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PARTISAN REVIEW
Bellovian line of reality instructors, who try to give people like Vic–
tor Wulpy "a better idea ... of how savage it is out there ." But, as
Wulpy remarks, Krieggstein's own reality "belongs to the Golden
Age of American Platitudes." He is beneath contempt for Wulpy :
that is, beneath the ken of art, the only thing that counts. Wrangel
puts it right: "Victor knows what the real questions are, and ... that
without art we can't judge what life is."
There is the risk of preciousness, but Bellow avoids it by recon–
ceiving the bourgeois-bohemian conflict as a story of symbiosis,
whatever the mutual suspicion. The "bourgeois" (the man of reality)
in Bellow's fiction (whether he is a business
gonif
or a bona fide rack–
eteer) is a kind of raw energy or material for the imagination.
Bellow's artists or artist-types have nothing of the effete about them.
Ijah, the artist-type in
Cousins,
mistrusts romantic inwardness,
which has been the diminishing capital of so much art of the past two
centuries, because he knows from his life in Chicago "that there were
so many things going on in the
outer
world, the city itself was so rich
in opportunities for
real
development, a center of such wealth,
power, drama, rich even in crimes and vices, in diseases and intrin–
sic-not accidental-monstrosities, that it was foolish, querulous, to
concentrate on oneself." But he refuses to concede this outer world to
his racketeer cousin Tanky, for he too has experienced evil and "the
dissolution of the old bonds of existence."
If
there is a resentment
toward the
outer world
and those who incarnate it, it is because they
want to deny it to the artist. In "Zetland: By a Character Witness ,"
the father of Zetland, a success in business and an admirer of the
arts, insists on a division of labor in which his genius son would be
"all marrow no bone."
If
we cannot know life without art, an art that
is cut off from the outer world is lifeless. Zetland's son fights to claim
the world for himself.
But what does it mean in 1985 to judge life, from the vantage
point of art or of anything else? Bellow's vision has become increas–
ingly apocalyptic, as readers of his last novel
The Dean's December
have remarked with some displeasure. Ijah strikes the apocalyptic
note: "And whether we are preparing a new birth of spirit or the
agonies of final dissolution ... depends on what you think, feel, and
will about such manifestations or apparitions, on the kabbalistic skill
you develop in the interpretation of these contemporary formula–
tions." The aphoristic style is open-ended. Don't expect any final
truth here.
Then what does the wisdom of art amount to? The implicit
