POETIC NATURALISM
469
The poeticization is particularly striking in all those urban novelists
whose essential sources and materials are in the realist-naturalist tradi–
tions. While it is hard to define the direction of a one-book novelist
like Ralph Ellison, his
Invisible Man
(certainly the major work by a
Negro writer in recent years) interestingly combines the vehement na–
turalism of protest literature, the self-conscious literary devices of sur–
realism, poetic allegory and a highly worked rhetoric. The occurrence
of so many works with just these characteristics suggests a literary
Zeitgeist.
While it once was a critical commonplace that
first
novels were
characterized by heavy poetic rhetoric and symbolic tendentiousness,
these qualities now frequently appear as part of the
mature
style to–
wards which the novelist reaches. This change in mode in a serious
urban novelist can be recognized by comparing the early and late
work of Saul Bellow. His first novel,
Dangling Man,
was a wry dramati–
zation of a
petit bourgeois
clerk and intellectual in the dry and trans–
parent language of the social-realist tradition. The theme and organi–
zation of the work, as the title indicates, essentially derived from a
concept of urban sociology : the marginal man. Bellow's second novel,
The Victim,
exploits typical urban scenes and types and the crude
realities of anti-Semitism, but the prose style and narrative order of
realism are now undershot with Kafkaesque allegorical ambiguities
around the identity of victim and the victimizer. In his third and most
ambitious novel,
Th e Adventures of Augie March,
Bellow has markedly
dropped realistic narrative for a complicated variation on the picaresque;
sociology has been submerged in symbolism; and the style has acquired
a rotund elaborateness and an uncomfortable number of adjectives and
metaphors. The basic materials--<:ity poverty and ethnic social types,
the young man on the make, the competitive ethos and petty larceny,
sex mixed up with status, left-wing politics, etc.-are all essentially things
brought into the novel by naturalism. Augie March, despite all the
poetic and formal complication and irony, is but another version of
Bellow's obsessive concern with the urban phenomena of the social-and–
self-alienated marginal man. So, more fancifully, with
H enderson The
Rain King.
Bellow's movement into poeticization of an essentially social point
of view covers about a decade. The more prolific, but less polished,
Herbert Gold follows the same course in about half that time. In his
rather flabby first two novels,
Birth of a Hero
and
The Prospect Before
Us,
Gold attempted to give ponderous significance to emphatically or–
dinary figures-a suburban accountant and a self-made manager of a
