Portrayal of writers II

Saul Bellow

Evaluation at Award Presentation Ceremony

Enjoying parallel popularity with Hemingway and Faulkner, Saul Bellow is the most important writer of post-war America. The following is the repsentation speech by Karl Ragnar Gierow, of the Swedish Academy.

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, When Saul Bellow published his first book, the time had come for a change of climate and generation in American narrative art. The so-called hard-boiled style, with its virile air and choppy prose, had now slackened into an everyday routine, which was pounded out automatically; its rigid paucity of words left not only much unsaid, but also most of it unfelt, unexperienced. Bellow’s first work, Dangling Man (1944), was one of the signs portending that something else was at hand.

In Bellow’s case, emancipation from the previous ideal style took place in two stages. In the first, he reached back to the kind of perception that had found its already classic guides in Maupassant, Henry James, and Flaubert, perhaps, most of all. The masters he followed expressed themselves as restrainedly as those he turned his back on. But the emphasis was elsewhere. What gave a story its interest was not the dramatic, sometimes violent action, but the light it shed over the protagonist’s inner self. With that outlook the novel’s heroes and heroines could be regarded, seen through and exposed, but not glorified. The anti-hero of the present was already on the way, and Bellow became one of those who took care of him.

Dangling Man, the man without a foothold, was thus a significant watchword to Bellow’s writing, and has, to no small extent, remained so. He pursued the line in his next novel, The Victim (1947) and, years later, with mature mastery in Seize the Day (1956). With its exemplary command of subject and form, this last novel has received the accolade as one of the classic works of our time.

But with the third story in this stylistically coherent suite, it is as if Bellow had turned back in order at last to complete something which he himself had already passed. With his second stage, the decisive step, he had already left this school behind him, whose disciplined form and enclosed structure gave no play to the resources of exhuberant ideas, flashing irony, hilarious comedy and burning compassion, which he also knew he possessed, and whose scope he must try out. The result was something quite new; Bellow’s own mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation with the reader – that too very entertaining – all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into 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.

First in the new phase came The Adventures of Augie March (1953). The very wording of the title points straight to the picaresque, and the connection is perhaps most strongly in evidence in this novel. But here Bellow had found his style, and the tone recurs in the following series of novels that form the bulk of his work: Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), Mr Sammler’s Planet (1970), and Humboldt’s Gift (1975). The structure is apparently loose-jointed, but for this very reason gives the author ample opportunity for descriptions of different societies; they have a rare vigour and stringency, and a swarm of colourful, clearly-defined characters against a background of carefully observed and depicted settings, whether it is the magnificent façades of Manhattan in front of the backyards of the slums and semi-slums, Chicago’s impenetrable jungle of unscrupulous businessmen intimately intertwined with efficient criminal gangs, or the more literal jungle in the depths of Africa, where the novel, Henderson the Rain King, the writer’s most imaginative expedition takes place. In a nutshell, they are all stories on the move, and, like the first book, are about a man with no foothold. But (and it is important to add this) a man who keeps on trying to find a foothold during his wanderings in our tottering world, one who can never relinquish his faith that the value of life depends on its dignity, not on its success, and that the truth must triumph at last, simply because it demands everything except – triumphs. That is the way of thinking in which Saul Bellow’s “anti-heroes” have their foundation and acquire their lasting stature.

索尔·贝娄

颁奖典礼上的评价

索尔·贝娄与海明威、福克纳齐名，是美国战后最重要的作家。以下是瑞典皇家科学院的卡尔·拉格纳尔·吉罗的报告。

国王陛下，殿下，当索尔·贝娄出版他的第一本书时，美国叙事艺术的气候和时代已经发生了变化。所谓的冷酷的风格，以其刚健的神气和波涛汹涌的散文，现在已经松弛成一个日常的例行程序，这是自动推出的；它的严格缺乏的话，不仅留下很多不安全，而且大部分还没有发表，没有经验。贝娄的第一部作品《悬空的人》（1944年），是预示着手边还有别的东西的标志之一。

在贝娄的案例中，从先前的理想风格中解放出来分为两个阶段。首先，他又回到了那种在莫泊桑、亨利·詹姆斯和福楼拜（也许最重要的是）已经找到经典指南的观念。他所追随的大师们表现得和他背弃的那些人一样克制。但重点是其他方面。使故事有趣的不是戏剧化的，有时是暴力的行为，而是它照亮了主人公的内心。有了这一观点，小说中的英雄和女主角可以被视为、看穿和曝光，但不能被美化。现在的反英雄已经上路了，贝娄成了照顾他的人之一。

悬空的人，这个没有立足之地的人，因此是贝娄写作的一个重要的口号，而且在很大程度上仍然如此。他在他的下一部小说《受害者》（1947年）中追寻了这条路线，几年后，他在《占领日》（1956年）中有了成熟的掌握。最后一部小说以其对主题和形式的典型把握，被誉为我们这个时代的经典作品之一。

但在这套风格连贯的套房里，有了第三个故事，贝娄似乎已经转过身来，最终完成了他自己已经走过的事情。在他的第二个阶段，即决定性的一步，他已经把这所学校抛在了身后，这所学校纪律严明，结构封闭，没有发挥他知道他拥有的令人振奋的思想、闪现的讽刺、搞笑的喜剧和燃烧的同情心的资源，以及他必须尝试的范围。其结果是一种全新的东西：贝娄自己混合了丰富的毕加索小说和对我们文化的微妙分析，娱乐冒险，戏剧性的悲剧情节，以及与读者之间的哲学对话，这些都是由一位具有机智的语言和佩内特的评论员发展而来的——太有趣了。对驱使我们采取行动或阻止我们采取行动的外部和内部复杂情况的洞察力进行评级，这可以称为我们这个时代的困境。

新阶段的第一个阶段是奥吉·马奇（1953年）的冒险。标题的措辞直接指向了流浪汉，这一联系在这部小说中可能是最有力的证据。但在这里，贝娄找到了自己的风格，并且在以下构成他大部分作品的一系列小说中，他的语气重现：亨德森雨王（1959年）、赫尔佐格（1964年）、萨姆勒先生的星球（1970年）和洪堡的礼物（1975年）。这种结构显然是松散连接的，但正因为如此，作者有了充分的机会来描述不同的社会；他们有着罕见的活力和严格性，在仔细观察和描绘的背景下，有着丰富多彩、清晰界定的人物群，无论这是曼恩宏伟的正面安坦在贫民窟和半贫民窟的后院前，芝加哥的无耻商人密不可分的丛林，与高效的犯罪团伙紧密交织在一起，或是在非洲深处更为直白的丛林，小说《雨中之王亨德森》，作者最具想象力的探险活动就发生在那里。简言之，它们都是动态的故事，就像第一本书，是关于一个没有立足点的人的。但是（重要的是要加上这一点），一个在我们这个摇摇欲坠的世界里徘徊的人，一个永远不能放弃自己的信念的人，即生命的价值取决于它的尊严，而不是它的成功，真理最终必须胜利，因为它需要一切，除了胜利。这是索尔·贝娄的“反英雄”思想的基础，并获得了他们的持久地位。