February 15, 1959

The Search for Symbols, a Writer Warns, Misses All the Fun and Fact of the Story

By SAUL BELLOW

In this age of ours serious people are more serious than they ever were, and lightness of heart like Mr. Forster’s is hard to find. To the serious a novel is a work of art; art has a role to play in the drama of civilized life; civilized life is set upon a grim and dangerous course--and so we may assume if we are truly serious that no good novelist is going to invite us to a picnic merely to eat egg salad and chase butterflies over the English meadows or through the Tuscan woods. Butterflies are gay, all right, but in them lies the secret of metamorphosis. As for eggs, life’s mystery hides in the egg. We all know that. So much for butterflies and egg salad.

It would be unjust to say that the responsibility for this sort of thing belongs entirely to the reader. Often the writer himself is at fault. He doesn’t mind if he is a little deeper than average. Why not?

Nevertheless deep reading has gone very far. It has become dangerous to literature.

“Why, sir,” the student asks, “does Achilles drag the body of Hector around the walls of Troy?” “That sounds like a stimulating question. Most interesting. I’ll bite,” says the professor. “Well, you see, sir, the ‘Iliad’ is full of circles--shields, chariot wheels and other round figures. And you know what Plato said about circles. The Greeks were all made for geometry.” “Bless your crew-cut head,” says the professor, “for such a beautiful thought. You have exquisite sensibility. Your approach is both deep and serious. Still I always believed that Achilles did it because he was so angry.”

It would take an unusual professor to realize that Achilles was angry. To many teachers he would represent much, but he would not be anything in particular. To be is too obvious. Our professor however is a “square,” and the bright student is annoyed with him. Anger! What good is anger? Great literature is subtle, dignified, profound. Homer is as good as Plato anytime; and if Plato thought, Homer must surely have done so, too, thought just as beautifully circle for circle.

Things are not what they seem. And anyway, unless they represent something large and worthy, writers will not bother with them. Any deep reader can tell you that picking up a bus transfer is the reisemotif (journey motif) when it happens in a novel. A travel folder signifies Death. Coal holes represent the Underworld. Soda crackers are the Host. Three bottles of beer are--it’s obvious. The busy mind can hardly miss at this game, and every player is a winner.

Are you a Marxist? Then Herman Melville’s Pequod in “Moby Dick” can be a factory, Ahab the manager, the crew the working class. Is your point of view religious? The Pequod sailed on Christmas morning, a floating cathedral headed south. Do you follow Freud or Jung? Then your interpretations may be rich and multitudinous. I recently had a new explanation of “Moby Dick” from the young man in charge of an electronic brain. “Once and for all,” he said. “That whale is everybody’s mother wallowing in her watery bed. Ahab has the Oedipus complex and wants to slay the hell out of her.”

This is deep reading. But it is only fair to remember that the best novelists and poets of the century have done much to promote it. When Mairy (in James Joyce’s “Ulysses”) loses the pin of her drawers, she doesn’t know what to do to keep them up; the mind of Bloom goes from grammar to painting, from painting to religion. It is all accomplished in a few words. Joyce’s genius holds all the elements in balance.

The deep reader, however, is apt to lose his head. He falls wildly on any particle of philosophy or religion and blows it up bigger than the Graf Zeppelin. Does Bloom dust Stephen’s clothes and brush off the wood shavings? They are no ordinary shavings but the shavings from Stephen’s cross.

What else? All the little monkish peculiarities at which Robert Browning poked fun in the “Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister,” crossing knife and fork on the platter at the end of a meal and the rest of it, have become the pillars of the new system.

Are we to attach meaning to whatever is grazed by the writer? Is modern literature Scripture? Is criticism Talmud, theology? Deep readers of the world, beware! You had better be sure that your seriousness is indeed high seriousness and not, God forbid, low seriousness.

A TRUE symbol is substantial, not accidental. You cannot avoid it, you cannot remove it. You can’t take the handkerchief from “Othello,” or the sea from “The Nigger of the Narcissus,” or the disfigured feet from “’Oedipus Rex.” You can, however, read “Ulysses” without suspecting that wood shavings have to do with the Crucifixion or that the name Simon refers to the sin of Simony or that the hunger of the Dubliners at noon parallels that of the Lestrigonians. These are purely peripheral matters; fringe benefits, if you like. The beauty of the book cannot escape you if you are any sort of reader, and it is better to approach it from the side of naivet? than from that of culture-idolatry, sophistication and snobbery. Of course it’s hard in our time to be as naïve as one would like. Information does filter through. It leaks, as we have taken to saying. Still the knowledge of even the sophisticated is rather thin, and even the most wised-up devils, stuffed to the ears with arcana, turned out to be fairly simple.

Perhaps the deepest readers are those who are least sure of themselves. An even more disturbing suspicion is that they prefer meaning to feeling. What again about the feelings? Yes, it’s too bad. I’m sorry to have to ring in this tiresome subject, but there’s no help for it. The reason why the schoolboy takes refuge in circles is that the wrath of Achilles and the death of Hector are too much for him. He is doing no more than most civilized people do when confronted with passion and death. They contrive somehow to avoid them.

The practice of avoidance is so widespread that it is probably not fair to single out any group for blame. But if nothing is to be said or done, we might as well make ready to abandon literature altogether. Novels are being published today which consist entirely of abstractions, meanings, and while our need for meanings is certainly great, our need for concreteness, for particulars, is even greater. We need to see how human beings act after they have appropriated or assimilated the meanings. Meanings themselves are a dime a dozen. In literature, humankind becomes abstract when we begin to dislike it. And . . . Interruption by a deep reader: Yes, yes, we know all that. But just look at the novels of the concrete and the particular, people opening doors and lighting cigarettes. Aren’t they boring? Besides, do you want us to adopt a program to curtail the fear of feeling and to pretend to like the creature of flesh and bone?

Certainly not. No programs.

A pretty pass we have come to!

We must leave it to inspiration to redeem the concrete and the particular and to recover the value of flesh and bone. Meanwhile, let Plato have his circles and let the soda crackers be soda crackers and the wood shavings wood shavings. They are mysterious enough as it is.

Mr. Bellow is the author of several novels, among them “The Adventures of Augie March” and the forthcoming “Henderson the Rain King.”