solipsism isn't just an example of idiocy or selfishness -- it's a logical problem that's hard to refute, though unappealing.
The works cited as solipsistic aren't actually solipsistic -- they don't actually argue that the writers' mind is the only mind. If they did, that might be interesting. I am going to go very far here and say that I don't think the word as used in literary criticism has any meaning at all. I think it's used in the stead of actual thinking, as a place holder for such thinking. Because it's a fairly uncommon, intelligent-sounding term, bullshit doesn't often get called on its users.
It tends to be used in ad hominem attacks about a work as a whole. I think that's because it means nothing. There's no way to back it up with textual support, if it has no actual content.
Either that or I just don't get what is actually being said when that word is used.
talking way too much about this -- but one more thing:
A lot of important novels are essentially about what it is like to inhabit a certain character's mind. Because those novels accept the limitation that the reader cannot know any other minds (for the reason that, in life, we only know one mind), should they be dismissed as solipsistic? If so that word is very dangerous.
Even in third person narration, one of the rules of fiction is, or should be, don't create a narrator that assumes knowledge of all minds. The admission that we don't really know other minds isn't a problem -- it's a positive development, and it amounts to one of the great gifts to the novel from the existential philosophers in the early 20th cent.
I feel as though the term is often used to dismiss works -- like Herzog -- in which the reader inhabits a single mind. The critic doesn't like the novel, can't quite say why, and comes upon the word "solipsistic."
For that reason, I shall wage war on the word, and those who use it.
Here's my take on the word "solipsistic." We pretty much know what we mean when we call a person solipsistic--it's like there's no one else in the world for them. Of course this isn't literally so, but hyperbolically, we use it to mean really self-absorbed.
So calling a work of art solipsistic would mean saying that it's like nobody else exists for the author. Not every book that fully inhabits a character's consciousness would be vulnerable to this accusation. For instance, in Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy we're very much trapped in the narrator's consciousness, but I don't think anyone would call it solipsistic, because the narrator is so very different from the author. The narrator is solipsistic but not the book.
So I guess if someone is calling Herzog solipsistic (I haven't read the Salon article) it's like they're saying that we're trapped inside Bellow's consciousness, and that no one else's character can make itself felt.
This is emphatically not true of "A Silver Dish"--the narrator's father is an extraordinarily strong character.
(No one really seems to take the problem of solipsism very seriously these days in analytic philosophy--the work on the problem of other minds tends to be naturalistic: How do we discover what others (or ourselves) are thinking? See Stich and Nichols' Mindreading, which I haven't actually read. And there's some non-naturalizing work on first-person authority that doesn't deal with solipsism: Moran's Authority and Estrangment, for instance. But there are no or few solipsists actually working in analytic philosophy today, which I think is just a special case of there are no or few skeptics. I'm not saying that this means that solipsism isn't a real problem--just offering up a bit of description of what's happening in the field. All as far as I know, since I don't work much in that area.)
So I guess if someone is calling Herzog solipsistic (I haven't read the Salon article) it's like they're saying that we're trapped inside Bellow's consciousness, and that no one else's character can make itself felt.
Again, as tex mentioned above, can't this be said of Portrait of the Artist, a thoroughly extraordinary piece of writing?
It seems like, from what you describe, solipsism as used in literary criticism is synonymous with navel-gazing. But it is a much more derrogatory term.
Calling something navel-gazing doesn't dismiss it as a work of art. Solispsitic implies something very wrong, endemic, in the writing. But I don't think we can say what is so wrong with writing alleged to be solipsistic -- because there isn't really anything behind the word.
It's one of those words that makes something sound worse than it actually is. Like "flip-flopper." And like "flip-flopper," it's used to dismiss, without having to provide real reasons for doing so.
(the road from "textualist" to "tex" should have been longer, don't you think?)
Here's the paragraph:
Bellow's precursor is Kafka: Every minor character acts out the desires and terrors of the guilty hero, who keeps insisting that these specters have nothing to do with him. Some readers have charged the book with racism, which is understandable (Sammler dismisses the sexual revolution as a quest for "niggerhood") but misses the point. "Mr. Sammler's Planet" is about blackness as fantasy, whiteness as the badge of the solipsist. Solipsism, of course, is the general condition and limitation of Bellow's novels. And while we suffer that limitation less gladly than readers did at midcentury, Bellow bodies forth our lunacy and lack of connection as nobody else has done.
The charge, it seems, is that Bellow's stories always describe solipsism (not that his writing, per se, is solipsistic). And "solipsism," here, means "lack of connection." The reviewer's gripe (extrapolating here) is that there's a richer landscape of interaction to be described than what Bellow's unconnected characters let him describe. I don't think the charge holds up, but at least it makes sense.
I disagree that it makes sense. First, "whiteness as the badge of the solipsist" does not make sense. Second, the author goes from making a decent case that one character in one of Bellow's novels is a solipsist (as in navel-gazing) to arguing that all of Bellow's work (not just individual characters within that work) is solipsistic. The "of course" is completely infuriating.
I agree as to your first point. Did you enjoy your time away from the blog?
"whiteness as the badge of the solipsist" does not make sense
Sure it does. It means that a character's whiteness is the reader's clue that the character is solipsistic.
And to say that Bellow's work is solipsistic is just to say that all his main characters are, at least as I read the paragraph. Ok, I'm really going away now.
Sure, if whiteness is the clue of solipsism, that makes sense, in that it gets across that idea, but it says nothing as to why whiteness would indicate solipsism or anything else. Even if we are to take solipsism as meaning "lack of connection" -- which is not a natural use for that word -- why would whiteness be a clue as to lack of connection? You could give an explanation that makes sense -- and I think you could probably make a strong case, ogged -- but I don't think that the writer of this piece has done so.
Really, too bad about Ravelstein, though.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 6:55 PM
Did you actually dislike Ravelstein, or just find it beneath his talents?
And can someone explain to me what is going on in Henderson the Rain King? I'm still confused.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 7:43 PM
I found it somewhat dull, but I didn't actively dislike it. It's a real shame that it's the only work of his that I've yet read. I am a sorry excuse for an English major!
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 8:33 PM
Wow, weird. I've only read Ravelstein. Though I did read a quote from Herzog today, because there's one at the beginning of Ian McEwan's Saturday, which I just started.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 9:36 PM
I haven't read Ravelstein, but I'm pretty sure y'all need to read something else besides. I'll bet that there's one of his stories in an anthology you have around. Otherwise, I can definitely recommend Herzog.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 9:39 PM
I loved "Him with His Foot in His Mouth," about an academic who tends to speak before thinking. In one exchange, after a campus librarian tells the guy his baseball cap makes him look just like an archaeologist, he replies, "And you look like something I dug up."
Henderson the Rain King, on the other hand, was just awful.
Posted by peter snees | Link to this comment | 04- 6-05 3:45 AM
Herzog is the only Bellow I've read, but it was, indeed, absolutely first-rate.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 04- 6-05 4:46 AM
Augie March is pretty mandatory.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 04- 6-05 6:44 AM
Man, 6:44 am? I can't believe I'm up this early.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 04- 6-05 6:44 AM
I'm not a Bellownick--the only novel I've read is Henderson the Rain King (great for the first few chapters, then he goes to Africa). I put Herzog down after a while because--well, to quote Jules Feiffer, "Bellow is the only man alive who can whine in essay mode." (I may pick it up again sometime.)
But you have to read "A Silver Dish." That's the story that makes me realize I need to read a lot more Bellow. (I think it's in Him with His Foot in His Mouth; it's also in The Best American Short Stories of the Twentieth Century, and quite right too.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 04- 6-05 8:02 AM
I like Bellow lots. Especially Augie March and Herzog. Salon published a rather uncharitable review of his work today, to commemorate his death. Which brings to mind: when, if ever, is an accusation that a work of art is "solipsistic," not a signal of poor analysis?
Posted by textualist | Link to this comment | 04- 6-05 1:49 PM
I recognize that the last comma in my post is gratuitous.
Posted by tex | Link to this comment | 04- 6-05 1:56 PM
Answer to Tex's question: When you're discussing "No Particular Night or Morning," by Ray Bradbury? I think.
Well, not really.
Would you accept that the accusation could be made of certain, perhaps imaginary, double-disc concept albums about how hard it is to be a rock star?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 04- 6-05 4:28 PM
I accept. But it would be more appropriate if the album were about how the rock star's mind is the only mind that exists.
Posted by tex | Link to this comment | 04- 6-05 4:38 PM
In fact, you could use solipsistic to describe The Matrix, Total Recall, or other "brain in a vat" type movies. But then the response would be "yes, that's the point."
Posted by tex | Link to this comment | 04- 6-05 4:41 PM
Maybe now is when I reveal that, when I was reading Zuckerman Bound, I had the sneaking thought, "Isn't this a concept album about how hard it is to be a rock star?" (Roth, not Bellow, to avoid confusion.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 04- 6-05 4:47 PM
I've not read it. I guess my real problem with the term "solipsism" as it's used in literary criticism, is that I'm not sure what it actually criticizes. If it merely means "navel gazing," well some pretty good literary works have been navel gazing. See Portrait of the Artist, etc.
If it means something more than navel gazing, what does it mean? Solipsism is an actual philisophical problem. I would be punching far above my weight to try to say much about philosophy here, but I do know that solipsism isn't just an example of idiocy or selfishness -- it's a logical problem that's hard to refute, though unappealing.
The works cited as solipsistic aren't actually solipsistic -- they don't actually argue that the writers' mind is the only mind. If they did, that might be interesting. I am going to go very far here and say that I don't think the word as used in literary criticism has any meaning at all. I think it's used in the stead of actual thinking, as a place holder for such thinking. Because it's a fairly uncommon, intelligent-sounding term, bullshit doesn't often get called on its users.
It tends to be used in ad hominem attacks about a work as a whole. I think that's because it means nothing. There's no way to back it up with textual support, if it has no actual content.
Either that or I just don't get what is actually being said when that word is used.
Posted by tex | Link to this comment | 04- 6-05 5:00 PM
talking way too much about this -- but one more thing:
A lot of important novels are essentially about what it is like to inhabit a certain character's mind. Because those novels accept the limitation that the reader cannot know any other minds (for the reason that, in life, we only know one mind), should they be dismissed as solipsistic? If so that word is very dangerous.
Even in third person narration, one of the rules of fiction is, or should be, don't create a narrator that assumes knowledge of all minds. The admission that we don't really know other minds isn't a problem -- it's a positive development, and it amounts to one of the great gifts to the novel from the existential philosophers in the early 20th cent.
I feel as though the term is often used to dismiss works -- like Herzog -- in which the reader inhabits a single mind. The critic doesn't like the novel, can't quite say why, and comes upon the word "solipsistic."
For that reason, I shall wage war on the word, and those who use it.
Posted by tex | Link to this comment | 04- 6-05 5:17 PM
He just had a kid five or six years ago or something.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 04- 6-05 5:26 PM
Tex--
Here's my take on the word "solipsistic." We pretty much know what we mean when we call a person solipsistic--it's like there's no one else in the world for them. Of course this isn't literally so, but hyperbolically, we use it to mean really self-absorbed.
So calling a work of art solipsistic would mean saying that it's like nobody else exists for the author. Not every book that fully inhabits a character's consciousness would be vulnerable to this accusation. For instance, in Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy we're very much trapped in the narrator's consciousness, but I don't think anyone would call it solipsistic, because the narrator is so very different from the author. The narrator is solipsistic but not the book.
So I guess if someone is calling Herzog solipsistic (I haven't read the Salon article) it's like they're saying that we're trapped inside Bellow's consciousness, and that no one else's character can make itself felt.
This is emphatically not true of "A Silver Dish"--the narrator's father is an extraordinarily strong character.
(No one really seems to take the problem of solipsism very seriously these days in analytic philosophy--the work on the problem of other minds tends to be naturalistic: How do we discover what others (or ourselves) are thinking? See Stich and Nichols' Mindreading, which I haven't actually read. And there's some non-naturalizing work on first-person authority that doesn't deal with solipsism: Moran's Authority and Estrangment, for instance. But there are no or few solipsists actually working in analytic philosophy today, which I think is just a special case of there are no or few skeptics. I'm not saying that this means that solipsism isn't a real problem--just offering up a bit of description of what's happening in the field. All as far as I know, since I don't work much in that area.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 04- 7-05 8:49 AM
So I guess if someone is calling Herzog solipsistic (I haven't read the Salon article) it's like they're saying that we're trapped inside Bellow's consciousness, and that no one else's character can make itself felt.
Again, as tex mentioned above, can't this be said of Portrait of the Artist, a thoroughly extraordinary piece of writing?
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 04- 7-05 8:54 AM
It seems like, from what you describe, solipsism as used in literary criticism is synonymous with navel-gazing. But it is a much more derrogatory term.
Calling something navel-gazing doesn't dismiss it as a work of art. Solispsitic implies something very wrong, endemic, in the writing. But I don't think we can say what is so wrong with writing alleged to be solipsistic -- because there isn't really anything behind the word.
It's one of those words that makes something sound worse than it actually is. Like "flip-flopper." And like "flip-flopper," it's used to dismiss, without having to provide real reasons for doing so.
Posted by tex | Link to this comment | 04- 7-05 9:57 AM
Tex,
(the road from "textualist" to "tex" should have been longer, don't you think?)
Here's the paragraph:
The charge, it seems, is that Bellow's stories always describe solipsism (not that his writing, per se, is solipsistic). And "solipsism," here, means "lack of connection." The reviewer's gripe (extrapolating here) is that there's a richer landscape of interaction to be described than what Bellow's unconnected characters let him describe. I don't think the charge holds up, but at least it makes sense.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 04- 7-05 10:10 AM
I disagree that it makes sense. First, "whiteness as the badge of the solipsist" does not make sense. Second, the author goes from making a decent case that one character in one of Bellow's novels is a solipsist (as in navel-gazing) to arguing that all of Bellow's work (not just individual characters within that work) is solipsistic. The "of course" is completely infuriating.
I agree as to your first point. Did you enjoy your time away from the blog?
Posted by textualist | Link to this comment | 04- 7-05 10:26 AM
"whiteness as the badge of the solipsist" does not make sense
Sure it does. It means that a character's whiteness is the reader's clue that the character is solipsistic.
And to say that Bellow's work is solipsistic is just to say that all his main characters are, at least as I read the paragraph. Ok, I'm really going away now.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 04- 7-05 11:10 AM
Sure, if whiteness is the clue of solipsism, that makes sense, in that it gets across that idea, but it says nothing as to why whiteness would indicate solipsism or anything else. Even if we are to take solipsism as meaning "lack of connection" -- which is not a natural use for that word -- why would whiteness be a clue as to lack of connection? You could give an explanation that makes sense -- and I think you could probably make a strong case, ogged -- but I don't think that the writer of this piece has done so.
Anyway, sorry to be contentious. Bon Voyage.
Posted by textualist | Link to this comment | 04- 7-05 11:38 AM