Studies in American Fiction

NOTES SEX: SAUL BELLOWS HEDONISTIC JOKE Sarah Blacher Cohen State University of New York, Albany The humor in the relationship between men and women in Saul Bellow's novels rests not so much on the pandemonious clashes between male and female, but on Bellow's portrayal of the laughable nature of sex itself. The young Bellow protagonist regards copulation as a rollicking animal game in which he eagerly participates. Although he experiences some difficulty in learning the rules and familiarizing himself with the other players' techniques, he plunges headlong into the game. He enjoys taking an amoral holiday from his quest for a distinctive fate; he welcomes the refuge it affords from those "imposers-upon, absolutists"1 who want to conscript him to their versions of reality. He also views sex as an expression of love, a way of breaking out of his solitude and merging with another human being. But after the dissolution of one love affair after another, he realizes that he is not the selfless devotee of Eros. I Ie only turned to love to avoid the grimness of the impersonal world. He had permitted sex to fool him into thinking that he had fused with another person and was not alone. The middle-aged Bellow protagonist regards the human being in the act of mating as a funny creature, what with the devious stratagems and the awkward positions he must adopt to attain so ephemeral a bliss. Viewing copulation as a clumsy, undignified activity, he mocks his own and especially his female partner's tendency to invest it with romantic feelings and elevate it to the status of a universal panacea. Despite his ridicule of the sex act, after weighty internal debate and labyrinthine rationalizations, he indulges in it. It is not so much the physical pleasure that he seeks; rather he deludes himself into believing that he can escape from the anxiety and ambiguity of man's middle position between beast and god by losing himself in the animal. When his brief metamorphosis ends, he is all the more oppressed by his human state. More shameridden and constrained than ever, he now sees sex as a joke which his own nature and civilization, notably women, play on him. His distress is 224Notes short-lived, however, forhe soon allows himself to be the butt of another sexual joke. And so the delusion-disappointment pattern continues. The older Bellow protagonistviews sexnotas a joke, butas themost vile plague on earth, with women and blacks as the chief contaminators. Trying desperately to dissociate himself from the debased mortal state by denouncing the bestial and choosing the divine, he is not able to quarantine himself from the noxious presence of sex. Although he is not a participant of the hedonistic revels of the time, he is still the voyeuristic spectator of them and experiences the lurid thrill of the carnal. Much as he tries to be a god, his reaction to the sexual—either his shrill condemnation of it or his furtive titillation by it—does not allow him to transcend his human nature. Against his will, he, too, is the butt of the sexual joke. Augie March, Bellow's larky young hero, is primarily concerned with discovering a worthwhile destiny for himself. Most of his time is spent, however, not in self-scrutiny, but in fleeing from the Machiavellis in his life, those "heavy-water brains" (p. 524) who want him to play a supporting role in their fantasies. Often tiring of charting his life's voyage while having to dodgehis relentless drafters, he engages in sex as a diversion. Though he is the "by-blow of a traveling man" and "wellstocked , probably by inheritance, in all the materials of love" (p. 47), he does not always have an easy time of it. His sexual initiation is obstacleridden and far from idyllic. Unlike a Tom Jones who chances upon ready sexual gratification, Augie must first hoist his invalid employer Einhorn on his back, walk up a tortuous flight of icy stairs in the dark, deposit Einhorn before an astonished whore, choose a nameless woman himself, and then seek his own pleasure. And this pleasure Augie claims "didn't have...