ARGUMENTS
619
of those New York literati he now attacks. Yet he and his contem–
poraries, he complains, have been denied "creative scope." What Bellow
seems to resent is that for all that approbation, the ultimate tribute, the
mantle of Proust, Joyce, Mann
et al.,
has been withheld, an injustice
which he can only attribute to a professorial conspiracy. There is some–
thing paranoid in Bellow's use of the professors as surrogates for an
implicit attack on modern literature itself and as scapegoats for the
deficiencies of his own real but limited genius. Ultimately the "disaf–
fected, subversive, radical" quality of modern literature comes to seem
like an invention of criticism and Proust, Joyce and Mann, bizarre
creations, become no more than a fictitious holding company for con–
cealed and self-serving private interests.
Of course Bellow is partly right. "Aliepation" and "the absurd"
have in some hands become a deadening new orthodoxy, a fashionable
stance mechanically adopted. But this does not mean that these concepts
have outlived their historical life, any more than had the ideas of Marx
and Freud after they had been similarly vulgarized. Nothing in the litera–
ture of Bellow and his contemporaries-certainly not the unconvincing
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