G. Neelakantan, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur*
Saul Bellow's The Dean's December[1] is in many ways an apocalyptic novel. It depicts a world in the grip of spiritual crisis. It has a prophetlike narrator who believes in the power of the word to transform the world. The narrative is clearly driven by the narrator's opposition to "existing spiritual and political practices …,"[2] an opposition that plays a significant role in structuring and guiding the central theme of the novel. This essay seeks to analyze The Dean's December as an apocalyptic text that articulates the author's neoconservative take on the urban decay and the racial conflicts that characterized America in the 1970s and early 1980s.
To understand Bellow's novel The Dean's December, it is necessary to examine the author's notion of apocalyptic representation and to develop a critical approach to the specific problems associated with apocalyptic writing, which are in the foreground of the novel. This essay addresses the following questions: In what way does Bellow differ from his contemporary apocalyptic writers including Bernard Malamud, Thomas Pynchon, John Updike, and Don DeLillo?[3] What are the politics of Bellow's apocalypse? And what unique contribution does Bellow make to the apocalyptic representation of his time?
Since Bellow's stance in The Dean's December conforms in various ways to the American tradition of apocalyptic writing, it is interesting to speculate how his apocalypse is different from that of his fellow writers. This would help us to understand better Bellow's artistic vision as well as the social and cultural forces that shape his complex literary sensibility. In Malamud's fiction, apocalyptic overtones arise out of the absurd in our experience, the human inability to check the appetites of the self. Updike recreates a postapocalyptic world that shows human beings inventing reality all over in larger-than-life postures. DeLillo and Pynchon, preeminently postmodern in outlook, project a technologized world overwhelmed by entropic stasis, trauma, violence, and a pervading sense of waste. If Bellow's apocalypse shares some of the concerns of these writers, it also differs both in rigor and in the mode employed in engaging the question of whether the human race will eventually prevail. The Dean's December boldly foregrounds this meditative strain. Interestingly, Bellow's prophetic turn in this novel has a parallel in Allan Bloom's jeremiad on the state of the American academy in The Closing of the American Mind.[4] A neoconservative like Bellow, Bloom argues that the political and social crisis in contemporary America has its genesis in the crisis of the academy.
The Dean's December clearly marks a shift from Bellow's characteristic stance of dismissing apocalyptic views summarily. The investigation of Bellow's apocalyptic take and the symbolic tropes that structure the narrative assume significance in view of Bellow's polemics with the apocalyptic modernist thinkers. Bellow's eponymous protagonist Herzog, for instance, viewing the contemporary intellectual landscape, has this to say: "We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and the rest of it … we love apocalypses too much, and crisis ethics and florid extremism with all its thrilling language. Excuse me, Herzog concludes. I've had all the monstrosity that I want."[5] This is Bellow's characteristic antiapocalyptic rhetoric, and it is often found in his fiction as well as essays and interviews. Paradoxically, however, Bellow belies such facile rhetoric in his vivid fictional portrayals of protagonists who are overwhelmed by despair, thanks to the powerful life-denying tendencies in the Bellovian naturalistic city. The protagonists' experiences when examined signify the presence of a moral vacuum in the contemporary world. It is this dichotomy in Bellow's fictional vision that Malcolm Bradbury focuses on in noting that "for a writer critical of modern apocalyptics, his own work is remarkably dominated by apocalyptic views of history."[6]
The Dean's December articulates a forceful plea to face up to the "real reality"[7] of the human condition manifested in Chicago and Bucharest, and unabashedly shows how it warrants cultural despair. The moral landscape that is recreated for the reader through Bellow's descriptions is evocative of the biblical cities--Sodom and Gomorrah--consigned to destruction. While Corde initially refuses to concede that he is an apocalyptic, he is later partly convinced, especially when Dewey Spangler, his former schoolmate and currently a leader in the media, takes issue with him on the apocalyptic tone of his articles: "It was when you got apocalyptic about it," Spangler tells Corde, "that you lost me: the dragon coming out of the abyss, the sun turning black like sackcloth, the heavens rolled up like a scroll, Death on the ashen horse. Wow! You sounded like the Reverend Jones of Jonestown" (DD 243). There is a definite correlation between the apocalyptic view of the cities presented in this novel and the prevailing urban decay in the America of the 1970s and early 1980s. However, Corde would argue that he is only "disinter[ing] the reality" and "represent[ing] it anew as art would represent it" (DD 124). Assuredly, it is an article of faith with Corde, as it was with Matthew Arnold, that it is only poetry that can eventually minister to one's anguished soul in a lonely universe. Corde expresses his conviction thus: "perhaps only poetry has the strength to rival the attractions of narcotics, the magnetism of TV, the excitements of sex, or the ecstasies of destruction" (DD 186-87).
In his poetic soul, Corde nurtures an idea that resists the turn to discourse. But like the seals of apocalypse, it has to bide time for final disclosure. Bellow's narrator expresses it thus: "Corde did have an idea, certainly, but he kept it shrouded. It belonged to a group of shrouded objects which he promised himself one day to examine. But on that day a philosophical light would have to shine. Otherwise it wouldn't do to remove the shrouds" (DD 97). These "shrouded objects" in Corde's consciousness include human relationships, particularly difficult ones, like his relationship with his cousin Detillion and brother-in-law Zaehner.
Forever interrogating false consciousness and seeking "human agreement" (DD 18), Corde surveys his native Chicago with the aim of gauging "the mood of the country, the inner city, urban decay, [and] political questions" (DD 196). Admittedly "more pictorial than analytical" (DD 196), the descriptions of the cityscape in his exposé derive from his intellectual preoccupation with the "great sources" (DD 164)--Baudelaire and Rilke, Montesquieu and Vico, Machiavelli and also Plato (DD 163). Bellow, like Bloom, privileges an ideal community of men in the Platonic mode who meditate on "the permanent concerns of mankind."[8]
The apocalyptic narrative in The Dean's December is evocatively reminiscent of the apocalypses of the Romantic poets, notably Blake.[9] The novel also draws considerably on Friedrich Nietzsche's doctrine of nihilism.[10] Bellow's vivid narrative conjures up Corde as a prophet desiring the spiritual rejuvenation of the human community. Given Corde's aim of "recover[ing] the world that is buried under the debris of false description or nonexperience" (DD 240; emphasis added), he qualifies supremely for being an apocalyptic in a most fundamental way. Does the etymology of the word "apocalypse" not hold out a sense similar to Corde's own mission in life?
Imbued with Emersonian idealism, Bellow's protagonist battles a world that is irredeemably corrupt. The pessimistic tone of the novel arises out of the horrendous vision of the cities. The Dean's December focuses on two cities that share the same malaise: Chicago and Bucharest. Deploying the "sub-savage" (DD 154) machinery of power, both these cities are inimical to all human values. Bellow brings to bear on this novel a vision of a universal wasteland encompassing both the "rotten West" (DD 133) and the iron-curtained East.
The Dean's December opens on an atmosphere of twilight darkness in Bucharest where the Cordes go to attend on the dying Valeria, mother of Minna Corde. Ironically "an ideal archaic symbol of chaos,"[11] this darkness is unmistakably symptomatic of death that holds sway in the Communist East. Haunted by a "livid-death moment" (DD 9) at dusk, Bucharest strikes Corde as macabre with its power to annihilate all human values. Adopting egalitarianism in principle, the Communist government strangely keeps its citizens perpetually in want. The typical city scenario emerges from the following description: "Aged women rose at four to stand in line for a few eggs, a small ration of sausages, three or four spotted pears. Corde had seen the shops and the produce, the gloomy queues--brown, gray, black, mud colors, and an atmosphere of compulsory exercise in the prison yard" (DD 56).
Familiar as he is with the contents of the mail his wife receives from the Civil Rights Organization, Corde has gained "a fairly complete idea of how things are in this part of the world--forced labor, mental hospitals for dissenters, censorship" (DD 67). His experience in Bucharest bears witness to the violations the communist hegemony is charged with. Valeria and her husband were earlier party members, and, subsequent to her husband's death, Valeria had even held a ministerial portfolio. It is the estrangement from the communist regime that compels her later to send away Minna, her daughter, to the United States.
At Bucharest, the Cordes are even denied the right to visit Valeria regularly in the party hospital. The sense of human community dissipates under the state's tacit directive that all citizens turn surveillant. Iaonna, Valeria's concierge, for example, is herself an informer. Corde suspects that the praises Valeria's sister Tanti Gigi heaps on Iaonna are far from genuine, but he understands that such hypocrisies are necessary to survive in the police state.
The situation is no better in Chicago, a city deeply mired in racial conflict. Despite Bellow's sympathetic cameos of Rufus Ridpath, the jailor, and Winthrop, a former hoodlum who runs the detoxification center at Chicago, one often detects a note of acrimony in his portrayal of African-Americans. A professor of journalism and dean at a Chicago college, Corde is dismayed by the state of moral corruption in Chicago's social institutions and investigates the matter for The Harper. Corde's articles, in which he takes an apocalyptic tone and implicates others for being callous about the atrocities committed in the prisons and hospitals, earn him much displeasure and ill will. To compound the situation, his efforts to bring before the law the assassins of Rick Lester, a married student of the college, assume a racial dimension. Corde suspects the involvement of two African-Americans in the murder of Lester. One of these, Riggie Hines, is a prostitute. In their misplaced enthusiasm to espouse the cause of the underdog, both his nephew and his cousin join forces and rouse racial antipathy toward Corde. As his luck would have it, the media that had previously suffered his vitriolic criticism joins his detractors. It is under such adverse circumstances that Corde leaves for Bucharest to attend on the ailing Valeria. While immersed in the social and cultural conservatism of the early 1980s, The Dean's December articulates the "Cold War anxieties and perceptions of domestic social breakdown during the 1960s."[12]
With its horror and malevolence far from neutralized, the Chicago of The Dean's December becomes in Corde's metaphorical imagination "the Gobi desert" (DD 235). In this "feverland" (DD 152), primitivism reigns supreme. Attending the birthday celebrations of an acquaintance's dog, Corde muses on the "decadence" (DD 290) of the times and sees in the dog "the Great Beast of the Apocalypse" (DD 290). In Corde's mind, his brother-in-law, Zaehner, signifying crass materialism and raw sensuality, becomes conflated with the beast (DD 99).
Investigating the atrocities perpetrated in the prisons of Chicago, Corde uncovers drug trafficking, rackets, rape, violence, and torture. The situation, perhaps, warrants the doubt that the "Antichrist" (DD 260) is already descended on this city. The self-conscious invocation of the figure of the Antichrist is patently apocalyptic. It makes one wonder why Bellow, being Jewish himself, invokes the figure of the Antichrist. Perhaps, it serves Bellow's essential need to reach out to the larger American readership, which has presumably internalized the strident moral outlook of Christian apocalyptic thinking in its psyche. Past enduring, many of the fear-ridden inhabitants of Chicago flee it to settle down elsewhere. The narrator suggests the motive behind the apocalyptic vein of Corde's articles: "It wasn't as if Corde had made a beeline for the blight. Nor did he write about it because of the opportunities it offered for romantic despair; nor in a spirit of middle-class elegy or nostalgia. He was even aware that the population moving away from blighted areas had improved its condition in new neighborhoods. But also it was fear that had made it move. Also, it was desolation that was left behind, endless square miles of ruin" (DD 165).
The all-consuming drive for sex in Bellow's fictional America underscores the death of moral values in the contemporary world. Sex is often associated with sickness and death in this novel. Corde repeatedly refers to the "sexual epidemic" (DD 43) breaking out in the West. From his own experiences, he is aware of the dangers of the sexual siege. Though there is no way of ascertaining why Lucas Ebry and the colored prostitute (suspects in the murder of Lester, the white student) were in Lester's house, Corde suspects that they were there at Lester's insistence for sex. Similarly, the criminals in Chicago prisons are depicted as being guilty of heinous sexual crimes. Invariably subjected to homosexual rape, their victims, if they survive, become psychic wrecks. Given to philandering, Max Detillion, Corde's cousin, is portrayed as a "personification of Eros" (DD 98). Corde, however, realizes that his own complicity in sexual promiscuity is becoming a collective historical phenomenon. If Lester represents "modern consciousness" (DD 131), Valeria stands for "unity of consciousness."[13] This symbolism is further borne out in her last gift of an antique pocket watch to Corde, "an emblem of time running backwards as well as forwards."[14]
In its mindless hostility to life, Chicago qualifies as a city of destruction and death. While violent crime and death are overlooked here, pity is often lavished on the criminals, paradoxically, for their psychological and social maladjustments. To cite an instance, a psychopath named Mitchell abducts and kills a woman after repeatedly raping her. Mitchell's lawyer wants his defendant condoned because "certain human and social failures" (DD 201) have a bearing on his crime. Corde is disturbed to find that human life has no significance for such self-appointed humanists. In the prosecution of the accused in Lester's murder trial, all concerned prefer to downplay the enormity of the crime in order to pre-empt possible reprisals from the African-Americans. In seeking justice for the victim, Corde makes himself unacceptable to the whites, who have their own vested interests in hushing up the case. Bellow's politics of cultural apocalypse insists on delineating his neoconservative protagonist Corde as a victim. Even when one agrees with Bellow on his catalogued facts, there is an uneasy feeling that the big picture never really emerges in the text. The African-American community in Chicago, it appears, is overtly engaged in a war of self-destruction in trying to break out of what Gregory S. Jay has elsewhere tellingly summed up as the oppression of "economic colonization" and "lack of access to legal upward mobility."[15] Bellow projects a stereotypical image of African-Americans by "ignor[ing] the absent cause" of their poverty and lack of social mobility and by "operat[ing] exclusively with causes and effects that are clearly labeled."[16]
While American society ails from its excesses, East European society as depicted in Romania suffers from an impoverished sense of human dignity, owing to the regimentation of organized communism. In Corde's view, the human race is being smothered by false consciousness. If the Ceausescu regime in Romania bans free speech, the liberal democracy in America endorses excessive empty discourse. In Corde's view, Dewey Spangler, the media guru and "world-communicator" (DD 24), is a specialist in "the debris of false description" (DD 241). Bellow's description of a world in the stranglehold of manufactured discourse has a parallel in Kaliyug, the apocalyptic age in Hindu mythology, where "all texts will be considered Sastras"[17] irrespective of their merit. The Dean's December indicts the political systems of both East and West for bringing misery on the human community.
Corde's apocalyptic framing of Chicago is inspired by his fervor to evoke among his fellow citizens a passion for order, moral clarity, and faith in the human community. Assuming the role of "the moralist of seeing" (DD 125), Corde in his Harper articles espouses "the noble ideas of the West in their American form" (DD 125). While his nephew refers to him as a "mastermind nemesis" (DD 47), Corde perceives himself as a "Welsh prophet" (DD 79). Corde believes that it is not wholly impossible to check the dangerous trend in Chicago and pave the way for its amelioration. Even though Chicago is past endurance, he refuses to contemplate settling down in a place with less vexation. Knowing full well that "a man without a city is either a beast or a god" (DD 226), Corde prefers to stay in Chicago and fight his lonely battles as a dignified, responsible human being.
Meditating on what prompted him to write those morally indignant articles about Chicago for The Harper, Corde grasps that it was to gain a sense of the mood that predominated at the time the city was built. Like all great cities of the past, Chicago, it so strikes Corde, is a "centre of delusion and bondage, death" (DD 281). Surveying the city, Corde registers that it is a monstrous "wilderness" (DD 205). In a moment of intense despair, he ruminates: "Christ, the human curve had sunk down to base level, had gone itself. The visible one didn't bear looking at" (DD 188). Convinced that human destiny is imperiled, Corde in his Chicago articles urges the readers to look inward and purge their consciousness. "But for a fellow like me, the real temptation of abyssifying is to hope that the approach of the 'last days' might be liberating, might compel us to reconsider deeply, earnestly. In these last days we have a right and even a duty to purge our understanding" (DD 274). Bellow's eschatology perfectly meets Frank Kermode's definition of the phenomenon as one that is " stretched over the whole of history, [and] the end is present at every moment."[18] The apocalyptic tone evoked by Bellow's narrator is clearly symptomatic of a certain post-1960s discouragement that was so pervasive in the seventies and the eighties. Kevin Philips graphically captures the dominant mood of defeat that characterized America in the 1970s and 1980s: "The American belief in Manifest Destiny honed by centuries of westward advance toward the Pacific and then by over a half-century of global advance from Manila Bay to V-J Day, was shaken during the 1970s much as Germany's self-image was after November 1918."[19] Even if pessimistic, Corde's vision nonetheless embodies an intense longing to seize the real behind appearances. Internalizing the Hegelian understanding "that the spirit of the time is in us by nature" (DD 240), Corde reflects: "we'd better deal with whatever it is that's in us by nature, and I don't see people being willing to do that. What I mainly see is the evasion" (DD 240). This choiceless awareness on Corde's part is redemptive in that it ensures him a sense of liberation.
The crematorium scene in Bucharest and the closing scene at Mount Palomar Observatory in America, with their crucial symbolic significations, provide metacommentary on the apocalyptic theme of the novel. Accompanying Valeria's coffin down the stairs of the crematorium, Corde is affected by the oppressive heat and wonders if the cold of the freezing dome overarching the crematorium is preferable to the heat down below. His description of the journey recreates the "bottomless pit" of the biblical apocalypse. Dramatized this way, death and its allied emotions become sutured in Corde's imagination. "Corde's breast, as narrow as a ladder, was crowded with emotions--fire, death, suffocation, put into an icy hole or, instead, crackling in a furnace. Your last options. They still appeared equally terrible. How to choose between them" (DD 212). If it benumbs him, this "death rehearsal" (DD 214) serves as an epiphany in which he becomes aware of his own mortality. The narrator's conflation of death with a larger apocalyptic destiny of mankind in the novel is in tune with apocalyptic theory: "we gain understanding [of] our mortal condition from the mythic structure of apocalypse, which imposes shape upon human time and suggests a cosmic context for our individual ends."[20] Corde's love for Valeria, which fortified him against the inhuman cold and heat of the crematorium, constitutes a stay against death, for love has a reality beyond the finality of death. The crematorium scene touches upon an important aspect of Bellow's eschatological imagination. If there is any one way to counter death, it is by hallowing the loved object in one's memory.
At Mount Palomar Observatory, Corde views the heavens from the end of a telescope and finds the stars hazed by atmospheric disturbances. The starry skies appearing in a nebula suggest that the human race is far from attaining spiritual clarity. Knowing the haziness of the skies for "distortions of the atmosphere" (DD 306), Corde reasons: "And what he saw with his eyes was not even the real heavens" (DD 306). Bellow, perhaps, is positing hope for humanity in that it might yet glimpse the true and the real. Like the prophet of the biblical apocalypse, John, who deciphers heaven's mysteries for the benefit of his fellow beings, Corde too tries to help his fellow citizens to cut through modern distractions into the heart of life, even if he makes the self-deprecating comment on his role that he is merely "crawling between heaven and earth" (DD 221).
As behooves his name, Corde forever tries to establish bonds and connections with his fellow human beings.[21] It is only appropriate to view him as a "cosmic interpreter" and "poetic astrologer," one who "had been sent down to mind the outer world, on a mission of observation and notation," as Matthew Roudane observes.[22] In delineating his protagonist as one who cares for, and is concerned about, the destiny of the human race, Bellow asserts that humanity endures on the strength of individuals like Corde.
In many ways a profoundly disturbing novel, The Dean's December meditates on the self-destructive proclivities of human beings that have almost paralyzed life in contemporary urban America. Bellow does Corde justice in assuring him personal redemption. But there is no suggestion that he has a similar reward for the society he depicts. In the final analysis, Saul Bellow's apocalypse in The Dean's December, if it aims to discover what is "eternal in man" (DD 281), projects a sad vision of horror inspired by the reality of "inner slums" (DD 205) in human beings.
The Dean's December is an apocalyptic text that articulates the author's neoconservative reaction to the urban decay and racial conflicts that characterized America in the 1970s and early 1980s. Bellow's politics of cultural apocalypse is driven by a clear racial discourse. Bellow's prophetlike narrator, Corde, tries tirelessly to redeem Chicago, a city on the brink of destruction. For a writer impatient with the apocalyptic worldview of the modernists, Bellow takes recourse in this novel to apocalyptic thinking inspired by the horror of decadent Chicago. Bellow's apocalyptic representation of his times, as it emerges in this novel, is unique in that it is steeped in the stark reality of decaying cities and racial traumas in contemporary America. The Dean's December emerges as a significant text in the American tradition of apocalyptic writing and as a crucial text in Bellow's canon.
Footnotes
* I sincerely thank James Berger and R. K. Gupta for their insightful comments and suggestions.
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1. Saul Bellow, The Dean's December (1982; New York: Penguin, 1984). All subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text following the abbreviation DD.
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2. Lois P. Zamora, Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary United States and Latin American Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 2.
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3. Bernard Malamud, God's Grace (1982; New York: Penguin, 1995); Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965; London: Vintage-Random, 2000); John Updike, S (1988; New York: Penguin, 1989) and In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996; New York: Penguin, 1996); Don DeLillo, Underworld (1997; London: Picador-Macmillan, 1998).
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4. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).
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5. Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964; New York: Penguin, 1983) 317.
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6. Malcolm Bradbury, Saul Bellow (London: Methuen, 1982) 23.
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7. Matthew C. Roudane, "An Interview with Saul Bellow," Contemporary Literature XXV, No. 3 (1984): 270.
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8. Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind 19.
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9. Most Bellow critics note Blake's influence on this novel. Allan Chavkin, "The Dean's December and Blake's The Ghost of Abel," Saul Bellow Journal 13.1 (1995): 22-26; Chavkin and Feyl Chavkin, "Saul Bellow's Martyrs and Moralists: The Role of Writer in Modern Society," Saul Bellow and the Struggle at the Center, ed. Eugene Hollahan (New York: AMS Press, 1996) 13-24.
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10. Judie Newman, "Bellow and Nihilism: The Dean's December," Studies in the Literary Imagination 17.2 (1984): 111-22.
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11. John R. May, Toward a New Earth: Apocalypse in the American Novel (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1972) 9.
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12. James Berger, After the End: Representations of Apocalypse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) 7.
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13. Robert F. Kiernan, Saul Bellow (New York: Continuum, 1989) 180.
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14. Kiernan, Saul Bellow 180-81.
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15. Gregory S. Jay, American Literature and the Culture Wars (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997) 124.
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16. Robert Boyers, Atrocity and Amnesia: The Political Novel Since 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) 25.
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17. "Sastras" means any of the sacred books of Hinduism. See Nath M. Dutt, Vishnupuranam (Varanasi: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, 1972) 428.
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18. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968) 26.
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19. Kevin P. Philips. Post-Conservative America: People, Politics, and Ideology in a Time of Crisis (New York: Random House, 1982) 160.
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20. Lois P. Zamora, The Apocalyptic Vision in America: Interdisciplinary Essays on Myth and Culture (Ohio: Bowling Green University Press, 1982) 132.
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21. Kiernan, Saul Bellow 175, and Ellen Pifer, Saul Bellow Against the Grain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990) 166.
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22. Matthew C. Roudane, "Crie de Coeur: The Inner Reality of Saul Bellow's The Dean's December," Studies in the Humanities 11.2 (1984), rpt. in Saul Bellow in the 1980s: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Gloria Cronin and L. H. Goldman (East Lansing: Michigan University Press, 1989) 260.
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