Modern Mind

society of vast cities, which they confront with ‘a metaphysical hunger.’ 68 In
Dangling Man,
much influenced by Kafka, Sartre and Camus, Bellow wrote this about the main character: ‘He asked himself a question I still would like answered, namely, “How should a good man live; what ought he to do?” ‘In
The Adventures of Augie March
(1953), the hero says, ‘It takes some of us a long time to find out what the price is of our being in nature, and what the facts are about your tenure. How long it takes depends on how swiftly the social sugars dissolve.’ All Bellow’s books are about the ‘social sugars’ in one form or another, the nature of the link between the self and others, community, society. For Bellow, the nature of the social contract is the most fundamental of all questions, the fundamental problem of politics, the deepest contradiction of capitalism, the most important phenomenon that science has not even begun to address, and where religion can no longer speak with authority. 69 In
Herzog
we have a character determined not to surrender to the then prevalent nihilism; in
Humboldt’s Gift
we have ‘the Mozart of gab,’ a brilliantly loquacious poet who nonetheless dies penniless while his postmodern protégé, obsessed with commodities, becomes rich. In
The Dean’s December,
the dean, Albert Corde, from a free city – the Chicago of violence, cancer, and postmodern chaos – visits Bucharest, then behind the Iron Curtain, where families, and family life, still exist. He is for ever comparing his own despairing knowledge about city life with the certainties of the astrophysical universe that are the everyday concerns of his Romanian wife. The aphorism behind
More Die of Heartbreak
is ‘more die of heartbreak than of radiation,’ showing, in idiosyncratic yet tragic form, some limits to science. (The book is a comedy.) The progression from the dangling man, to Augie March, to Henderson, to Herzog, to Humboldt, to Dean Albert Corde is a profoundly humane, ebullient set oftragedies and epiphanies, an intellectual and artistic achievement unrivalled in the last half of the twentieth century.
    In the early 1990s literature by native American Indians began to appear.
Keeping Slug Woman Alive: Approaches to American Indian Texts
(1993) and
Grand Avenue
(1994), both by Greg Sarris, were two commercially and critically successful titles. 70 Sarris is part American Indian, part Filipino, and part Jewish, an elected chief of the Miwok tribe but also professor of English at UCLA. This conceivably makes him the ultimate postmodern, multicultural figure, the natural next step in America’s evolving history. He, or someone like him, could be the first major literary voice in the twenty-first century. But Bellow has set the standard against which all others will be judged.

NOTES AND REFERENCES
     
    In these references, especially in regard to works published early in the century, I have given both the original publication details and, where appropriate, more recent editions and reprints. This is to aid readers who wish to pursue particular works, to show them where the more accessible versions are to be found. In addition, however, the publication history of key works also shows how the popularity of certain key ideas has varied down the years.
    Quite naturally, there are fewer references for the last quarter of the book. These works have had much less chance to generate a secondary literature of commentary and criticism.

PREFACE
    1. Saul Bellow,
Humboldt’s Gift,
New York: Viking Press, 1975; Penguin paperback, 1996, page 4. The reference to the nightmare may be compared with James Joyce’s
Ulysses:
‘History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’ James Joyce,
Ulysses,
Paris: Shakespeare & Co., 1922; Penguin edition of the 1960 Bodley Head edition, 1992, page 42.

INTRODUCTION: AN EVOLUTION IN THE RULES
OF THOUGHT
    1. Michael Ignatieff, Interview with Isaiah Berlin, BBC 2, 24 November, 1997. See also: Michael Ignatieff,
Isaiah Berlin,
London: Chatto & Windus, 1998, p. 301.
    2. Martin Gilbert,
The Twentieth Century: Volume I, 1900–1933,
London: HarperCollins, 1997.
    3. Claude Lévi-Strauss and Didier Eribon,
De Prés et de Loin,
translated as
Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Paula Wissig (translator), Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988, page 119.
    4. John Maddox,
What Remains to Be Discovered,
London: Macmillan, 1998, Introduction, pages 1— 21.
    5.