Henderson the Rain King

Criticism

• Abeltina, Renate. "Existentialism in Saul Bellow's Novel Henderson the Rain King." Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Wilhelm-Pieck-Universitat Rostok Gesellschafts Reihe 33.7 (1984): 32–36. Cited in MLA Bibliography, 1985.
  
  
• Alter, Robert. "Jewish Humor and the Domestication of Myth." Defenses of the Imagination: Jewish Writers and Modern Historical Crisis. Robert Alter. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1977. 155–67. Rpt. from Harvard English Studies 3 (1972).
  
  
• Describes the distinctive survival humor of the Eastern European shtetl and its stereotypes. Claims that literary modernism has created novels full of the collective disorders of our day and developed a sense of crisis. Bellow, especially in HRK, domesticated for American literature some of the comic stances, stereotypes, and myths of Yiddish literature. His chief act of domestication of Yiddish myth is the use of humor to both rob self-pity from and enhance the real existential dilemma of the protagonist through the comic bumbling quest depicted in HRK.
  
  
• Andreu-Beso, Jose Vicente. "Discourse and Gender in Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King." Saul Bellow Journal 15.1 (1997): 1–13.
  
  
• Focuses principally on HRK and argues that female relatives such as wives, mistresses, mothers, and daughters develop tense relationships with the protagonist. On the other hand men friends, colleagues, mentors, and family members are treated in a more egalitarian manner. Illustrates how through structures of social class, status, race, and gender, Bellow illuminates the anti-hero's interrelations to illustrate male dominance. Hence women struggle to have a voice in the novel. Shows that Bellow's narrator does not reconcile with women through women or nature, but that he confides in males to solve his problems. Concludes that no matter how many situations the protagonist encounters, women will not be taken seriously as a solution.
  
  
• Arnavon, Cyrille. "Le Roman Africain de Saul Bellow: Henderson the Rain King." Etudes Anglaises 14.1 (1961): 25–35. Rpt. as "Bellow's Idyll of the Tribe." Pastoral Forms and Attitudes. Harold E. Toliver. Berkeley: U of California P, 1971. 323–33.
  
  
• Axelrod, Stephen Gould. "The Jewishness of Bellow's Henderson." American Literature 47.3 (1975): 439–43.
  
  
• Sees Henderson as the archetypal gentile American and heir to centuries of Christian and New World Culture. Yet Sees him as implicitly Jewish in terms of physical attributes and a host of other symbolic overtones, one of which is Henderson's self-casting as outsider among outsiders.
  
  
• Bairn, Joseph, and David P. Demarest, Jr. "Henderson the Rain King: A Major Theme and a Technical Problem." A Modern Miscellany. Carnegie Series in English 11. Pittsburgh: Carnegie-Mellon U, 1970. 53–63.
  
  
• Acknowledges that while Bellow's humanistic ideas have been traced to both Jewish and existentialist sources with regard to defining the problem of identity, they can also be defined mystically, spontaneously and intuitively. Adds that "although HRK has some splendid comic moments, it is nonetheless not a thoroughly satisfying novel because of an ambiguity about the character of Henderson himself. How should the reader take Henderson?as a rounded character he can empathize with, or as a two-dimensional comic fall guy? Suggests that Bellow tries to have it both ways and does not quite succeed in pulling it off.
  
  
• Balogun, F. Odun. "Mythopoeic Quest for the Racial Bridge: The Radiance of the King and Henderson the Rain King." Journal of Ethnic Studies 12.4 (1985): 19–34.
  
  
• Myth defined as fallacy and archetype function in HRK to constitute form as well as content. Hence the novel creates a mythic quest in order to resist racist myths and promote racial harmony. Henderson begins his quest sharing in white prejudices against Africans. Though they are generous prejudices, they are deep-rooted, come across as very patronizing, and tend to suggest rational incompetence on the part of Africans. They participate in the primitivist racial tropes of Africa suggested by Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Eventually, however, Henderson is stripped naked of his love of Western Civilization and takes a giant mythological leap in time. It is a three-part quest involving sin, expiation, and salvation. In his assumption of a prophetic role at the end of the novel, Henderson discovers love and reciprocity and thereby accomplishes humility and freedom from prejudice.
  
  
• Billy, Ted. "The Road of Excess: Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King." Saul Bellow Journal 3.1 (1983): 8–17.
  
  
• The dynamic cosmic vitalism of Blake informs the action of HRK, along with its imagery and characterization. Henderson carries Blake, in his pocket and the central metaphor for his spiritual quest stems from Blake's "The Mental Traveller." This poem provides the mythic foundation for Henderson's belief that "truth comes in blows." The article traces in detail direct allusions to Blake's poetry and concludes that this novel is the most explicit exposition of Blake's dialectic since Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth.
  
  
• Bloomberg, Edward. "Pascalian Echoes in Henderson the Rain King." Saul Bellow: A Mosaic. Twentieth Century American Jewish Writers 3. New York: Lang, 1992.173–83.
  
  
• As early as AAM we find references to Pascal in Bellow's work. Traces Bellow's numerous references to Pascal throughout the novels. Concentrates primarily on HRK and on their common themes of death and human misery. Concludes that similarities between Pascal and Bellow are strained at best, but that Henderson perfectly illustrates Pascal's dream for all libertins: redemption through conversion.
  
  
• Brophy, Robert J. "Biblical Parallels in Bellow's Henderson the Rain King." Christianity and Literature 23.4 (1974): 27–30.
  
  
• Discusses Henderson as one who makes the inner safari and as one who has been built as a composite of such biblical figures as Adam, Cain, Ishmael, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David, Daniel, and a host of others.
  
  
• Butler, Robert James. "The American Quest for Pure Movement in Bellow's Henderson the Rain King." Journal of Narrative Technique 14.1 (1984): 44–59.
  
  
• Argues that HRK is a vital example of a hero quest which seeks pure motion, not a particular point of arrival. It shows an undirected journey for the purpose of becoming rather than for a radical state of completed being, thus epitomizing the American search for radical forms of freedom, independence and possibility. This is confirmed not only by Henderson's actual journey, but the radically open ending which mitigates against certainty and probability. Henderson remains compelling evidence of the durability and vitality of the basic American values embodied in our picaresque tradition. Though free, the journey is purposeful and positive, not a "sick and hasty" ride through oblivion.
  
  
• Byatt, A. S. "'The Omnipotence of Thought': Frazer, Freud and Post-Modernist Fiction." Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination: Essays in Affinity and Influence. Ed. Robert Frazer. London: Macmillan, 1990. 270–308.
  
  
• In the context of a discussion about the decisive effect on modern literature of myth, and the influence of Frazer's The Golden Bough, the author discusses the irrational, the primitive, and the mythopoetic in HRK. Makes detailed connections between the plot and the world of Frazer's research, and notes how mocking and detached this account is compared to the complexity and liveliness of Bellow's approach. Discusses several of the mythopoetic motifs in the novel, including rain-making rituals, noting in conclusion that Bellow provides a clear, peaceful, demythologized vision that glories in metaphor while avoiding using it as magic or religion.
  
  
• Campbell, Jeff H. "Bellow's Intimations of Immortality: Henderson the Rain King." Studies in the Novel 1.3 (1969): 323–33.
  
  
• Bellow's central metaphor is drawn from the allusion to Wordsworth's "Intimations" Ode with which he closes the book. Henderson is seen as a modern Everyman who knows all the modern answers to estrangement and alienation and is unsatisfied with them. He turns back behind contemporary cliches to sources such as Homer, the Bible, Sophocles, Keats, Shelly, Tennyson, and Wordsworth, all of whom assume a greater significance when weighed against the implicit but unmistakable burlesque allusions to modern figures such as Henry Adams, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus and William Golding. The bulk of the story reflects his Wordsworthian insights.
  
  
• Cecil, L. Moffitt. "Bellow's Henderson as American Imago of the 1950's." Research Studies 40.4 (1972): 296–300.
  
  
• HRK, like the older modernist literature, maintains a vision of the absurdities and life-denying tendencies that are part of modern civilization, but departs from modernist literature in suggesting that alienation is, or should be, only a transitional condition for the more sensitive, alive protagonist. Henderson is a counter-image?an affirmative one. He appears as an awakening giant, on the verge of a new consciousness, representing the hopes and determinations of those who still share the American dream and see the USA as the leaven which will bring freedom and love to the world.
  
  
• Chase, Richard. "The Adventures of Saul Bellow: Progress of a Novelist." Commentary 27.4 (1959): 323–30. Rpt. in Saul Bellow and the Critics. Ed. Irving Malin. New York: New York, UP, 1967. 25–38; Saul Bellow. Ed. Harold Bloom. Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea, 1986. 13–24.
  
  
• A general discussion of a variety of aspects of the novel. Primarily a first response review article. Many fruitful ideas mentioned but not developed. Finds HRK not as satisfactory as SD or AAM.
  
  
• Clarke, Joni Adamson. "A Negation Offering Possibility: Henderson the Rain King and the Paradox of Gender." Saul Bellow Journal 10.1 (1991): 37–45.
  
  
• Begins with the premise that gender relations are central to Bellow's texts, and particularly so in HRK. Sees Henderson establishing a clear pattern for later Bellovian heroes who always seem to tap into the creative power that is associated with the trickster figure who mediates between humans and gods while behaving in the most anti-social manner imaginable. Describes how such trickster tales render formerly implicit limits or boundaries explicit and keep alive the possibility they might be transcended. Within this paradigm Henderson is tested in relation to his macho brutality and masculine need for control. Concludes that in HRK Bellow acknowledges the inconsistency, paradox, and disorder in the world by merging both clown and culture hero, animal and divine, secular and sacred to create a bumbling trickster-figure who ultimately rejects his own destructive, macho attitudes, thus negating normative assumptions of traditional gender patterning.
  
  
• Cochran, Robert. "Lessons of the Bear." Value and Vision in American Literature: Literary Essays in Honor of Ray Lewis White. Ed. Joseph Candido. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1999. 83–94.
  
  
• Attempts to answer the questions, "What lessons enable the stricken Henderson to burst the spirit's sleep? Who are his teachers? What wisdom does he learn?" Focuses on Dahfu's philosophy of each human being having a noble conception in the cerebral cortex and in believing that the relationship between the spirit and the flesh is utterly dynamic. Also points out the creative role in the process of self-transformation that human imagination plays. The culmination of the exercises is the orbiting in the stillness of love and resolution, the restless man, the abused animal, and the orphan children who have all accomplished mutual solace and redemption. Prayers for rain are answered, the restless traveler turns toward home, and the long night's journey reaches day.
  
  
• Colbert, Robert E. "Saul Bellow's King of Confidence." Yiddish 4.4 (1982): 41–47.
  
  
• Close scrutiny of the extent to which HRK is a parody of Conrad's Heart of Darkness enables the reader to understand the character of King Dahfu. This running Conradian parody is one of the chief devices Bellow uses to maintain a necessary aesthetic distance from the dangerously fascinating, but ultimately problematical, figure of the African monarch.
  
  
• Cronin, Gloria L. "Henderson the Rain King: A Parodic Expose of the Modern Novel." Arizona Quarterly 39.3 (1983): 266–76.
  
  
• While steering a moderate course between the excesses of disappointed idealism and nihilistic rage characteristic of most modern literature, Bellow uses the antiseptic and corrective device of parody to hold up for our scrutiny the false intellectual assumptions behind the modernist ideologies of death, absurdity, mass society, estrangement, and stoicism. At the same time, he has turned upside down the reasoning of the wasteland ideologists, the Lawrentian primitivists, the Freudian psychoanalysts, the Camus stoics, and the logical positivists through the elaborate parody that forms the basis of HRK.
  
  
• Desai, Anita. "Bellow, the Rain King." Salmagundi 106–07 (1995): 63–65.
  
  
• Provides a brief tribute to the life-force and richness of HRK and its hilarious yea-saying.
  
  
• Detweiler, Robert. "Patterns of Rebirth in Henderson the Rain King." Modern Fiction Studies 12.4 (1966–1967): 405–14.
  
  
• This novel focuses consistently and from many angles upon the single concept of rebirth. To do this, Bellow uses four devices: 1) a fundamental animal imagery that reveals the hero's gradual transformation from a lower into a higher creature, a kind of analogical chain of being progression from a pig-like to a lion-like nature, 2) Freudian and Jungian symbols of rebirth, 3) variations on the hero myth and the myth of the dying king, 4) an irony that saves each of the previous devices from the triteness of cliche and directs the ultimate meaning toward the paradox of redemption which rebirth signifies.
  
  
• Edwards, Duane. "The Quest for Reality in Henderson the Rain King." Dalhousie Review 53 (1973): 246–55.
  
  
• A hero in modern dress, Henderson, like grail-seekers before him, discovers that reality is not something which, once glimpsed, stands before one as clear and stationary as a statue. Continual effort, energy, will, discipline, and replenishment are required to keep it in sight. He learns also that man must not demand a heaven of earth.
  
  
• Funck, Susana Bornéo. "The Self and Beyond: A Reading of The Fixer, The Centaur, and Henderson the Rain King." Ilha do Desterro: A Journal of Language and Literature [Brazil] 15/16.1–2 (1986): 166–82.
  
  
• Focuses on Bellow's resistance to alienation theory and applies the theories in William Barrett's Irrational Man (1958) and Life Against Death (1959), Norman O. Brown's psychological interpretations of history, and Martin Buber's I and Thou. Argues that HRK attempts to show Henderson how to establish meaningful ties with the universe in a radical departure from the post-war novel of despair and escape. HRK moves toward unity and wholeness of being. Compares and contrasts HRK, The Fixer and The Centaur in this paradigm. Concludes that all the protagonists must learn to fully accept their condition in order to move from exaggerated concern with self toward responsible ties with others and thus affirm their positions in the universe.
  
  
• Goldfinch, Michael. "A Journey to the Interior." English Studies 43.5 (1962): 439–43.
  
  
• Discusses briefly the symbolic and mythic content of HRK as journey fiction. Places Bellow as a typically American writer because of his focus on antiquity, spirituality, and rediscovered roots.
  
  
• Gruesser, John Cullen. "First-Generation Postwar Writers: Ignoring Political Realities." White on Black: Contemporary Literature about Africa. John Cullen Gruesser. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1992. 36–41.
  
  
• In HRK, Bellow, like Graeme Greene, exploits Africanist discourse, but he does so not to create a work in the expatriate tradition, but rather one in the fantasy tradition. Just as Buroughs uses Africa as a fantasy world to illustrate the superior intellect and morality of the British nobility, so Bellow manufactures a fantastic Africa to make observations about the United States in the 1950s. Henderson's Africa is a reflection of himself and at no time is he a representative of his culture. The Africa that emerges is one full of alienation and death as well as binary oppositions and arrested development and bears no resemblance to the rapidly changing continent on the eve of independence. In presenting Henderson as a buffoon rather than a morally superior character, Bellow resembles second-generation postwar authors who frequently portray whites and other outsiders in the continent as clownish, incompetent, or powerless. Bellow exhibits a consciousness of Africanist discourse, but chooses to exploit it for novelistic purposes, either failing to see, or deliberately overlooking its under lying violence. Either way he is somewhat schizophrenic about the white expatriate.
  
  
• Guttman, Allen. "Bellow's Henderson." Critique 7.3 (1965): 33–42. Rpt. in The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity. Ed. Allen Guttman. New York: Oxford UP, 1971. 201–10.
  
  
• Comments that fabulous Henderson begins where Jay Gatsby would have ended if he could have had all that the green light across the water symbolized. Sees Henderson as the "ironic hero of an age of affluence." Also sees the transcendental roots of Henderson's quest.
  
  
• Hainer, Ralph C. "The Octopus in Henderson the Rain King." Dalhousie Review 55 (1975): 712–19.
  
  
• Discusses the death symbolism inherent in the brief initial reference to the octopus. Notes that the repeated references become an index to Henderson's ability to face death and to his spiritual regeneration.
  
  
• Hale, Thomas A. "Africa and the West: Close Encounters of a Literary Kind." Comparative Literature Studies 20.3 (1983): 261–75.
  
  
• Discusses images of Africa in confrontation with the West found in Western literatures. Treats HRK in the context of a discussion of the white man's search for salvation in Africa. Discusses also some possible African counterparts for Bellow.
  
  
• Hansson, Karin. "Two Journeys into the Country of the Mind: Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King." Cross-Cultural Studies: Ameman, Canadian and European Literatures, 1945–1985. Ed. Mirko Jurak. Ljubljana: English Dept., Filozofska Fakulteta, 1988. 435–44.
  
  
• Considers the importance of some similarities and affinities between the two novels. Puts them into the context of mythical and archetypal patterns, thereby suggesting the existence of intentional allusions and Conradian influences in HRK, which actually can be read as an inversion or a variation of Heart of Darkness.
  
  
• Hasenclever, Walter. "Grosse Menschen und Kleine Wirklichkeit: Erlebnisse eines Regenkonigs." Monat Feb. 1961: 71–75.
  
  
• Hassan, Ihab. "Faces of Quest: Fiction." Selves at Risk: Patterns of Quest in Contemporary American Letters. Ihand Habib Hassan. Wisconsin Project on American Writers. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990. 108–31.
  
  
• Begins with the question "Is there an ideal text of quest," and suggests HRK comes very close in helping us to recognize the palpable shapes of this world in its ideal conception of quest. Characterizes Henderson as not defined by any particular urban role or landscape, and as larger than life itself. Traces Henderson's journey through its various stages to show it as a paradigm of modern ironic quests, while yet remaining affirmative and all-encompassing. Notes its ironic ending showing the former colony now becoming the moral colonizer.
  
  
• Hassan, Ihab Habib. "The Spirit of Quest in Contemporary American Letters." Michigan Quarterly Review 27 (Wint.1988): 17–37. Rpt in Writers and Their Craft. Eds. Nicholas Delbanco and Laurence Goldstein. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1991. 364–83; Rumors of Change: Essays of Five Decades. Ihab Habib Hassan. Tuscaloosa, AL: U. of Alabama P, 1995. 187–207.
  
  
• Provides an analysis of HRK in which he describes everything from Bellow's mythic Africa, to his dark, double self, and to exile from civilization. Details how Bellow encompasses both Africa and America, Nature, and Civilization. Concludes that Bellow's Africa is not Conrad's or Fanon's, but the eerie spiritual space of Cooper's prairie, Poe's Antarctic, or Melville's Pacific Ocean.
  
  
• Hays, Peter L. The Limping Hero: Grotesques in Literature. Peter Hays. New York: New York UP, 1971. 55–59.
  
  
• Bellow, in this novel, uses the stuff of myth half in joke and half in earnest. HRK can be seen as a quasi-parody of all fertility myths. The novel testifies that man can undergo degradation and a spiritual death as rites of passage to a life that is better, fuller, and more meaningful.
  
  
• Heinsheimer, Hans. "Zeroing In." Opera News (16 Apr. 1977): 12–15.
  
  
• An informative account of Leon Kirchner's depiction of the character of Henderson and the structure of the opera Lily, based on Bellow's novel. Useful for historical background on how the opera came into being.
  
  
• Holm, Astrid. "Existentialism and Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King." American Studies in Scandinavia 10.2 (1978): 93–109.
  
  
• Acknowledges Bellow's debt to American romanticism, and concentrates exclusively on the influence of the French existentialists on his work. Of primary concern is the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre. Concludes by theorizing that Bellow seems eventually to be able to reconcile the two seemingly irreconcileable philosophical movements?Transcendentalism and Existentialism.
  
  
• Hruska, Thomas. "Henderson's Riches." Journal of English Studies [India] 12.1 (1980): 779–84.
  
  
• Illustrates the many critical models that can be applied to the novel as a way of illustrating the immense richness of the character of Henderson.
  
  
• Hughes, Daniel J. "Reality and the Hero: Lolita and Henderson the Rain King." Modern Fiction Studies 6.4 (1960–61): 345–64. Rpt. in Saul Bellow and the Critics. Ed. Irving Malin. New York: New York UP, 1967. 69-91; Saul Bellow. Ed. Harold Bloom. Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea, 1986. 25-43.
  
  
• Argues that both novels, if read in conjunction, throw light on the problems of the contemporary novelist and the much-heralded crisis in the novel. Both are novels about the quest for reality on the part of protagonists who completely fill the novels in which they appear, but who are not satisfied with such a role. Makes a series of complex and enlightening comments on similarities and differences between the two novels.
  
  
• Hull, Byron D. "Henderson the Rain King and William James." Criticism 13.4 (1971): 402–14.
  
  
• Suggests that all of the chapters dealing with Henderson, Dahfu, and Atti are explicable in terms of Jamesian psychology. In this light the initiation process going on under the tutelage of Dahfu becomes not only a part of the nature ritual allied to the overall archetypal pattern, but directed therapy applied to the ills of self which are Henderson's. Dahfu functions as psychotherapist employing the ideas of William James' psychology in a program of rehabilitation. Details the many motifs which derive directly from Weston's From Ritual to Romance.
  
  
• Jay, S. "Africa through the Eyes of Western Writers, 1887–1987?Critical Analysis of Selected Works of Fiction in Chronological Order." Afrique litteraire 80 (1988): 9–187. [In French]
  
  
• Johnson, Lemuel. "Safaries in the Bush of Ghosts: Camara Laye, Saul Bellow, and Ayi Kwei Armah." Issue: Journal of Opinion 13 (1984): 45–54. Cited in MLA Bibliography, 1985.
  
  
• Katafuchi, Nobuhisa. "Henderson the Rian King nojidai sakugo, aruwia tekijisei: SaulBellow to 1950 nendai America [Anachronisms or Timeliness in Henderson the Rain King: Saul Bellow and America in the 1950s.] Studies in English Literature/ Eibungaka Kenkyu 72.2 (2000): 117–30.
  
  
• Kehler, Joel R. "Henderson's Sacred Science." Centennial Review 24.2 (1980): 232–47.
  
  
• Argues that, in HRK, Bellow draws many concepts from the history of science in order to help define the hard-won but provisional affirmation of his protagonist. The terms of science interlock closely with those of romantic philosophy, psychology, and cultural anthropology, to dramatize the spiritual regeneration of a comically exaggerated twentieth-century man.
  
  
• Kirchhofer, Anton. "Stories and Explanations."
  
  
• Bellow's HRK and Roth's Portnoy's Complaint both feature protagonists in the therapeutic moment of existential howling as the signifying central moments of their respective stories. Examines the current psychoanalytic commentary on both novels and then proceeds to approach them in terms of the roles that psychoanalytic and therapeutic knowledge play with respect to plot, characterization, and narration. Proceeds to analyze the sites and forms of such knowledge to discover the effects associated with psychoanalysis and therapy. Takes DM, SD, H, MSP, HRK, and Roth's Portney's Complaint in historical sequence in order to differentiate the decades and the differing discursive effects of this knowledge. A major article.
  
  
• Knight, Karl F. "Bellow's Henderson and Melville's Ishmael: Their Mingled Worlds." Studies in American Fiction 12.1 (1984): 91–98.
  
  
• Discusses the mingled and ambiguous nature of the world of creatures as being the central theme of both works. Carefully traces numerous parallels between the two works. Concludes that at the end of the respective quests neither quester is reconciled to home and hearth.
  
  
• Korth, Philip A. "Adrift in a Sea of Dreams: Space and Time in America." Journal of American Culture 13.2 (1990): 85–90.
  
  
• Argues that the concept of motion, rather than time and space, unifies HRK. Henderson recognizes that the American frontier is closed and that if he is to find simplicity outside historical complexity he must return to the beginning of time and space. He must find the origins of man. There, before history, he hopes to find the peace and harmonious simplicity he seeks. Thus he is drawn to dark and mysterious Africa, where in organic relation to nature, he escapes time and the bonds of space. It is a quest for salvation and simplicity beyond time and space which, like Star Trek, heads into space as the "last frontier."
  
  
• Kruse, Horst. "Saul Bellow; Henderson the Rain King." Schlussel-motive der Amerikanischen Literatur. Dusseldorf: Bagel, 1979. 184–201.
  
  
• Kuhne, Dave. "Genre Africa." Dave Kuhne. African Settings in Contemporary American Novels. Dave Kuhne. Contributions in Afro–American and African Studies 193. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999. 77–109.
  
  
• Considers nearly everything about HRK a reaction to and a parody of Hemingway's safari fiction. Points out exhaustively all the similarities and allusions. Then argues that in contrast to Hemingway, Bellow uses African wildlife as tutors and pets. Both writers see African wildlife as capable of sparking epiphanies that charge their characters. These epiphanies, in the Bellow novel, do not come from defeating, or destroying, or controlling nature. Instead, they come from embracing the natural world.
  
  
• Kuzma, Faye I. "Mental Travel in Henderson the Rain King." Saul Bellow Journal 9.2 (1990): 54–67.
  
  
• Notes the critical discussion on the double voice of HRK (formal and colloquial), and attempts to explain how it works in the text by using Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the dialogic or double-voicing. Relating this to HRK, the critic comments on Henderson's dual allegiance to the discourses of the twenties and thirties and the post-war period. Makes reference to Henderson's alternating hardboildom and emotionalism as indicative of the double voicing in the text. Discusses diction, the process of storytelling, dual gender codes, conversational rhythms, and Henderson's final rejection of the heroic rhetoric of the Hemingway code hero. Concludes that as Henderson successfully overthrows the privileged voice of the Hemingway hero, Bellow shows how lived experience is to be found in one's inner struggle with a privileged form of discourse.
  
  
• Lamont, Daniel. "'A Dark and Empty Continent': The Representation of Africa in Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King." Saul Bellow Journal 16.2/17.1–2 (2001) 129–49.
  
  
• Describes the colonial myth of Africa as a dark and empty continent, along with the genre of African adventure tales which emerged from the nineteenth century. Reads HRK through this lens and compares it to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Both novels construct a colonial subject and discourse which functions to reinforce the power of the West, since aboriginal inhabitants function as primitive, untaught, and degenerate. However, Conrad critiques imperialism, unlike Bellow who oversimplifies the relationship between colonizer and colonized, thus implicating himself in the colonial discourse. HRK is the inheritor of previous discourses about Africa and is therefore shaped by them. The tropes of barbarism, primitive and the savage, are recurrent, as well as romanticization of the noble savage, all of which exhibits an egregious Eurocentrism. Furthermore, Bellow's imagining of his black other is self-reflexive. Africa is used as a source of contemplation about whiteness, civilization, and chaos. Henderson, like Marlowe, assumes a superior attitude towards native Africans. His Africa is shot through with Romantic primitivism. While Henderson is an anti-hero and a figure of paradox, unlike Marlowe, this does not redeem the novel from the colonialist paradigm. The question of race in this novel is inescapable. Unfortunately, Bellow has added a new work to the colonial library.
  
  
• Lawless, Kimberly J. "Henderson the Rain King: A Study of the American Hero." Bulletin of the West Virginia Association of College English Teachers. 13.2 (1991): 153–64.
  
  
• Details Henderson's archetypal and geographic journeys. The I which calls to Henderson is his soul which wants to live in accord with the body. Once this unification has occurred, Henderson realizes that life is not a cycle of death and decay, but is instead a pattern of continual rebirth. Traces in detail the specifics of the journey.
  
  
• Leach, Elsie. "From Ritual to Romance Again: Henderson the Rain King." Western Humanities Review 14.2 (1960): 223–24.
  
  
• Certain important elements of the plot and situation of HRK parallel components of Jesse L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance. Points out that the fertility cult symbols of the Grail Legend, the rain-making ceremonies, the propitiation of the nature gods, the curse on the land, the dead body in the dark sequences, strangulation as a cure for impotence, and many other similar motifs derive directly from Weston's book.
  
  
• Levy, Paule. "L'Ecriture 'en suspen': Heritage et filiation dans le roman Henderson the Rain King." Imaginaires [France] 1 (1996): 167–80.
  
  
• Macintyre, Ben. "Who Is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?" Times 19 Mar. 1994: 18.
  
  
• Discusses Bellow's response in The New York Times to charges of racism brought against him by Brent Staples. Describes Bellow's attack against such petty thought police and defends his remark to Alfred Kazin about there being no Tolstoy among the Papuans or the Zulus. Describes Bellow's praise of Thomas Mofolo as a sort of retraction, and considers it humiliating for a literary master to be backed into such a corner for his merely anthropological observation about preliterate cultures. Hails Bellow's response to these charges as a hearty riposte written with great care, and criticizes Staples for failing to distinguish between Bellow and his characters. Suggests that Staples and his like with their vigilant political correctness ought to be equally careful, and then points out that Staples later retracted the word "mugged" which he had used in his comment about Bellow's response to his attack: "It's not every day you get mugged by a Nobel Laureate.'
  
  
• Majdiak, Daniel. "The Romantic Self and Henderson the Rain King." Bucknell Review 19.2 (1971): 125–46. Rpt. in Makers of the Twentieth-Century Novel. Ed. Harry R. Garvin. Lewisberg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1977. 276–89.
  
  
• In HRK Bellow chooses to treat the growth of the spirit comically while he reaffirms the romantic assertion that spiritual growth is the end of existence even if, in the modern world, it manifests itself in strange and unexpected forms. Henderson, like the romantic poet, becomes the quester with his goal of expanded consciousness. Traces the development of this romantic quest for selfhood in considerable detail.
  
  
• Markos, Donald W. "Life Against Death in Henderson the Rain King." Modern Fiction Studies 17.2 (1971): 193–205.
  
  
• Argues that in the character of Henderson we find both the destructive symptoms of alienation, and a potential vitality for regeneration. Bellow has made Henderson appear often larger than life, a mythical figure who embodies many of the fears and aspirations of a whole generation of Americans. Though grossly misdirected, the life instinct is strong in Henderson. The impulse toward renewal is at the heart of this novel; it is the source of motivation and symbolism, as well as incidental imagery. We have moved from the modernism typified by Eliot's listlessly questing Fisher King to the energy and vitality of post-modernism where significant positive action is once again possible.
  
  
• Michelson, Bruce. "The Idea of Henderson." Twentieth Century Literature 27.4 (1981): 309–24.
  
  
• Michelson sees this novel as lacking adequate critical treatment. In HRK Bellow explores and wages a kind of war against all the deceptive, fleeting seriousness of modern life, all those new ideas which demand such reverence and which wear out so quickly. It can defy seriousness even as it achieves it. Michelson goes on to explore a number of related themes in an effort to discern the structure of the book. States that his explicit intent is not to give the novel a reductive symbol hunters reading, but rather to examine a variety of themes without insisting on the primacy of any one. Its apparent disorder is its deliberate structure.
  
  
• Moss, Judith. "The Body as Symbol in Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King." Literature and Psychology 20.2 (1970): 51–61.
  
  
• In HRK, Moss claims, the body of Eugene Henderson, viewed in the light of Freudian conversion symptomology, is a central dramatic symbol, "substantial" and unavoidable, which functions in characterization, shapes the narrative, and metaphorically generates the dual theme of regeneration and recovery.
  
  
• Okeke-Ezigbo, Emeka. "The Frogs Incident in Henderson the Rain King." Notes on Contemporary Literature 12.1 (1982): 7–8.
  
  
• Argues that the difference between how Henderson views the frogs and how the Arnewi view them sums up the opposition between Euro-American and the African world-views.
  
  
• Pearce, Richard. "Harlequin: The Character of the Clown in Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King and John Hawkes' Second Skin." Stages of the Clown: Perspectives on Modern Fiction from Dostoevsky to Beckett. Richard Pearce. Crosscurrents/Modern Critique. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP; London: Feffer, 1970. 102–16.
  
  
• Establishes that Bellow's Henderson is excellent for the purposes of exploring the modern manifestation of Harlequin, his situation, nature, and role, because of the emphasis on social reality. Henderson is a perfect Harlequin because he thrives in chaos, but to build rather than destroy. His creations are silly, precarious, and evanescent, but they bring positive pleasure and are a source of positive values. The world this Harlequin inhabits is as menacing as the one left by the medieval demon or sottie fool. Harlequin has no illusions about this world, but nevertheless affirms the greatness of the human spirit that can not only endure but prevail.
  
  
• Pearson, Carol. "Bellow's Henderson the Rain King and the Myth of the King, the Fool, and the Hero." Notes on Contemporary Literature 5.5 (1975): 8–11.
  
  
• HRK is a modern version of the myth of the king, the fool, and the hero. An examination of the novel from this perspective aids our understanding of it and shows how the myth has undergone changes to fit the conditions of the contemporary world. This article draws heavily on William Willeford's The Fool and his Sceptor for its basic argument.
  
  
• Porter, M. Gilbert. "Henderson the Rain King: An Orchestration of Soul Music." New England Review 1.6 (1972): 24–33.
  
  
• Pribanic, Victor. "The Monomyth and its Function in Henderson the Rain King." Itinerary 3: Criticism. Ed. Frank Baldanza. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green UP, 1977. 25–30.
  
  
• A brief application of the major features of the monomyth a la Joseph Campbell.
  
  
• Quayum, M. A. "An 'Arbiter of the Diverse': Bellow's Philosophical Affinity with Emerson and Whitman in Henderson the Rain King." Saul Bellow Journal 10.2 (1992): 42–64.
  
  
• Notes Bellow's remarkable moral and philosophical affinity with Whitman or Emerson. Like these two authors, his characters, Henderson and Dahfu, essentially advocate the vision of dialogue and double consciousness, unity and balance, mediation, moderation. Argues that in the same spirit as their spiritual precursors, they believe in the union of the physical and the spiritual, body and soul, reason and emotion, self and society, death and immortality, in such a manner that the author of the novel becomes "an arbiter of the diverse." A detailed exposition of textual parallels. Concludes that Henderson develops from his "pig" state to the "human state" to a state of becoming in which he successfully sheds his excesses and is reunited with his own faith, thus demonstrating that Bellow resides in the mainstream tradition of Emerson and Whitman.
  
  
• Quayum, M. A. "Bellow's Henderson the Rain King as an Allegory for the Fifties." American Studies International 33.1 (1995): 65–74.
  
  
• In HRK, Bellow provides an allegory of the bipolar culture of the fifties, whose characters embody the values of the "Cleans" and "Dirties" of the era. Henderson is a double captive to the age because he represents both of these typically fifties rival factions. By learning to adopt a more comprehensive and cohesive view of life from the Wariri and King Dahfu, Henderson eventually sheds his personal excesses and becomes a balanced person. Thus, by the end of the novel, he is no longer a prisoner to the polarized consciousness of the fifties but is free to live a whole life characterized by equipoise.
  
  
• Quayum, M. A. "Transcendentalism and Bellow's Henderson the Rain King." Studies in American Jewish Literature 14 (1995):46–57.
  
  
• Claims that HRK is steeped in American transcendentalism because of the organic view of life promulgated by Henderson and Dahfu. Both view life and express faith in the unity of the physical and spiritual, body and soul, reason and emotion, self and society, death and immortality. Given Bellow's language and moral ideas, he is clearly working out of the textual traditions of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Bellow is clearly the spiritual heir to Emerson and Whitman in the twentieth century, and it is enormously useful to read his novels in the affirmative light of American transcendentalism.
  
  
• Randall, Robert J. "Saul Bellow's Heroes and Their Search for the Inner Life." New Catholic World July/Aug 1985: 167–73.
  
  
• Traces Bellow's attention to the inner life through several of the novels. From a humanistic and spiritual perspective Over the past forty years Bellow has dealt with our psychic problems of impotence, isolation, and fragmentation, as well as our anxieties over death, meaning, and judgment. He has defined man as a mystery beyond empirical analysis and predictability. His characters wind their way comically and ironically to the door of salvation despite the social and philosophical fads of modernism, Marxism, Fascism, therapeutic fallacy, orgastic consumerism, behaviorism, relativism and carnality. With this paradigm Henderson demonstrates that compassion, hope, recovery, and love are still possible. Describes the mythic and psychic richness of the text, compares Henderson to a variety of other contemporary fictional heroes, and traces a series of allusions from Hemingway to Handel's "Messiah" and the Bible.
  
  
• Rao, R. M. V. Raghavendra. "'Guardian Animal'–The African Theme of Ancestors in Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King." Griot 4.1–2 (1985): 1–7.
  
  
• In HRK, Bellow deals with the realistic idea of death as a condition of life and exposes the sense of horror associated with it in the life of the urban American who shares the European's loss of belief in the world of phenomenal reality, and in the value of the self. Tests the European phobia with death by testing it in a prehuman past free from notions of annihilation. Henderson's Africa is a place where the living and the dead are in contact with one another and function as moral guides and protectors. Details Henderson's death fears as he finally encounters the guardian ancestors in the form of animals. Throughout his fantastic transcendencies in Africa he achieves the fictional truth of affirmation made possible in a new reality unaffected by fear of annihilation.
  
  
• Renaux, Sigrid. "Henderson the Rain King: The Hero's 'Extraordinary Situation' with the Arnewi." Estudos Anglo Americanos [Brtazil] 17–18 (1993–94): 75–104.
  
  
• A major chapter which examines Henderson's fantastic adventures with the Arnewi as carnival and Menippean satire which deflates the monological seriousness of the heroic journey. Details such matters exhaustively in a close reading of these episodes. Concludes that such an examination reveals how supple Bellow's quest structure is, since it allows the reader to prepare for the climax of the action inside Bellow's carnivalistic vision of the world.
  
  
• Rodrigues, Eusebio L. 'Bellow's Africa." American Literature 43.2 (1971): 242–56.
  
  
• Argues that Bellow's Africa is not just a geographical continent, but a strange land summoned into existence by Bellow's imagination. It is a metaphysical Africa?a paradigm of the modern world seen through a distorting and fantastic lens. Though Bellow did study African anthropology from the works of his teacher, Melville J. Herskovits, among others, nevertheless, Bellow transmutes these bare facts into a fictional and metaphysical landscape. Rodrigues traces Bellow's research borrowings very carefully in this article.
  
  
• Rodrigues, Eusebio L. "The Reference to 'Joxi' in Henderson the Rain King." Notes on Contemporary Literature 8.4 (1978): 9–10.
  
  
• Traces the references to Joxi or foot trampling massage to Richard F. Button's First Footsteps in East Africa. He claims that though Bellow borrowed unashamedly from Burton, he transformed what he took by changing spellings, adding touches of color and detail and making it a significant item in the overall Reichian pattern of HRK.
  
  
• Rodrigues, Eusebio L. "Reichianism in Henderson the Rain King." Criticism 15.3 (1973): 212–33.
  
  
• The axis of the whirling world of HRK, according to Rodrigues, is the Reichian thrust of Henderson's quest for humanness. A thorough analysis of the use Bellow makes of Reichian ideas in the novel.
  
  
• Rodrigues, Eusebio L. "Saul Bellow's Henderson as America." Centennial Review 20.2 (1976): 189–95.
  
  
• Traces Bellow's deliberate references to Henderson as a Twain adventurer, a Whitmanlike poseur, another Ishmael and a new American Columbus, thus making him a symbol of America itself. Gigantic, gargantuan, monumental, Henderson is endowed with huge, physical dimensions, suggesting he is not just an individual but a whole continent.
  
  
• Rodrigues, Eusebio L. "Saul Bellow's Henderson as Mankind and Messiah." Renascence 35.4 (1983): 235–46.
  
  
• On the topmost level, gargantuan Henderson is both mankind itself and an extraordinary messiah who comes back from Africa, the original home of mankind, with tidings of hope and joy for his fellow man.
  
  
• Sastri, P. S. "Bellow's Henderson the Rain King: A Quest for Being." Pan jab University Research Bulletin (Arts) 3.1 (1972): 9–18. Cited in MLA Bibliography, 1972.
  
  
• Schmitt-v. Mühlenfels, Astrid. "Novel into Opera: Henderson the Rain King and Leon Kirchner's Lily." Saul Bellow at Seventy-five: A Collection of Critical Essays. Studies & Texts in English 9. Tübingen: Narr, 1991. 41–53.
  
  
• Discusses Leon Kirchner's opera Lily, based on HRK, and performed first at the New York City Opera April 14, 1977. Locates it within the context of "Literaturoper," and argues that critics have not fully understood this work properly. Discusses: 1) Leon Kirchner himself, 2) the making of his opera, 3) the relationship of Lily to this distinctive type of modern musical theatre, and 4) individual scenes in sequence. Concludes that this adaptation of Bellow's work is important, and is in itself a remarkable musical accomplishment within the genre of experimental modern opera.
  
  
• Schur, Ellen. "Eugene Henderson's Many Selves." Saul Bellow Journal 7.2 (1988): 49–57.
  
  
• Argues that the unity of the novel is not to be found in a surface structure based on one set of symbols emerging from its plot structure, but in a continuous process of the creation of expectations and the undermining of those expectations by the same first-person narrator. Sees such statements as being without reference to a reality that can be verified by another source and creating a situation wherein the narrator presents so many versions of truth that the reader gets caught in a tautology, while the narrator goes on mediating his own story and giving no clear indication which version is real or true.
  
  
• Shear, Walter. "The Sense of Fate in Mid-Century American Literature." Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 21.1 (1988): 38–47.
  
  
• Comments briefly on HRK as a book that draws upon naturalistic traditions and yet transcends them because he shows the necessary balance in the development of human possibilities. Argues also that in Bellow we see true being as the blending of mankind's aspirations. Deals with the individual's desire for natural and psychological wholeness.
  
  
• Sieburth, Renee. "Henderson the Rain King: A Twentieth Century Don Quixote?" Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 5.1 (1978): 86–94.
  
  
• One of the main inspirations of HRK is Cervante's Don Quixote, which fact permeates the Henderson odyssey and informs its deepest matter. Mostly traces the parallels between the two characters, Don Quixote and Henderson.
  
  
• Singh, Sukhbir. "Bellow's Henderson the Rain King." Explicator 50.2 (1992): 118–20.
  
  
• A brief note which asserts that Henderson's blasting of the frogs with the flashlight bomb dramatizes his assertion of America's faith in science, technology, and power (modernism) over Africa's belief in myth, magic, and mysticism (primitivism). The frog is the representative of the rain god, according to an ancient belief in Africa and elsewhere. Therefore, Henderson unwittingly destroys the rain god with a bomb, for which he must atone by becoming the rain god/rain king himself. To do so he has to shed his American modernism and accept African primitivism. Concludes that through this transformation Henderson reclaims his primitive self and awakens to a new life free of old anxieties.
  
  
• Smelstor, Marjorie. "The Schlemiel as Father: A Study of Yakov Bok and Eugene Henderson." Studies in American Jewish Literature 4.1 (1978): 50–57.
  
  
• Examines the contemporary use of the schlemiel as a useful model for the modern bungling anti-hero. Proceeds to examine the schlemiel fathers, Bok and Henderson, as two Jewish anti-heroes who are speaking to modern audiences about their fears of fathering, being fathered, of giving and receiving life.
  
  
• Steig, Michael. "Bellow's Henderson and the Limits of Freudian Criticism." Paunch 36–37 (1973): 39–46.
  
  
• Asserts that Bellow's way of presenting Henderson is much more compatible with a Reichian view of the relation between psyche and soma, than with the Freudian concept of conversion hysteria.
  
  
• Stout, Janis P. "Biblical Allusion in Henderson the Rain King." South Central Bulletin 40.4 (1980): 165–67.
  
  
• Stout establishes that though there are only direct allusions to six books of the Bible, HRK abounds in indirect allusions, knowledge of which enriches and extends the significance of Henderson's journey to Africa by supporting its religious dimension. But they also provide specific measures by which to assess his changes in awareness and disposition during the course of the journey.
  
  
• Stout, Janis P. "The Possibility of Affirmation in Heart of Darkness and Henderson the Rain King." Philological Quarterly 57.1 (1978): 115–31.
  
  
• Discusses the similarities between Heart of Darkness and HRK. Stout concerns herself with the differences in tone, the narrator's attitude and his response to the journey. Attempts to answer the question of whether, within the terms of the two novels, hope is feasible. Asserts that the responses of both works to this question are more moderate, more qualified by reservations than commentators have generally allowed.
  
  
• Tick, Stanley. "America Writes." Meajin [Australia] April 1961: 112–15.
  
  
• Toliver, Harold E. "Bellow's Idyll of the Tribe." Pastoral Forms and Attitudes. Harold E. Toliver. Berkeley: U of California P, 1971. 323–25.
  
  
• Briefly details Bellow's enactment of the pastoral in HRK. Claims that Henderson shapes with the traditional shepherds and knights of Sydney and Spenser the psychology of their dispraise of social life and the philosophical and spiritual susceptibility that replaces other pursuits. However, HRK combines pastoral, quest story, and the romance.
  
  
• Torsello, Carol Taylor. "Linguistic Management of Shared and Unshared Information: From the Fairy Tale to the Scientific Article to the Novel." Scienza e immaginario. Eds. Grancesco Gozzi and Anthony L. Johnson. Pisa, Italy: ETS. 1997. 133–58.
  
  
• A scientific linguistic application which focuses on sharedness implications in all literacy an non-literary forms of communication. Argues that in HRK, there are linguistic markers of shared information embedded in the fronted hypotactic temporal adjunct with "when" is a structure which shares information. Further embedded comparative clauses also indicate shared information. All this functions in the service of suspending cynicism and disbelief so that readers can participate in the transformation Henderson experiences.
  
  
• Toth, Susan Allen. "Henderson the Rain King, Eliot and Browning." Notes on Contemporary Literature 1.5 (1971): 6–8.
  
  
• Comments on Bellow's use of T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" and Robert Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," both of which reverberate through the background of Bellow's novel.
  
  
• Towner, Daniel. "Brill's Ruins and Henderson's Rain." Critique 17.3 (1976): 96–104.
  
  
• Traces similarities between Vance Bourjaily's novel, Brill Among the Ruins (1970), and HRK. Explores also what can be learned from studying the dissimilarities between the novels.
  
  
• Trachtenberg, Stanley. "Saul Bellow's Luftmenschen: The Compromise with Reality." Critique 9.3 (1967): 37–61.
  
  
• Whittemore, Reed. "Safari Among the Wariri." New Republic 16 Mar. 1959: 17–18. Rpt. as "Henderson the Rain King." The Critic as Artist: Essays on Books 1920–1970. Ed. Gilbert A. Harrison. New York: Liveright, 1972. 382–87.
  
  
• An interestingly testy essay on all the works of literature to which HRK has been compared in the reviews. Complains of the lack of unity in the novel.
  
  
• Winchell, Mark Roydon. "Bellow's Hero with a Thousand Faces: The Use of Folk Myth in Henderson the Rain King." Mississippi Folklore Register 14.2 (1980): 115–26.
  
  
• Defines the Campbell monomyth in detail and then explicates the novel in light of it, showing how Bellow both borrows from and violates the structure of the myth. What makes this hero different from the traditional romantic hero of the monomyth is his unwillingness to "acknowledge a single, external source of meaning." Concludes that Bellow takes "an eclectic and utilitarian view of the folk myth."
  
  

• Assadi, Jamal. “From Possession to Exorcism: Acting and Interpretation in Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King.” Saul Bellow Journal 20.1 (2004): 33–46.

  
  

  Discusses Henderson—like other Bellow characters, he is the playwright and actor, manipulating reality by rhetorically reinterpreting his own text of himself. He considers life to be comprised of fragmented situations that disfigure his appearance and impoverish his soul. He believes his life is reminiscent of the story about the possessed man out of whom Jesus drives many unclean spirits, which then enter the Gadarene swine. His trip to Africa is an attempt to recover his clean spirit. Meanwhile, the reader, thrice removed, must reinterpret the dramatizing rhetoric of Henderson and of others. Uses seventeenth-century conceptualizations of possession and exorcism as theatrical performances. Henderson’s version is Michel Leiris’ théâtre veçu or “theatre lived”—the trope to which Jesus belonged as he casts out devils. Henderson demonstrates real possession in the form of insanity, fear, rashness, hostility, aggression, and diabolical disorder. The novel is about him searching for an exorcist and the real drama of exorcism after he meets Queen Willatele. The ritual occurs in stages throughout the Wariri episodes, and Bellow, the narrator, plays exorcist. Concludes that Bellow manages to merge the actor/writer/teacher role with the spectator/reader/student role, thus requiring a recasting of how extrinsic and intrinsic levels of narration might best be defined. 

• Brown, Russell Morton. “ ‘The Real Past, No History or Junk Like That’; or, How I Learned to Read Henderson the Rain King.” Wacana Review of Contemporary Poetry and Short Fiction. 37.1 (2002): 64–75. 

  
  

  An anecdotal and academic account of how time and place profoundly affect what we make of and what we take from literature. Focuses on HRK and proceeds to describe his own encounter with the text in the Spring of 1967 as a teaching assistant assigned to teach an introductory literature class, then encountering it years later in a twentieth-century novel course and then again in more recent years. Discusses H, DM, TV, and AAM, then draws an elaborate context for Bellow from the application of new reading paradigms throughout the academy of the 1960s, the myth-criticism decade of the 1970s, the multiculturalism of the 1980s, and the postcolonial critique in the 1990s. Concludes by talking of his 2002 re-reading of other famous literary works, now informed by his lifelong experience with HRK. Essentially anecdotal.

• Codde, Philippe. “From Farming Pigs to Fathering a Persian: Existentialist Patterns in Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King.” Stirrings Still: The International Journal of Existential Literature1.1 (2004): 46–63. 

  
  

  Argues that critics have treated only Bellow’s interest in pre-war Existentialism and its appearance in his early novels. Proceeds to trace the changes Camus and Sartre made in their earlier existentialist indifference in the post-war years, and suggests that Bellow continued to be influenced by them. Claims that while HRK belies Bellow’s disavowals of its continuing influence, there is much evidence in HRK of Henderson’s progression from middle-aged cantankerous and irresponsible self, bogged down in his own pig’s dung, reminiscent of Camus’s La Peste, to a person who commits to responsibility to his own people. 

• Halldorson, Stephanie S. “Henderson the Rain King: The Hero Surrendered.” The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 31–42. 

  
  

  Places HRK as an iconic text featuring an anti-hero who breaks with the traditions of the Hemingway code hero and the “wasteland” mentality. It reflects the literary establishment struggling with the loss of exalted human nature and the humanistic foundations of the subjective self and finding itself in opposition to the popular myths of America. Describes the essence of Bellow’s struggles with the heroic impulse inside codes and systems. In essence, Bellow rewrites the heroic journey as acceptance of, never submission to, the weight of human existence and contingent truth. Its assurance is that such paradoxes cannot obliterate the primordial self or its connection to all of existence.

• Macilwee, Michael. “Henderson the Rain King: Translations between Conrad and Hemingway.” Saul Bellow Journal 20.1 (2004): 47–71. Print.

  
  

  Claims Henderson’s reasons for visiting Africa constitute the real question of the book. Something inside Henderson is operating beyond the level of conscious choice and must be brought to the attention of his conscious mind. The expedition initially serves to relieve pressures of his life experience corporeally. He needs religious language to enact his own spiritual renewal and to find his moral center. Bellow shares many common concerns with Conrad, for whom the spiritual and corporeal seem at odds. Bellow uses Conrad’s theories of external orders of belief, fixed positions of loyalty, and art involving psychological and painful sensitivity. Develops the Conrad and Hemingway connections with HRK and concludes that the novel does not simply end with what Henderson physically gained from the journey. It ends only after adjusting the very order of the relationship between the various realms of being. Small and big, comic and mystic, physical and mental, outcome and intimation—these levels are not left in opposition or isolation. 

• Muhlestein, Dan. “Wrestling With Angels: Male Friendship in Henderson the Rain King.” Saul Bellow Journal. 21.1–2 (2005–06): 41–61. Print.

  
  

  Argues that the central issue in HRK is the establishment, maintenance, and decline of male friendships. Analyzes in considerable detail the bonds that connect Henderson to the other men in the novel. Suggests that these homosocial relationships connect men in socially powerful ways such as Henderson’s male friends in Connecticut, his army buddies, Prince Itelo, King Dahfu, Romilayu, and the lion cub. Describes how these men relate to one another vis-à-vis the natural world and how they use women both as material signifiers of male desire and as an informal counterbalance to a latent but measurable impulse toward homoeroticism. Also explores how the colonial enterprise that authorizes the action in HRK simultaneously enables and undercuts important male friendships in the novel. Concludes that HRK is an odd blend of the colonial tradition and a parody and critique of this tradition. HRK is also a detailed exploration of the potent forces which encourage and undercut it, along with a celebration and a lament of the things which bind men to men—hence its dedication to his son, Gregory. 

• Quayum, M. A. “Chapter 2: Henderson the Rain King.” Saul Bellow and American Transcendentalism. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. 37–83. Print.

  
  

  Suggests that HRK, Bellow’s first mature work, is constructed around the tensions between bohemia and academia. Argues that Henderson and Dahfu’s moral philosophies parallel Emerson and Whitman’s faith in the union of the spiritual and the physical, body and soul, reason and emotion, self and society, death and immortality. Henderson’s journey in transcendence enables him to shed the inner excesses of his self, as well as those of American culture—thus restoring equipoise and calm. He is finally released from his captivity to the disorders of the modern world into a state in which he can live by his own neo-transcendental faith. Concludes that Bellow, the latter-day heir of Whitman and Emerson, believes in the individual’s capacity for change and development and in the ability to even transcend former states. Henderson evolves from a pig state to human state, made state to given state, a state of “becoming” to the state of “king.” He also moves from the state of a prisoner to his own moral excesses and the excesses of American culture to the state of a balanced person. Now he is reunited with his own faith and firmly placed by Bellow into the mainstream tradition of American Transcendentalism. 

Reviews

• Baker, Carlos. "To the Dark." New York Times Book Review 22 Feb. 1959: 4–5.
  
  
• Bradbury, Malcolm. "Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King." Listener 30 Jan. 1964: 187–88.
  
  
• Cruttwell, Patrick. "Fiction Chronicle." Hudson Review 12.2 (1959): 286–95.
  
  
• Curley, Thomas F. "A Clown Through and Through." Commonweal 17 Apr. 1959: 84.
  
  
• Drabble, Margaret. "A Myth to Stump the Experts." New Statesman 26 Mar. 1971: 435.
  
  
• "Dun Quixote." Time 23 Feb. 1959: 102.
  
  
• Friedman, Joseph J. Venture 3.3 (1959): 71–73.
  
  
• Gold, Herbert. "Giant of Cosmic Despair." Nation 21 Feb. 1959: 169–72.
  
  
• Hardwick, Elizabeth. "A Fantastic Voyage." Partisan Review 26.2 (1959): 299–303.
  
  
• Hicks, Granville. "The Search for Salvation." Saturday Review 21 Feb. 1959: 20.
  
  
• Hogan, William. "Saul Bellow's Case Against Symbolism." San Francisco Chronicle 23 Feb. 1959: 25.
  
  
• Jacobson, Dan. "The Solitariness of Saul Bellow." Spectator 22 May 1959: 735.
  
  
• Knipp, Thomas R. "The Cost of Henderson's Quest." Ball State University Forum 10.2 (1969): 37–39.
  
  
• Kogan, Herman. "Symbolism Beneath a Rushing Narrative." Chicago Sunday Tribune 22 Feb. 1959: 3.
  
  
• Lemaire, Marcel. "Some Recent American Novels and Essays." Revue des Langues Vivantes 28 (1962): 70–78.
  
  
• Levine, Paul. Georgia Review 14.2 (1960): 218–20.
  
  
• Maddocks, Melvin. "In Search for Freedom and Salvation in New Novels." Christian Science Monitor 26 Feb. 1959:11. Rpt. as "The Search for Freedom and Salvation." Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Ed. Stanley Trachtenberg. Critical Essays on American Literature. Boston: Hall, 1979. 24–25.
  
  
• Malcolm, Donald. "Rider Haggard Rides Again." New Yorker 14 Mar. 1959: 171–73.
  
  
• Miller, Karl. "Poet's Novels." Listener 25 June 1959: 1099–1100.
  
  
• "Millionaire's Odyssey." Newsweek 23 Feb. 1959: 106–07.
  
  
• Perrott, Roy. "Two Attempts at the Big American Novel." Manchester Guardian 29 May 1959: 6.
  
  
• Pickrel, Paul. "Innocent Voyager." Harper's Mar. 1959: 104.
  
  
• Podhoretz, Norman. "Saul Bellow's Power-Filled, Puzzling Novel of a Millionaire in Africa." New York Herald Tribune Book Review 22 Feb. 1959: 3.
  
  
• Prescott, Orville. "Books of the Times." New York Times 23 Feb. 1959: 21.
  
  
• Price, Martin. "Intelligence and Fiction: Some New Novels." Yale Review ns 48.3 (1959): 453–56.
  
  
• Rolo, Charles J. "Reader's Choice." Atlantic Mar. 1959: 88.
  
  
• Stern, Richard G. "Henderson's Bellow." Kenyon Review 21.4 (1959): 655–61. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Ed. Stanley Trachtenberg. Critical Essays on American Literature. Boston: Hall, 1979. 19–23; The Books in Fred Hampton's Apartment. Richard G. Stern. New York: Dutton, 1973. 243–49; One Person and Another: On Writing and Writers. Richard G. Stern. Dallas: New York: Baskerville, 1993. 227–32.
  
  
• Describes HRK as packed with enough material for three novels, with a topography lively with personality. Notes that Bellow's African American custom and belief are strange, but real. Fantasy is kept in the realm of ideas. Henderson himself is a battered hulk aching with conscience, largesse, and sweet ambitions. HRK arises from Bellow's decision that the world is wanting, and a desire for the extraordinary good that is born of the narrator's complicated genesis.
  
  
• Swados, Harvey. "Bellow's Adventures in Africa." New Leader 23 Mar. 1959: 23–24.
  
  
• Thompson, Frank H., Jr. "I Want, I Want, I Want." Prairie Schooner 34.2 (1960): 174–75.
  
  
• Wain, John. "American Allegory." Observer 24 May 1959: 21.
  
  
• Waterhouse, Keith. New Statesman and Nation ns 6 June 1959: 805–06.
  
  
• Weales, Gerald. "Comedy, Laughter and Fantasy." Reporter 19 Mar. 1959: 46–48.