Abstract

A consistent feature of Saul Bellow’s fiction is the protagonist’s encounter with one or more teaching figures. Dialogue with such individuals prompts the Bellovian protagonist to reject his current state of selfhood as inadequate and provokes him to re-form as a new person. The teacher figure offers a better self to which the protagonist is attracted; or, more frequently in Bellow, the protagonist is repelled by both his teacher and his own current state to form a new, previously unrepresented self. This thesis argues that Bellow’s self inherits and modifies the perfectionist philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, in a literary reinterpretation that parallels Stanley Cavell’s philosophical revaluation of the American Transcendentalists. In Emerson and Thoreau, and in Cavell’s reading of perfectionism, the self is attracted onward only by a better representation of selfhood in another, while Bellow’s self may also be, and often is, provoked by a repellent other to inhabit a new form of selfhood. This thesis takes the evolution of selfhood in Bellow to be structured by travel. In The Adventures of Augie March, Augie’s movement between selves is impelled by conversation with teacher figures and paralleled by his unending journeys. In Herzog, Herzog’s self-transformations and travels are provoked by reading and writing, and by the ecstasy of loss revealed to him through apostrophic conversations with the dead and absent in a series of unsent and mental letters. Letter-writing, the provocation for Herzog’s self-perfection, becomes a form of travel in Herzog. This thesis further argues that Bellow’s travelling self is a critical response to two poles of modern subjectivity, structured by European mythologies of travel: Bellow’s fiction is critical, first, of a Hegelian, egoist mode of selfhood structured after the Odyssey; but equally critical of examples of Levinasian openness to the Other, patterned on Abraham’s exile. Bellow does not accept either the Odyssean or the Abrahamic mode of selfhood on its own, recognizing oppressive possibilities in both. Travelling selfhood in Bellow, initiated by conversation with others, both fuses and rereads Odyssean and Abrahamic constructs within a new, but perpetually unfinished American mode of self perfection