In seventh grade I knew a boy named Augie. He went by his middle name but of course instructors would always read names off their official lists and his secret never had a real chance of survival. Outside of being the only August I have ever met and preferring the name Virgil to Augie I don’t remember any other interesting detail about him. After all these years I have not met another Virgil.
I am ashamed to say that I have never read a book by Saul Bellow. How can a literate American read for so many years without touching this author? It is a good time for Saul Bellow and for a book that promises adventure with a character named Augie.
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Well, I can’t say I’ve ever known an Augie (other than Augie Doggie), but I have known and worked with a Virgil.
I have, in the deep and dark distant past, read other Bellow books: Henderson the Rain King and Humbolt’s Gift. Both were–if I recall correctly–wonderful. But at the time I was probably not sufficiently experienced to appreciate the nuances worked into what Hitchin’s calls in the introduction Bellow’s “demotic American English.”
Once again we are presented with a narrator who is telling us his story . . . I won’t mention the “R” word just yet . . . and I am impressed by the span and depth of the narrator’s knowledge. On the first page alone, a reference to Heraclitus and his philosophy of character as well as a recollection of an embroidered cushion with the worked design showing “a Berber aiming a rifle at a lion.” What adult looking back on his/her situation at age 9 can recall that accurately the design on a cushion? Did he, at 9, know what a Berber was? On the second page we have the whole discussion of Simon’s “English schoolboy notions of honor;” something Augie could not know of from a critical perspective without some experience. On the third page there is the reference to Timur, also known as Tamberlaine, the steppe warrior who established an empire in 14th Century inner-Asia, as a means of characterizing the way Grandma Lausch played chess (brutally, strategically).
And the list goes on . . .
Clearly we are getting clues as to the range of Augie’s adventures, whether or not we will be told of all of them.
Mr Bellow hands us a tidy clue at the beginning of chapter 4:
We are reading wonderfully detailed descriptions of the influences in Augie’s life and through those we learn more of Augie; it is a sort of bildungsroman-by-proxy. The following paragraph includes an interesting passage:
Is it our imaginations, those fears of exposure and punishment, that keep us on a moral path? Augie is stubborn in acquiring a sense of consequences, though these warnings and predictions are Lauschs’ and not necessarily proleptic. Note how these consequences are anthropomorphic — they aren’t being prepared, they are preparing, as if those consequences are lined up as well.
Here is a thought to consider in relation to your question and Augie’s notion of influences and consequences: at every step in life, choices are made; those choices have consequences which lead to influences and further choices; and those choices in their turn lead to others, and so on. But at each point, there are also choices NOT made, paths not taken, influences and consequences not experienced. How many of these paths criss-cross but never intersect? How many different paths eventually meet and lead to the same end?
I would suggest that Augie is, like Candide and Tom Jones and other picaros, drifting from event to event, absorbing each event and the lessons learned from them and moving on to the next crossroads with no particular path in mind. It is only in retrospect, as Augie sees it from his narrating vantage point looking back, that his life appears to be something other than a string of loosely connected, unintentional events, along with their associated consequences and influences.
And this leads to another point I’d like consider here: Augie’s narrating voice belies his temporal position and experience level relative to the events narrated and persons described. Unlike the voice created by James Joyce for Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which matures as Stephen matures, Augie’s voice is consistently “adult,” from the beginning. And as he ages in the told tale, his voice remains consistently the same. His descriptions of the characters encountered are full of allusions to the classics and the related value judgments only an adult can make based on experience and education.
What/who is Augie March that he feels compelled to tell us his story?
Winging its way to you under cover of an eMail is an article from a recent issue of Science which relates to the motivations for “moral” behavior. It was sent to me via a listserv which is focused on Root Cause Analysis and Human Performance Improvement. It may have some relevance to our discussion.
You have observed elsewhere about Augie’s references to Greek mythology; it happens later (Croesus at the start of chapter 7) and I suspect it will happen again. Let’s hope that one of his adventures is some classical education. I am more than happy to mention unreliability, our favorite Pandora’s box, because these aren’t just simple asides but rather comparisons to detailed historical relationships.
While waiting for Augie to educate himself, it is no bad thing to enjoy Bellow’s articulate style.
What do you suppose “double-toddle” means?
Also noted in this paragraph is how Augie categorizes his social classes — grinds, memorizing eccentrics, gangsters — as an introduction to Joe Gorman. Augie seems to be guided by his lack of membership in any of these categories. It isn’t that he identifes with the gangsters, it is that it was easier for the gangsters to take [him] for one of them. He has yet to acquire that sense of consequences.
And I would be remiss if I didn’t comment on this synecdoche phrasing instead of an outright “yes I will.” On this date, Glen officially gave up his Everyman status.
Have you noticed that we don’t know much about Augie’s parents, especially his father? We have some clues like this one from Einhorn,
So where is the father? It is apparent Augie’s mother was not much of an influence or, at least, was completely overshadowed by the formidable Grandma Lausch.
I am intrigued by your idea about “did not say no” as synecdoche. Had you not raised it, I never would have tumbled to it. The multiple levels of meaning which inhere to that statement, the shades of meaning in that simple negation of the negative response are “weighty.” The whole notion reminds me I once heard from someone that the Chinese do not really have a word for our “no.” Rather, their affirmative and negative responses translate as “yes” and “not yes.” It is as though they always want to leave a door open for negotiation. Extending that idea: Augie’s not having said “no” suggests (to me) that either he did not know how to say “no” to a character like Gorman (out of fear? but I sense Augie has no fear as we commonly think of it), or he did not want to immediately alienate Gorman, holding out for the chance to learn something new by experience, or—and this may be more likely given what we have learned of Augie’s character to this point—he was merely going along with the flow, not pushing the river, not swimming against it.
As for your “officially” giving up your Everyman status, you gave that up the day you agreed to undertake this project. How many others do you suspect are out there doing what we are doing? I’d bet you could count them on your hands and feet and still have digits left over.
But, then, I am something of an elitist . . .
I’m going to pull us back several 10s of pages for a description I want to put out for consideration:
This is by no means the first, nor the last, of the potent poetic descriptions Augie places before us (and we have to remember that it is Augie and not Bellow or some “other” who is giving us these descriptions). One aspect of what has struck me about these descriptive moments was raised by Hitchens (see Introduction, p. xiv, where he refers to “Bellow’s power of taxonomy and onomatopoeia”). These descriptions read almost as a chant, a song. They are metered and the images are amplified by the sounds of the words, not just the words themselves. A similar descriptive moment occurs a little farther down the page in the next paragraph, starting with the words “sharp financial hat, body-clasping suit.” Which points to another aspect of these prose poems that caught my attention: I am not sure whether I am seeing/hearing an echo of or a precursor to the Beat Poets. There is a lyricism here which conjures up comparisons with Ferlinghetti, Kerouac, and their ilk. Elsewhere I have observed that there is a similarity to Mailer, but Bellow makes Mailer look like a rank amateur.
Off on a bit of a Narrative Theory tangent here: consider the following moment from Augie’s musings on page 203:
What do you make of the shift in tense–from the past tense of telling to the present tense of commentary on the telling?
Augie is an intrusive narrator by all standards, though he has not yet–that I have seen–directly addressed his readers/auditors/interlocutors. This is, though, the closest he has come (as far as I recall) to stepping out of the narrated frame into the narrating frame to speak directly to us from the narrating present. Have you noted other such moments?
Here is another such moment, though it did not strike me that way at first; he is so good at slipping his metaleptic commentary into the flow of the story, commenting on Einhorn and his personality years after the fact, as though he was present now, at the telling:
Further clues as to the scope of Augie’s adventures and the “time of narration” . . .
At the opening of Chapter 12 we have this curious prolepsis which comes during Augie’s philosophical musings on the power of luxury as power, or an emblem of power:
So, we know that at some point later in the narrative, though we may never get to hear about it, Augie will find himself in Venice and Rome “passing along the side of majestic walls where great men once sat.” Have you felt what he is speaking of here? I felt something similar when we went to Japan, though I was unable to articulate it then. And, later, in England and Scotland, I got a whiff of it again. There are a few places here in the US where one gets that odd feeling of being just a piece of flotsam in the temporal whirl of history, of swimming alone and unnoticed in the rush of the temporal river. Our history is pretty much torn down and built upon anew. In Europe, at least within my experience, history surrounds and pervades everything that happens, including how the people relate to one another.
Later on the same page, we have an indication of Augie’s temporal perch from which he is telling the story:
When did “kamikazi” [sic] become a part of the American vocabulary? According to the OED, which spells it kamikaze (the spelling I am most familiar with), the first English language usage of the term is 1945. From this, we can be pretty well assured that Augie is speaking from some time after the end of World War II.
I enjoy sussing out textual clues like this which give us an inside look of the characters and narrators.
It might be subliminal that your second quote touched on free will; the speaker of German is Martin Luther (Hier stehe ich; ich kann nicht anders; Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise) in the context of the Protestant Reformation. There is a quote by Bellow that I hope to find again where he claims that the words to The Adventures of Augie March just came to him, he was just the receptacle and all that was required was to stay open to that flow like a bucket catching rainwater. It is only fitting that Augie struggles to find what drives him.
Another temporal clue is the great stock market crash of 1929 (chapter 7.)
Ah, chapter 13. I need a little help understanding the “now” of the narrator in the first sentence because this clearly takes a temporal jump. I believe the “now” is the now of the narrator but the second paragraph instigates confusion by using past tense to relate an incident that hasn’t happened in Augie’s life so far. We have an intruder.
There are a number of phrases on this page that are still tapping at the side of my brain but set the book down and look at it from a few feet away. The first paragraph covers intimacy begetting falsehood, what Christ meant when he called his mother “Woman”, and the challenge of needing to be both inside and outside the small circle that encompasses two or three heads in the same history of love. Bellow follows this with an allegory on ancestral fortitude of Neapolitans via the fishmonger (…sassing everybody about the circle of love that protects you.).
And then the last paragraph,
Did our intruder stop by to be philosophical or is this simply about human nature? That people change as they live and the dead die again and again in our memories until they are forgotten?
It appears as though we ran aground on the same narrational shoals on entering Chapter 13. Virtually all of the story elements and citations you mention I bumped up against as well. I would though argue that the “now” of the first sentence is the narrated now and not the narrating now. And I believe that is supported not only by the context of the entire opening sentence (“I was no child now, neither in age nor in protectedness, and I was thrown for fair on the free spinning world.” (311)) but also by the images that carry the condition forward in the paragraphs following.
I do, though, agree that what we have here is an intrusive narrator. Augie is speculating, albeit at some distance in time, philosophically on what he experienced that New Year’s Eve/Day. And he is mapping on to it his experiences we have yet to experience with him (though we have had hints of them) as corroborating evidence of the point he is making, that is
I read this as the imperative that we all have lived to-date: leave the home, the protection, the value system our parents were hoping to impose on us and make our own mark on the world. This is perhaps what is behind the unexplained “What Christ meant when he called his mother ‘Woman.’” My own mother died before I really got to know her as something other than my mother, but we were in the process of breaking those bonds. I, more than my brothers, had a glimpse of her as a human being instead of a “Mother.”
That last paragraph on the opening page also caught me off guard. I must have read it 6 times before I moved on. It warrants more thought than I can give it tonight . . .
Oh . . . and what is going on with the editor? I have not had these issues until tonight . . . all of the control codes that I had gotten used to are getting converted into <s and >s and nothing does what I expect it to do.
I am not through with thoughts on Chapter 13, but I wanted to get my impressions of the run of Chapter 14 up to the caesura on page 347.
It stikes me that in this first half of Chapter 14 we have an interesting glimpse of/into Augie’s character, but from a different perspective than we have had before. We have discussed in the past that much of what we know of Augie comes not from descriptions of himself (though we do get a little of that, now and again, as he intrudes on the flow of the story) but from the way in which he describes others and reports their manner of telling him of what he should and should not be/do. What we know of Augie-the-character is what Augie-the-narrator chooses to let us know, or what he lets slip when he isn’t paying close attention to how he is telling the story. This chapter changes that—or maybe my perception of it has changed (let me know what you think).
In his own opening words (“Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.” [1]), we have the suggestion that he opposes the suppression of information, or is at a minimum aware of the problems inherent to it; hence—in my view—his often lengthy and painfully detailed (accurate?) descriptions of the physical and mental appearances/attributes of others. We also have here, though, the beginnings of a situation which a Freudian advocate of the “talking cure” could make into a career-long case, particularly when we consider the logical opposite of Augie’s “theory” of suppression: a theory of disclosure. That is: there is no fineness or accuracy of disclosure; if you raise one issue you raise the surrounding issues as well. This idea of disclosure is supported to a large extent by the psych-lit (or lit-psych) criticism of the past which—among other things—draws parallels between the written text and the “talking cure” of psychoanalysis; it is the basis of most Freudian approaches to narrative texts.
By way of example, consider the unstated argument of Augie-the-narrator’s entire discourse that runs from page 339 to 347; the crux, though, occurs in the conversations reported on 345-347. Not only are we learning a lot about Thea’s character (and, I think, at a far deeper level than that of any character encountered earlier), we are getting a strong reflection of Augie-the-character’s character—in part because of what Thea is telling him of her read of his character, but also, and crucially, because of the way his discourse frames her as suffering from the very things she ascribes to him. His description of her disclosure of her own character by her describing his character serves as a disclosure of his own character at a level we have not seen up to this point (tough sentence to get out; probably tougher to read). This re-re-reflection is an intriguing variant of mise en abyme.
Just as we have to accept Augie-the-narrator’s version of everything . . . unless we want to bring up reliability.
Oh no you don’t — I think we may have to devote an entire post to reliability.
I will re-read the noted passages tonight but it brings to mind how easy it is to view this novel from several perspectives. There is the big-world perspective of Augie who passes through the stock market crash and the great depression at a time that is typically devoted to starting or building a career. He meets crooks, schemers, and hobos. There is also the micro view of the details of the characters who influenced him so much during of this time — his brother, grandma Lausch, Einhorn, Lucy, Mimi, and now Thea. It is interesting that the gender influences are split equitably but Thea is notable for her grand idea of “manning” an eagle. This juxtaposes nicely with the weak personality of his fiancee and it is moderately interesting to note the segue between Lucy and Thea is a strong character like Mimi. Did you really think that Augie would ever end up in the Magnus family?
Thea is a wonderful character for Bellow to have in his pocket for fleshing out our picaro. Now I am off to explore the idea of mise en ablyme.
On entering Chapter 15 a strange idea struck me (OUCH! That hurt . . .). But a little background first: at the NARRATIVE Conference this last April, one of the papers presented at the panel in/on which I was participating was grounded in the way authors sometimes use authorial forwards as a means of indicating to the reader—sometimes in a rather oblique way—just how the text is to be read; the primary example with which the presenter worked was Joseph Conrad’s forward to The Nigger of the Narcissus. After the papers were presented and questions were slow in coming from the attendees, I asked the presenter (Sara, a Canadian Grad Student) whether she had considered the openings provided by frame narrators, like the one in Heart of Darkness, as a sort of forward with clues as to how to read the framed story. I have heard from Sara since the conference and she is expanding her PhD Thesis to do just that.
But relevant to our discussion, consider the opening of each chapter of the book. Those seem to be the times Augie-the-narrator waxes most philosophical. Could those opening paragraphs of each chapter be a clue as to what the chapter contains and how to “read” it in the grand scheme of things? To pull that thread, I have this evening gone back through the book and flagged the beginning of each chapter. At some point I want to test this idea . . . but right now it is bed time.
Reading the above, triggered many thoughts. I will try to take them in the order they occurred to me.
The reflection on the conversation with Thea about observing and being observed: Chapter 15 is full of references back to that discussion (another variety of mise en abyme?).
“the gaze”: This has been a topic of much critical theory in the last 40+ years. It was “introduced” into critical discourse by the Continental Philosophers (mostly French) of the 60s and 70s, primarily dealing with visual art. Names associated with this are Foucault (philosopher) and Lacan (neo-Freudian psychologist).
The curse of Cain: There is much here in terms of literary threads; a lot of it associated with the classically Gothic novels of the late 18th and early 19th Centuries.
Jailers and the jailed: Foucault, again; this time his book Discipline and Punish, from which I first learned the word panopticon and its meaning. Jeremy Bentham devised a “modern” prison which was based on concentric rings: administration to the inside and cells to the ouside, so that from a single location the guards could observe all of the prisoners at all times. Clearly “the gaze” and the attendant power structures figure heavily here.
Self-consciousness: Jake Donohue in Under the Net. Recall how he always hated to be “observed.” And there are some interesting parallels between Under the Net and The Adventures of Augie March which might be worth sussing out.
I’m going to start by bringing up some theoretical issues about the final bits of the book that could/should lead us to further discussion about story related issues. This may actually take more than one post to fully suss out the ideas, but we may choose not to pull certain threads.
My focus is on how the book was concluded. It is fair to say the book had an ending—that is, the telling of the story by Augie-the-Narrator quite literally came to an end. But, I want to add that the story lacked closure, not that that is a bad thing; Augie-the-Character obviously continues on beyond our ken, not to mention the lives of all of those with whom his life-trajectory intersected. Narratologically speaking, it is important to point out that the TELLING came to an END and the STORY lacked full CLOSURE. Augie-the-Narrator could choose at some later date to take up the story threads again and weave a new tale of Augie-the-Character’s continuing development as a human being.
I did not see the Sopranos, not one single episode. But I have read a great deal of commentary on the ending of the last episode—some by distinguished literary theorists. I find it interesting that a lack of closure affects so many people adversely, though I do not find it surprising given our “big pink ribbon” entertainment industry. There appears to be a need on the part of a great many to KNOW “how a story ends.” But those readers/viewers are mistaking closure for the ending.
Were you “satisfied” with how the telling of Augie-the-Narrator came to an end? Did you achieve a sense of closure, however small?
For myself, the ending—as it approached—lacked the substance that was part of everything that went before. It felt rushed. Like maybe Stella was calling him to dinner as he was putting the finishing touches on the last bits that brought us (and narrated time) into synchronization with the time of narration.
It would have been nice to know what became of Millie and Arthur, of Thea, of the eagle, of his mother and brothers. All of these trajectories become what H. Porter Abbott would call “egregious gaps” in the telling of the story. They are elements of the narrative that will never be resolved no matter how hard the reader tries to figure them out. They contribute to the state of closure of the story.
So, Augie-the-Character and Augie-the-Narrator become one in the end; and perhaps there is some closure there.
I don’t know that I need a hard finish to be satisfied with end of a story—and yes, it did feel like the end of the telling more than the end of the story. Perhaps it is telling that one of the last few episodes are about Augie and the lunatic Basteshaw adrift at sea, forced time with a contemptuous man who has more ego than reason. Bellow might simply have felt that he had spent enough time with Augie and it was time for a background fade.
What is Bellow doing towards the end of this narrative? New character arcs are starting. Consider Jacqueline the maid, the business trip to Bruges, and the car breaking down. In one short telling, Bellow attracts us to a character who could just as easily have been left on the sideline. Augie’s story meanders through all these interesting characters and as likable as he becomes I find more respect for characters like Jacqueline, Thea, and Millie. If this were The Adventures of Thea Fenchel, how big a part would the Augie character have?
What makes the Augie character interesting is that he fails to change from that ethical conundrum taught to him early on by Grandma Lausch that lying is good to get what you need, that the end justifies the means. It would have been trite for Bellow to have Augie fall in love, marry Stella, AND step up ethically. It is fitting for Bellow to slow the beat and fade to black.
I do understand your feeling about how the ending lacked substance, however. It must be difficult for a writer to close a story as strongly as this one began.
You raise two interesting questions which are not only related to one another but fit nicely up against something I was working on just before we left to go on vacation (hints of which appear in some of my posts, as will become clear below). I’ll start with the last part of this opening and move into the first . . .
Around the middle of June, Tom Loe sent me a “literary question” posed to him by an MA candidate who was working on his final paper, and its defense. He was approaching a text by Barbara Kingsolver from an ethical, environmental, and narratological perspective. The bundle is “neater” than it sounds on initially stating it: there has been a move toward environmental criticism in lit-crit-theory; think of it as post-colonialism in terms of the exploitation of the environment and how “man” (the ardent feminists would have me over a barrel on that one) has exploited it, just as the “west” exploited the “east” for its own purposes (where are “west” and “east” on a sphere?). There has also been a move toward the “ethics of reading” and the “ethics of the text,” in terms of how the reader reacts morally to the text and how the text manipulates the reader into taking up certain moral perspectives, whether or not they fundamentally agree with them. Finally, as any good narratologist (is that in the moral sense or in the qualitative sense?) would tell you, none of these positions could be held or argued but for the storytelling aspects of the texts considered. So, the idea—while broad, perhaps even too broad for the type and size of paper considered—is not so far-fetched as it sounds.
Tom was soliciting my input because the student was looking for a snappy sounding narratological term to describe what he was reading in Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer as muliple, intersecting/interlocking plot lines (sort of . . .). After a couple of attempts to get him to clarify his position, well . . . you’ve seen Babel, and . . . suddenly it strikes me we have had this conversation already. Okay, so I think you know where I took my reply to the student . . . But, what does this have to do with the two questions you raised?
“What is Bellow doing towards the end of this narrative?” and “If this were The Adventures of Thea Fenchel, how big a part would the Augie character have?”
In my reading, Bellow (and even Augie-the-narrator, though we have to remember they are not the same “person”) is doing just what that student saw in the text he was reading: call it neo-super-realism, or intersecting/interlocking character trajectories, or interleaved plot lines, in my mind it all comes down to the same thing: Bellow is continuing to give us as good a textual mirroring of reality as he can create, given the limits of the medium; Augie and the other characters go on after the end of the telling, just as our lives go on as we ricochet from one casual/causal encounter to another. I am, for some reason, associating a discussion of this sort of thing with our reading of Under the Net, though for the life of me I cannot find it in the posts.
Augie-the-narrator is doing the same. And this intersects nicely with your second question. One could write The Adventures of Thea Fenchel. This is the sort of thing that Marie-Laure Ryan calls a transnarrative (I still have to send you that paper . . . tonight): a retelling of the same story differently or a telling of a/an (inter)related story. One could write the story of the Mexican family who maintained Casa Descuitada. Augie-the-character and Thea would appear there, but—as you rightly ask—in how large a role? And what about the intersections Augie-the-narrator does not tell us about? What role did they have in shaping him and the way he tells his own story?
Storytelling is all a matter of choices, much like the course of our own lives.