Alhadeff, Barbara. "The Divided Self: A Laingian Interpretation
of Seize the Day." Studies in
American Jewish Literature 3.1
(1977): 16–20.
Tommy Wilhelm so
fills the mold R. D. Laing delineates in his work The Divided Self that his character becomes the literary embodiment
of the notion of the "divided self." Laing's approach to
schizophrenia also shows a high degree of correlation with the
existential condition of Tommy Wilhelm.
Ancono, Francesco Aristide. "Saul Bellow's Seize the Day. Writing the
Absence of the Father: Undoing Oepipal Structures in the
Contemporary American Novel. New
York: U P of America, 1986. 35–48.
Considers the
refusal of the father to relinquish his role in favor of
sacrificial love to be the central perversion dealt with
in SD. Tommy Wilhelm is the sign of the failure of the
psychocenter of the family unit as the psychologically crippled
son who seeks escape in surrogate fathers. Provides a detailed
treatment of SD from a Freudian perspective, which concludes that
Tommy finally intuits his own oedipal tragedy. The neurotic
Tommy's wished-for father is clearly the dead father who he
embraces as a delusion.
Bach, Gerhard P. "'Howling Like a Wolf from the City Window':
Cinematic Realization of Seize
the Day." Saul Bellow Joumal 7.2 (1988): 71–83.
Calls the film
version of SD a 90 minute cinematic tour de force of Tommy
Wilhelm's unrelenting succession of painful, nightmarish events,
which ends his final outcry against this fate. Notes that this
outcry is frozen into the silence of a self-inflated imprisonment
where the human soul is tossed around endlessly between death and
loss. Provides an inset general essay on Bellow's attitude toward
film and film versions of his novels. Concentrates finally on the
actual production of the film, its artistic conventions and
options, the narrative strategies of film and novella, the
controversial ending, and the aesthetics of impermanence that
permeate it.
Baker, Robert. "Bellow
Comes of Age." Chicago
Review 11.1 (Spring 1957):
107–10. Rpt Critical Essays
on Saul Bellow. Ed. Stanley
Trachtenberg. Critical Essays on American Literature. Boston:
Hall, 1979. 26–29.
Reviews the novel
briefly and develops the view that it culminates a line of
development begun with DM. Traces the
ideational development across the four novels and concludes
that SD constitutes a major coup.
Birindelli, Roberto. "Saul Bellow, Mr. Joyce e il mito:
Mitopoiesi in Seize the
Day." Confronto Letterario [Italy] 5.10 (1998): 461–72.
Argues that Tamkin
is not a plain hypocrite, or a mere problem in SD, but rather an
ineffectual financial advisor and the kind of hypocrite who does
not practice the healing philosophy he teaches. Sees Tommy
Wilhelm not so much a victim of Tamkin's devious ways, but rather
as a weak, self-compassionate, middle-aged man who undergoes an
astonishing metamorphosis which makes him better prepared to face
outside reality and his inner self. Describes Tamkin's mythic
ancestry and concludes that Bellow seems to be telling us that
whoever places trust in myths and storytelling is bound to find
himself trapped, cheated, enriched, and simultaneously saved from
the drabness of an orderly existence.
Bordewyk, Gordon. "Nathanael West and Seize the Day." English
Studies 64.2 (1983): 153–59.
Rpt. in Critical Essays on
Nathanael West. New York: Hall, 1994.
169–76.
Traces the direct
influence of West's Miss Lonely
Hearts and Day of the Locust on SD. Detailed and convincing.
Bordewyk, Gordon. "Saul
Bellow's Death of a Salesman." Saul Bellow Newsletter 1.1 (1981): 18–21.
Argues that Bellow relies heavily on
Miller's plays for the themes and characters of SD. Traces
similarities in names, occupational fortunes, problems with
insurance companies, similar post-war backdrops, alienation of
the middle-class, family break-down, a strong pastoral nostalgia,
urban misery, and other shared material between the two
playwrights.
Bouson, J. Brooks. "Empathy and Self-Validation in
Bellow's Seize the
Day." The Empathic Reader: A Study of the
Narcissistic Character and the Drama of Self. Ed. J. Brooks Bouson. Amherst: U of
Massachusetts P, 1989.64–81.
Argues that, like
Dostoevsky's anti-hero and Kafka's insect-hero, Wilhelm Adler
of SD craves the attention of others to support his
threatened self. But unlike the others, Adler openly voices his
sense of narcissistic entitlement and his desire for rescue.
Claims that all his verbal pleas for sympathy shed light on his
preverbal personality, a personality which masks ambivalence,
anger, and disconnection. Concludes that his self is empty and
full of dread. Sees Wilhelm as inhabiting not the glorious
here-and-now fantasied by Tamkin, but the bleak here-and-now of
his own crippled self.
Bouson, J. Brooks. "The Narcissistic Self-Drama of Wilhelm Adler:
A Kohutian Reading of Bellow's Seize the Day." Saul Bellow
Journal 5.2 (1986): 3–14. Rpt.
in rev. version "Empathy and Self-valuation in Bellow's
Seize the Day." The Emphatic
Reader: A Study of the Narcissistic Character and the Drama of
Self. J. Brooks Bouson. Amherst, MA:
U of Massachusetts P, 1989. 64–81.
Bellow, through
his character Wilhelm Adler, anticipates recent psychoanalytic
investigations into the dynamics of the narcissistic personality
disorder. Wilhelm Adler provides an artistic anticipation of what
psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut describes as "tragic," "broken" man,
the narcissistically defective individual "who suffers from an
enfeebled, crumbling sense of self."
Bowen, Robert O. "Bagels, Sour Cream and the Heart of the Current
Novel." Northwest Review
1.2 (1957): 52–56.
Complains
that SD is the third in the "mopery series" and is of
interest as morbid social pathology insofar as it deals with the
surface of a current American phenomenon: the middle-age
adolescent. The ending of the novel is pure self-pity of the most
saccharine order. There is no turning outward to humanity. This
is not literature; it is a tour de force based on subject matter
dear to the urban book reviewer.
Bowman, Diane Kim. "This Man Will Self-Destruct: Kafkaesque
Ambiguity in Saul Bellow's Seize
the Day." McNeese Review 28
(1991–1992): 34–43.
SD
is a novel in which the protagonist is a
victim hero who, whether guilty or innocent, has a responsibility
for his own alienation and victimization in an ambiguous
Kafkaesque manner. Traces the Kafkaesque elements by pointing out
the self-destruction of the character involving Wilhem's conflict
with his father, with a larger system of authority, and a host of
other similarities. Notes that the final Kafkaesque twist to the
Oedipal conflict is Wilhelm's acceptance of his father's
condemnation with perfect filial submission. Concludes that this
is a black comedy of an alienated average man whose world is
absurd as that of Kafka's protagonists, whose tendency leans
toward hyperbole rather than restraint, whose self pity is so
constantly before the reader that the reader develops no pity of
his own. In SD, as in Kafka's stories which it most closely
resembles, the decline or disintegration of an individual is not
imposed from without, but results from the protagonist's
acquiescence and participation in his own destruction.
Budick, Emily Miller. "Yizkor for Six Million: Mourning the Death
of Civilization in Saul Bellow's Seize the Day." New Essays on
Seize the Day. Ed. Michael P. Kramer.
Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge UP, 1998. 93–109.
Argues that
SD is a
novel in which Judaism itself is laid to rest. At the center of
the text lies a dark and despairing consciousness of life in the
modern world as a fact of the Nazi Holocaust. SD is largely
about the Holocaust, but treats it in an oblique and understated
way. It works like counter-scripture in which Bellow provides a
new post-Holocaust testament, replacing both the Old and the New
Testaments. It is a yizkor
for the six million, and for the death of
civilization. The final scene in the funeral parlor is not only
for the world's lost Jews, but for the world itself. The
kaddish is
also for the loss of the father of Christianity, Judaism itself.
Here Bellow provides a full measure of contempt for European and
American culture. Hence SD
unfolds as something of an allegory of
prewar and postwar Europe. However, it's notions of the real soul
and the pretender soul also suggest that Emersonian romantic
American models of Self are not immune to the diseases of
European and Jewish culture. Bellow takes the Jews complicity in
their own victimization. a step further. He critiques the
religious impulse in Judaism, Christianity, and Emersonianism to
imagine souls in the first place, since such imagining is
dangerous to humanity. What Bellow calls for is the unwriting of
all scriptures, the eradication of the world as we know it, the
dismantling of the Western theological and philosophical
tradition, and the self-restraint not to indulge in their
re-writing. Tommy's final scene in the funeral home is Bellow's
de-creation of the world through the de-creation of the
Self–a veritable great flood preparatory to the development
of an entirely new world. Hence atonement is now an undefined
moment in the future, a private and personal day of reckoning
unbound by Christianity, Judaism, or Humanism.
Bullock, Chris. "Men and Depression: Saul Bellow's Seize the Day." Journal of
Men's Studies 4.2 (1995):
153–68.
Suggests that SD is a study of the mental and behavioral
conditions of depression, and, specifically of male depression.
Discusses three theories of depression around three successive
settings in SD. Covers these genderless theories of depression
centering on the father's hotel, the brokerage office, and the
chapel. Then approaches the novel from a mythopoetic and gendered
reading of depression using Bly, Hillman, and Meade's work.
Concludes that SD is about men's depression in particular, and
that mythopoetic analysis is the most illuminating of the two
methods.
Chametzky, Jules. "Death and the Post-Modern Hero/Schlemiel: An
Essay on Seize the
Day." New Essays on Seize the Day. Ed. Michael P. Kramer. Cambridge,
Eng.: Cambridge UP, 1998. 111–23.
Argues that
SD is a
brilliantly written account of the WWII explosion of violence and
madness which abruptly ends modernity and ushers in the
contingency and flux of postmodernity. Claims that this is a
death-haunted Holocaust-inflected book in which normal is
der Tod.
Here Bellow seems to exist between option and realities making
demands on him, in some kind of liminal state. Among other things
it is also a story about the end of patriarchy as well as about
other belief systems. Here fathers are no fathers and sons no
sons. Details how Bellow and his peers lived through the dashed
hopes of Socialism, Stalin's betrayals and brutalities, the
Ukraine Massacres, the Purge Trials, Trotsky's assassination, the
killing of the Jewish writers and intellectuals, the Depression,
the Spanish Civil War, Fascism, WWII, the Atomic Bomb, the
Holocaust, and the Hungarian Uprising. Concludes that all of this
violence affirms to Tommy Wilhelm that there is only the death of
the Self, a culture in tatters, and an ungraspable future. Tommy
has no choice but to weep and live on one day after
another.
Chavkin, Allan. "'The
Hollywood Thread' and the First Draft of Saul Bellow's
Seize the Day." Studies in the
Novel 14.1 (1982): 82–94.
Demonstrates
Bellow's primary concerns in SD by discussing
his examination of the earliest draft of the book entitled
One of Those Days. A technical, detailed and essential article
since it is the only study of the early manuscript and its
relationship to the published novel. Deals primarily with the
evolution of the characters and particularly that of Tommy
Wilhelm.
Chavkin, Allan. "Suffering and Wilhelm Reich's Theory of
Character-Armoring in Saul Bellow's Seize the Day." Essays in
Literature 9.1 (1982):
133–37.
Demonstrates that
the early manuscript copy of the novel entitled One of Those Days contains the specific notions of
character-armoring as elucidated originally by Wilhelm Reich in
his book Character
Analysis on this topic. Goes on to
add to the previous discussions of this by Eusebio Rodrigues and
John J. Clayton.
Chavkin, Allan. "Wordsworth's 'Ode' and Bellow's Seize the Day." ANQ
ns 3.3 (1990): 121–24.
Concentrates on
the puzzling last sentence of SD, which Chavkin
claims has all the compression, intensity, and suggestiveness of
romantic poetry, and therefore seeks to illuminate its meaning
through comparison with Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of
Immortality... ," Keats's "Ode to Sorrow," and other work of the
early Romantics. Discusses Bellow's textual revisions of
SD to
centralize the idea of suffering, and argues that for Bellow
romantic acceptance of suffering is preferable to a phony
psychologist's (Tamkin's) hedonism. Concludes that Wilhelm's and
Wordsworth's persona both learn that rather than being a cause
for despair, suffering allows one to recognize common humanity
and learn to love everyday life with all its tenderness, joys,
and fears.
Ciancio, Ralph. "The Achievement of Saul Bellow's Seize the Day." Literature and
Theology. Eds. Thomas F. Staley and
Lester F. Zimmerman. The University of Tulsa Department of
English Monograph Series 7. Tulsa, OK: U of Tulsa, 1969.
49–80. Rpt. in Small
Panets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Gloria L. Cronin. East
Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000. 127–56.
What begins as the
schizoid estrangement of the individual and his authentic self
begets the estrangement of father and son, the individual and
contemporary urban world, the Jew and his spiritual heritage, the
individual and humanity—issues that Bellow manages to
encompass in the short breadth of this novel by focusing squarely
on the plight of his protagonist and the real and the pretender
souls. Makes much of Wilhelm's radical adolescence and radical
innocence. Develops a sophisticated explanation of the intimated
relationship between Wilhelm and Tamkin. Defines a zaddick in
historical terms and demonstrates Tamkin's role with regard to
Wilhelm's salvation.
Clark, Michael. "Saul Bellow's Seize the Day and Oedipus
Rex." Saul Bellow Journal 6.1 (1987): 28–33.
Endorses the work
of Rodrigues and Weiss in explicating SD from various
psychoanalyic and psychological perspectives, and sets about
amplifying these views through a comparative approach which
asserts that Bellow used Oedipus
Rex not so much as a model for
psychoanalytic truths, but rather as a paradigm for the
unchanging human condition.
Clayton, John J. "Saul
Bellow's Seize the
Day: A Study in Mid-Life
Transition." Saul Bellow
Journal 5.1 (1986):
34–47.
Argues that the
ending of the novel is based on the study of Wilhelm as an
infantile regressive who, while in the midst of a mid-life
crisis, takes steps toward true maturity as he mourns the corpse
(the casting off of his old self) and emerges from the experience
more maturely and deeply connected with the world of human
beings.
Costello, Patrick. "Tradition in Seize the Day." Essays m
Literature 14.1 (1987):
117–31.
Argues that the
fundamental narrative frame on which SD is built is
that antagonism set up between Dr. Adler's adherence to
"tradition" and Tommy's adherence to the "new." The article
concentrates on the Jewish tradition after summarizing the other
two mentioned. Covers such issues as the work ethic, the American
Dream, Hollywood, the myth of baseball, major aspects of the
Jewish and Christian traditions and their primary values.
Concludes that Tommy Wilhelm has failed the American tradition of
success and embraced the superior Jewish-Christian tradition of
responsibility and trust which involves dying to oneself.
Cronin, Gloria L. "The Seduction of Tommy Wilhelm: A
Post-Modernist Appraisal of Seize
the Day." Saul Bellow Journal 3.1 (1983): 18–27.
The surface world
of SD is deceptively modern in construction, comprised
as it is of urban alienation materials such as its nightmare
urban landscape, pathetic hero and carefully constructed patterns
of descent, sickness, decay, impotence and drowning imagery.
However, Bellow is actually making clever ironic use of such
materials, and particularly with such shopworn materials as
absurdist and Freudian estimates of man. SD is actually a
drama of seduction in which Wilhelm is forced to faith through
having to resist the appealing modernist notions of Tamkin, the
espouser of alienation ethics and nihilism. Provoked finally to
examine such modernist estimates of life, Wilhelm rediscovers his
faith in the human enterprise.
Eichelberger, Julia. "Renouncing 'The World's Business' in
Seize the Day." Studies in
American Jewish Literature 17 (1998):
61–81.
Reviews and
rejects critiques of SD
that focused on the protagonist's psychic
angst in favor of an examination of his alienation due to the
ideology of individualism or "the world's business," Reappraises
Bellow's humanism and contemporary theories of social
constructivism and alienation employed in many critical readings
of SD. Asserts that critical readings which see
SD as an
expression of conservative humanism underrate the novel.
Demonstrates an alternative reading which accounts for the
characters, settings, structure, and imagery of the novel as
contributing to a condemnation of the ideologies of domination at
work which commodifies people within a money culture. Hence
Wilhelm's final disengagement from what he calls "the world's
business," is a renunciation of the ideology of domination. In
Wilhelm, Bellow makes the case for the value of an individual
with an innate need for the kind of work that lies outside the
purview of capital and domination. For Wilhelm, the crowds which
throng the pavement outside the Hotel Glorianna are evidence that
each individual is valuable. It is this lyric sensibility of
Bellow's that suggests his ideological matrix. While being more
vulnerable to pain and anger Wilhelm has discovered more freedom.
Bellow has inscribed a specific cultural critique in which
Wilhelm's is not a renunciation of the world, but of the world's
business. Wilhelm experiences not universal human alienation, but
alienation from the influences of accumulated capital. Hence this
reading takes the narrative out of a universal or "transcendent,"
framework and places it inside a paradigm which provides a
"suspicious" view of the individual culture as impossible. Bellow
demonstrates that the individual is not isolated and that
Wilhelm's world is a luminous creation of multiple
possibilities.
Elam, Heide. "Narcissus and Hermes: The Intersection of
Psychoanalysis and Myth in Seize
the Day." Saul Bellow Journal 13.2 (1995): 30–48.
Discusses the two
characters of Tommy and Tamkin from SD as Narcissus
and Hermes as viewed from the perspective of Hans Kohut's
psychology of the self. In terms of Kohutian psychology, Tommy
Wilhem is a man in an acute state of self-disorder who yearns to
merge with the archaic and omnipotent figure as represented by
the psychological trickster. However, although the latter offers
him insights, he is too self-seeking, unemphatic, and enfeebled
to benefit. As the narcissistic Tommy Wilhelm tends to be highly
self-referential and alienated from work and society, the
interaction with the mythological trickster helps to overcome a
possible stalemate. Concludes that while the encounter with
Tamkin threatens to draw Tommy toward self-destruction in the
manner of the Narcissus legend, it also offers relief from the
burden of self. But unlike the tragic ending of the Narcissus
story, the novel seems to suggest that Tommy's surrender of the
pretender soul signals temporary relief from suffering and a
brief illumination before the symptoms of his disorder are
resumed.
Frank, Elizabeth. "On Saul Bellow's Seize the Day:
'Sunk though He Be beneath the Wat'ry Floor.'" Salmagundi 106–07 (1995): 75–80.
Describes
SD as a
nonstop conversation with many other books, including Job,
Ecclesiastes, and the works of Milton and Tolstoy. But more
particularly it invokes such American books as those by Emerson
and Melville. Elaborates on the progression of Tommy Wilhelm in
light of Billy Bud, "Bartleby the Scrivener," and "Lycidas." Concludes
that Tommy Wilhelm is an Upper West Side Lycidas and a believer
in the Emersonian cult of self-invention. Makes much of Bellow's
ability to create an authentic 1950s milieu.
Giannone, Richard. "Saul Bellow's Idea of Self: A Reading
of Seize the Day." Renascence 27.4
(1975): 193–205.
Unlike previous novels dealing with fallen characters like Tommy
Wilhelm, this novel embodies the quest for personal light in
deliberately romantic structural forms. Like the romantic sun
gods, Apollo and Hyperion, Tommy must be schooled in suffering
before he can reach his "humanness." In the modern materialistic
world, this is a process of losing—not acquiring. Only at
this point is true creative energy released. A sophisticated
explication in which Tommy Wilhelm is seen as an inadvertent
aspirant to romantic ambition.
Girgus, Sam B. "Imaging Masochism and the Politics of Pain:
'Facing' the Word in the Cinetext of Seize the Day." New Essays
onSeize the Day. Ed.
Michael P. Kramer. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge UP, 1998.
71–92.
Compares the state
of Tommy Wilhelm to the tortured image of Saint Sebastion on the
cover of Kaja Silverman's study of male masochism entitled
Male Subjectivity at the
Margins. Both texts examine
masochism's power to complicate and multiply representations of
masculinity in cinema, literature, and society. Both Saint
Sebastion and Tommy Wilhelm are bloodied and impaled from seeking
love , approval , and recognition from invisible, absent
Father/fathers. Employs Silverman's theories of masochism and
multiple masculinities as models for examining the cinematic
version of SD. Talks of the specularity of the film and Tommy's
inner psychic structures as mediated by his desire to be an
actor. Describes Tommy's bodily sensations as clues to his
impaired ego and masochistic self-hatred. Claims that Tommy is a
feminized man who has been castrated, and who founders in a
regressive and nearly infantile state. He is the evidence that
masculinity rests upon an abyss and means that men must live by
"lack." Sees Tommy as evidence of the illusion of fulness with
his feminine behavior and histrionics. Concludes that in the film
version Adler comes off as death incarnate, while Robin William's
institutionalizes Tommy as the ultimate victim.
Gordon, Andrew. "Shakespeare's The Tempest and Yeats' 'Sailing to
Byzantium' in Seize the
Day.'" Saul Bellow Journal 4.1 (1985): 45–51.
Hidden, ironic
allusions in SD refer to "Ariel's Song" from Shakespeare's
The Tempest and W. B. Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium." Both
enrich our understanding of death and transfiguration motifs
in SD. Concludes that the allusions solidify the book's
insistence that spiritual transcendence is possible, despite the
odds. Wilhelm goes on his quest not in Yeats holy city of
Byzantium, or Shakespeare's magic isle, but in the secular and
most mundance island of Manhattan.
Handy, William J.
"Bellow's Seize the
Day." Modern Fiction: A Formalist
Approach. William J. Handy.
Crosscurrents/ Modern
Critiques. Carbondale, IL: Southern
Illinois UP, 1971. 119–30.
Claims that
in SD it is the image of mid-century American man that
is most significant in the novel. Describes the narrative line of
the story and the relationship of the characters within the plot.
Treats the father-son theme and the failure of modern man implied
in Dr. Tamkin.
Handy, William J. "Saul Bellow and the Naturalistic
Hero." Texas Studies in
Literature and Language 5.4 (1964):
538–45.
Describes Bellow's break with the
Dreiserian and Heming-wayesque naturalistic hero struggling and
being defeated in an ultimately malevolent world. Indicates
briefly Bellow's affirmative modifications on the naturalistic
formula and its premises.
Hattenhauer, Darryl. "Tommy Wilhelm as Passive-Aggressive in
Seize the Day." Midwest
Quarterly 36.3 (1995):
265–74.
Provides a more
pessimistic psychological reading than earlier models by Clayton,
Rodriguez, and Bordewyk. Tommy is a classic passive-aggressive
personality because he cannot express his feelings, is grandly
circuitous, manifests self-destructive tendencies, and engages in
futile efforts. Furthermore he both denies and affirms his father
and manifests an inability to assert himself. Concludes that
Tommy is a jobless, homeless, penniless, suicidal drug addict who
will have to overcome extraordinary obstacles if he is to lift
himself above all of this.
Howe, Irving. Introduction. Seize
the Day. Classics of Modern Fiction: Ten Short
Novels. Ed. Irving Howe. New York:
Harcourt Brace and World, 1968. 457–66; 2nd ed. 1972.
51120; 3rd ed. 1980. 457–66.
Introduces the
work under the headings: The Setting, Poetry, The Hero, Minor
Characters, and Style. A useful overview of major issues in the
novel for the beginning student.
Ikeda, Choko. "Human Relations in Saul Bellow's Seize the Day." Kyushu American
Literature 30 (1989):
21–26.
Discusses
SD in order
to show that the ending is hopeful and that human relations,
including the father-son relation, is not what Bellow wants to
emphasize. Comments that the compact style of the novel creates
two problems: 1) the dangling or ambiguous ending, and 2) the
primacy of the father-son relationship.
Jefchak, Andrew. "Family Struggles in Seize the Day." Studies in
Short Fiction 11.3 (1974):
297–302.
In SD we see that
family relationships, not church, army, or big business, form the
psychocenter of the novel. Traces convincingly the destructive
dynamics and values that govern the failed familial relationships
in the novel. The ending of the novel suggests the improbability
of twentieth-century familial closeness and indicates that true
feeling can only be generated both within and toward one's own
self. The unshared life is depicted as a permanent
condition.
Kramer, Michael P. "Introduction: The Vanishing Jew: On Teaching
Bellow's Seize the Day
as Ethnic Fiction." New Essays on Seize the Day. Ed. Michael P. Kramer. Cambridge,
Eng.: Cambridge UP, 1998. 1–24.
Describes
teaching SD as ethnic fiction to Israeli–Jewish students
who failed to see the Jewishness of the text. To them Tommy does
not eat Jewish, sound Jewish, speak Hebrew or Yiddish, or have a
Jewish girlfriend. He forgets Yom
Kippur and only mentions the
Holocaust in passing. Describes Bellow's numerous ambivalent
remarks about his own Jewishness, and sees as emblematic his
highly significant removal of a reference to the Star of David in
the next published version published after the Partisan Review initial printing. Argues that the first generation
of critics who saw Bellow as a Jewish writer were using him as a
mirror for their own Jewish experiences of assimilation. Asserts
that Bellow's novels both embodied and transcended Jewishness,
and that while SD is a cultural marker of the disappearance of a
certain Eastern European style of Jewishness, it is, despite all
of its and Bellows's denials and suppressions, a Jewish
novel.
Kremer, S. Lillian.
"Seize the Day: Intimations of Anti-Hasidic Satire."
Yiddish 4.4
(1982): 32–40. Rpt. in Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of
Short Ficiton. Eds. Gerhard Bach and
Gloria L. Cronin. Easy Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000.
157–67.
Intelligent
application of the materials and techniques of Jewish literature
infuses the content and style in SD. Set in New
York City's decaying West Side, the narrative deals with a
multilevel conflict, including, on an allusive plane, the
historic antagonism between the Hasidim and their Jewish
opponents. Bellow's use of the historic misnagdic and maskilic
opposition to the Hasidic way justifies the dramatic function of
the novella's minor actors and, more importantly, clarifies the
paradoxical nature of Tamkin's character.
Kremer, S. Lillian. "An
Intertextual Reading of Seize the
Day: Absorption and Revision."
Saul Bellow Journal 10.1 (1991): 46–56.
Describes Bellow demonstrating the historic sense that T.S.
Eliot asserted "compels a man to write not merely with his own
generation in his bones" but with a sense that all literature
"has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order."
Talks of his work echoing Russian realists, French
existentialists, English romantics, American transcendentalists
and realists. Uses Bloom's theory of the Anxiety of Influence to frame a detailed intertextual reading of
SD. Traces
the author's use of stock characters from Yiddish literature and
Hasidic folklore. Characterizes Tommy Wilhelm as the schlemiel Hasid
and Dr. Tamkin as schnorrer,
Hasidic Zaddik and Lamed vov Zaddik, the hidden saint— a
dual character who is primarily the corrupt zaddik of
maskilic anti-hasidic satire. Tracks other characters, such
as Mr. Pearls, to various Jewish, hasidic, and British literary
traditions often by secularizing the Jewish source and Judaizing
the secular source. Praises Bellow for his enduring capacity to
benefit from and contribute to literary traditions in ways that
embrace and extend precursor texts, simultaneously effecting
absorption of and discontinuity from the past to create
literature of prodigious intellectual and spiritual import.
Kulshreshtha, Chirantan. "Seize
the Day and the Bellow
Chronology." Literary
Criterion 13.3 (1978): 29–33.
Cited in Annual Bibliography of
English Language and Literature,
1978.
Argues that
SD was
probably not written after AAM and belongs as
a companion piece to DM
and "The Bootlegger's Son." Hence Wilhelm's
designation as a victim-hero and the obvious resemblances between
these texts. SD resembles DM and
TV in its
meticulous attention to technique and structure.
Lister, Paul A. "The
'Compleat Fool' in Seize the
Day." Saul Bellow Journal 3.2 0984): 32–59.
Bellow leads
Wilhelm through a complete progression from foolishness to
wisdom. Suggests a relationship to I. B. Singer's "Gimpel the
Fool" that Bellow translated just three years before. Suggests
Proverbs as an influence. Claims Wilhelm arrives at the heart of
his maturity in the funeral parlor.
Loe, Thomas. "Modern Allegory and the Form of Seize the Day." Saul Bellow
Journal 7.1 (1988):
57–66.
Discusses the
archetypal and symbolic dimensions of Bellow's shorter fiction in
which the concentrated line of action and sharply focused
characters heighten possibilities of metaphoric import. Notes how
the synthesis of the symbolic and the realistic characterizes an
increasing number of important twentieth-century narratives.
Examines SD in comparison with a wide variety of other modern
pieces.
Lyons, Bonnie K. "American–Jewish Fiction since
1945." Handbook of
American–Jewish Literature: An Analytical Guide to Topics,
Themes, and Sources. Ed. Lewis Fried,
Gene Brown, Jules Chametsky, and Louis Harap. Westport:
Greenwood, 1988. 61–89.
Discusses Bellow
in the context of a major article about postwar
American–Jewish fiction. Discusses a variety of Bellow
novels and short stories under such headings as "Those
Kleine Mensche": The Common Man; "Menshlichkayt":
vs. Manliness; Man's Mixed Moral Nature; "T Shuva": Turning,
Jewish Sources; Cosmopolitanism and Universalism; The Middle
Road: And-Romanticism/Anti-Nihilism; Time, History, and Memory;
Intellect and Spirit; The Celebration of Talk; and Art as a
Humanistic Enterprise.
Marotti, Maria Ornella.
"Concealment and Revelation: The Binary Structure of Seize the Day." Saul Bellow
Journal 5.2 (1986):
46–51.
Discusses the idea
that though the novel is centered on a central character facing a
moment of deep crisis and self-discovery, the novella is
organized through the principle of a shifting center of
consciousness that is functional to the deep structure of the
text, that is, to the underlying binary pattern of concealment
and revelation. Not only is the reader allowed to penetrate the
true emotional roots of the protagonist's personality through his
thoughts, delusions, and memories, but also he or she is able to
see the impact of his appearance on the world both through his
father's thoughts and the narrator's grotesque descriptions of
his discordant physical traits.
Marshall, Sarah L. "Bellow's Seize the Day." Notes on
Contemporary Literature 20.1 (1990):
9–10.
Examines the three
meal scenes in SD to demonstrate how they support the implication
of carpe diem, and how they differentiate the diners
appositely. Argues that, in a world lacking a spiritual
component, pursuit of the physical becomes paramount. Suggests
that the food that fuels pursuit may even become an end in
itself. How Wilhelm Adler, Dr. Adler, and Dr. Tamkin approach
mealtime thematically distinguishes their characters. Wilhelm
approaches food as a last resort, Adler is calculated, and Tamkin
attacks it. The meal themes emphasize the
"here-and-now-because-life-is-short" theme suggested by the
title.
Martin, John Stephen. "Vision and Visibility: The Phenomenology
of Power and the American Literary Consciousness of Self."
Canadian Review of American
Studies 18.2 (1987):
181–96.
SD is discussed in the context of an
essay on the dialectics of consciousness which operates
throughout American literature. In SD, the dialectic expresses
itself in the hero's identification of a mysterious transcendent
ego called by his mentor, a pretending soul, and a radically
empirical real soul. Tommy's ultimate accomplishment is to cast
off his pretender soul and achieve dignity by cheating
experience, and thereby achieving transcendence by giving rise to
his true individuality. His ego has given him the power to cope
and endure, and is more precious than ideas of Nature or the laws
of phenomena. For Bellow it is possible to have a vision that one
knows is such a performance of the will, and through such staged
performance, to create all that is visible, as well as all that
is ineffable, intangible, and invisible. Wilhelm's consciousness
is a conscious gesture that dignifies mankind, even if it is
fundamentally ridiculous and inane. SD is a typically modern
novel because it's theme, consciousness of selfhood, is central
to modernism.
Mathis, James C. "The Theme of Seize the Day." Critique
7.3 (1965): 43–45.
Traces the complex
strands of meaning and associations set off in the novel by the
unconventional use of the carpe
diem theme from Shakespeare's Sonnet
73.
Morahg, Gilead. "The Art of Dr. Tamkin: Matter and Manner
in Seize the Day." Modern Fiction
Studies 25.1 (1979): 103–16.
Rpt. in Saul Bellow. Ed. Harold Bloom. Modern Critical Views. New
York: Chelsea, 1986. 147–59.
SD
is problematic in that its intellectual
values depend heavily on the enigmatic character of Dr. Tamkin,
who, through seemingly negative ideas, communicates positive
healing effects. Provides a review of critical assessments of
Tamkin and argues that Tamkin uses his imaginative vision to
communicate cogent visions of human reality. These are generally
analogous to a developing vision postulated in Bellow's later
novels. Like Bellow, he is dedicated to a cultural and spiritual
mission he believes can be carried out through his art. Traces
these ideas throughout this and later novels.
Mukerji, Nirmal. "A
Reading of Saul Bellow's Seize
the Day." Literary Criterion
9.1 (1969): 48–53. Rpt. as "A Note on the Animal Imagery
in Seize the Day." Asian Response
to American Literature. Ed. C. D.
Narasimhaiah. New York: Barnes, 1972. 313–15.
Provides a general
overview of the theme and style in the novel. Develops a slightly
more detailed analysis of its patterns of animal and water
imagery.
Nelson, Gerald B. "Tommy
Wilhelm." Ten Versions of
America. Gerald B. Nelson. New York:
Knopf, 1972. 129–45.
A general
discussion detailing the exact dimensions of Tommy's defeat in
modern America. Concludes that the journey was simply too
rigorous for him, that he really didn't have what it takes to
negotiate modern America, and that Tommy cannot "protect himself
from the savages" by building any kind of a fence. He doesn't
really want to die, he just doesn't want to be a man.
Pinsker, Sanford. "Bellow's Seize
the Day." Explicator 41.3
(1983): 60–61.
Pinsker argues
that the poem "Eyes and Tears" by Andrew Marvell provides a
striking analogue of Tommy's situation. Pinsker goes on to
document the large number of water images in the novel and to
conclude that weeping in the novel, as in the poem, is a sign of
strength, not of weakness.
Pinsker, Sanford. Saul
Bellow's Seize the Day. Twayne's
United States Authors Series 606. New York: Twayne's; Toronto:
Maxwell Macmillan, 1992. 77–79.
Calls Tommy
Wilhelm an Augie March grown old and slightly paunchy, with his
chances running out. Sees Tommy's collective failures as economic
and not human. Traces the plot and concludes that Tommy Wilhelm
is a Woody Allen style sensitive flop who speaks directly to the
zeitgeist in which anti heroes seem the only heroes left.
Porter, M. Gilbert.
"Seize the Day: A Drowning Man." Whence the Power? The Artistry and Humanity of
Saul Bellow. Columbia, MO: U of
Missouri P, 1974. 102–26. Rpt. as "The Scene as Image: A
Reading of Seize the
Day." Saul Bellow: A Collection of Critical
Essays. Ed. Earl Rovit. Twentieth
Century Views. Englewood Cliffs, N J: Prentice, 1975.
52–71.
Pugh, Scott. "Stylistic Indeterminacy and the Opening of
Seize the Day." Kyushu American
Literature 28 (1987):
29–37.
Argues that the
elusive style in which the [first] paragraph is presented
establishes in its very elusiveness a standard of indeterminacy
which has far-reaching ramifications not only in terms of style
but also in relation to character, symbol, theme, and narrative
point of view, a claim which may be substantiated by a detailed
examination of internal evidence.
Ranta, Jerrald. "Time in Bellow's Seize the Day." Essays in
Literature 23.2 (1995):
300–15.
Posits the
existence of Gregorian and Jewish time in SD. Argues that
Gregorian time: the season, month, and day-date of Wilhelm's "day
of reckoning," appear to be easily identified. Traces all of this
in great detail through the novel, showing several inaccuracies
in Wilhelm's recollections. This blurring is significant. If one
looks at it from the perspective of Jewish time, it would appear
that the Jewish calendar is of great significance in the story.
It is the religious nature of the Jewish calendar and its
associations with Shavu'ot
that provide the most extensive and
interesting reading of Wilhelm's "Day of Reckoning." Bellow is
showing a bi-calendric double-vision. Wilhelm is actually
receiving hints from another reality at work in our lives, and
this suggests that even if Wilhelm is not restored to his Jewish
faith, faith is still possible.
Raper, J. R. "Running Contrary Ways: Saul Bellow's Seize the Day." Southern
Humanities Review 10.2 (1976):
157–68.
Develops the
thesis that there is no longer a unitary personality in the novel
that emerged after the hardboiled era of Hemingway. True identity
of the real self is always compounded in part of the "Spirit of
Alternatives" that appears in many of Bellow's novels. Interest
in this stems from Bellow's interest in psychoanalysis and
Jungian psychology. Believes a man's character runs "contrary
ways" and that "none has as broad and immediate application to
American society as the change in Tommy Wilhelm's personality
in SD.
Richmond, Lee J. "The Maladroit, the Medico, and the Magician:
Saul Bellow's Seize the
Day." Twentieth Century Literature 19.1 (1973): 15–25.
Dr. Adler
functions as a failed medico and father. Tommy fulfills the role
of the maladroit. He is the deluded inheritor of a bogus
mythology of commerce like Jay Gatsby, Willy Loman, and others
before him. Tamkin the magician, however, is the archetypal
shaman who has a special form of medicine power. His is, in fact,
the trickster-transformer. He is a master at exorcising tormented
souls of evil things. Kin to Tommy as his name suggests, he
becomes Tommy's elected father and finally his savior, only to
disappear magically as Tommy takes possession of himself in the
funeral parlor.
Rodrigues, Eusebio L. "Bellow's Confidence Man." Notes on Contemporary Literature 3.1 (1973): 6–8.
Traces the
evolution of Tamkin from a variety of sources: Reich, the
American literary con man, and the con men of Chicago who inhabit
Bughouse Square and Hyde Park, and particularly Yellow Kid
Weil.
Rodrigues, Eusebio L. "Reichianism in Seize the Day." Critical Essays
on Saul Bellow. Ed. Stanley
Trachtenberg. Critical Essays on
American Literature. Boston: Hall,
1979. 89–100.
Rosenberg, Howard.
"Robin Williams Seizes Bellow's 'Day.'" Los Angeles Times 1 May 1987, sec. 6: 22.
Calls this film
production, funny, grim, and suffused with a dark ribbon of
nervous energy. Describes the performances of various actors and
the film sets.
Salomon, David A. "The Brotherhood of Unfulfilled Early Promise:
Tommy Wilhelm in Saul Bellow's Seize the Day and
'You' in Jay McInerney's Bright
Lights, Big City." Saul Bellow Journal 12.2 (1994): 37–43.
Tommy Wilhelm and
"You" in Jay McInerney's Bright
Lights, Big City are strikingly
similar portraits of failure in twentieth-century American
literature. Both are tales of unfulfilled youth; the parallels
include similar views of contemporary life involving loss of
religious and ethical values and the adoption of nihilism as a
religious ideal in its own right. In the end both protagonists
are on the road to a healthy perspective, with clean slates, free
of guilt, and ready to experience joy.
Scrafford, B. L. "Water and Stone: The Confluence of Textual
Imagery in Seize the Day." Saul Bellow
Journal 6.2 (1987):
64–70.
Examines the
multiple implications of both water and ossification imagery
in SD as clues to several obvious and many buried levels
of meaning. A detailed and complex treatment.
Shaked, Gershon. "Shadows of Identity: A Comparative Study of
German Jewish and American Jewish Literature." The Shadows within: Essays on Modem Jewish
Writers. Gershon Shaked.
Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1987.
57–82.
Begins with an
elaborate series of definitions of Jewish literature in other
than Hebrew languages, refuting some and finally settling on the
fact that "a culture with a dual identity is not simply a
theoretical creation of historians of literature but, rather, an
empirical entity. Its literature is a highly complex embodiment
of both identities" (58). What follows is an elaborate historical
and comparative examination of German and American Jewish
literatures. Points out that because modified Jewish culture has
moved from one place of exile to another throughout history, the
identity of its readership has changed, as have the authors.
Concludes: "Yet the problem of identity plagues Jewish writers,
their characters, and their readers as much as ever" (79).
Sharma, J. N. "Seize the
Day: An Existentialist Look."
Existentialism in American
Literature. Ed. Ruby Chatterji.
Atlantic Highlands, N J: Humanities Press, 1983.
121–33.
Examines
SD as an
existentialist novel emphasizing the aspect of individual choice
as the chief criterion. Explores the relationship of this novel
to its two predecessors. Mines several of Bellow's essays and
interviews for supporting arguments.
Shear, Walter. "Steppenwolf and Seize
the Day." Saul Bellow Newsletter 1.1 (1981): 32–34.
Likenesses between
Steppenwolf and SD point to some shared concerns of both Herman Hesse
and Saul Bellow. Such con-terns include suffering, the dual
nature of the individual, adult isolation, the human meaning of
finality, and "the heart's ultimate need." Bellow finally
reverses Hesse's isolating duality and supplants it with evidence
of man's tendency toward inclusiveness.
Shiels, Michael. "Place,
Space, and Pace: A Cinematic Reading of Seize the Day." Saul Bellow at
Seventy-five: A Collection of Critical Essays. Studies & Texts in English 9.
Tübingen: Narr, 1991. 55–62.
Argues that place,
space, and pace are closely related notions in SD, as well as
important conceptual tools employed in analyzing the formal
structures and communicative aesthetics of cinema narratives.
Illustrates how Bellow's imaginative literary relations in the
notions of space, place, and pace are transcribed in a Cinematic
reading of the novella, in which thematic concerns are made
usually congruent with structure, dynamics, and aesthetics of
filmic narrative. Moves through each scene systematically.
Concludes with a discussion of the arresting effect of the
freeze-frame conclusion to the film.
Sicherman, Carol M. "Bellow's Seize the Day:
Reverberations and Hollow Sounds." Studies in the Twentieth Century 15 (1975): 1–31.
SD
presents an analysis of human isolation in
mid-twentieth-century New York through ironic play on the central
carpe diem motif. Hence, Bellow is able to detail the manifold
discordances between Wilhelm's world and the literary world
evoked by the book's title. A sophisticated treatment of Bellow's
inversions and uses of the traditional associations suggested by
the carpe diem cannon of literature.
Simmons, Gaye McCollum. "Atonement in Bellow's SD" Saul Bellow Jouranl 11.2–12.1 (1993–94): 30–53. Rpt.
in Small Planets: Saul Bellow and
the Art of Short Fiction. Eds.
Gerhard Bach and Gloria Cronin. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State
UP, 2000. 169–87.
Argues that
Bellow's Jewishness is most explicitly seen in SD because here we
see ethical monotheism and the tradition of taking stock of
oneself in the Rosh Hashanah Yom
Kippur traditions. Argues that it is
through these traditions fully assimilated Jews are reminded of
their bond with Judaism and of the necessity for an ethical bond
with humankind. Even though Tommy is inarticulate in traditional
theological terminology, and although no narrator translates his
experiences, Tommy still acts out of a modern sense of diaspora
and observes the day as a Jew in exile cut off from his father
and engaged in repentance. While SD does not
replicate the religious service on the Day of Atonement (Yom
Kippur), the process described in the
novel is allegorical of such an atonement. Concludes that
SD is a
piece of conversion poetics, calling the reader to become
a mensch in a world seeking to reduce all to a faceless and
characterless universal humankind.
Singh, Sukhbir. "Bellow's Seize
the Day and Vonnegut's Mother Night: An
Intertextual Approach." Indian
Journal of American Studies 23.1
(1993): 100–06.
Provides an
intertextuality study of SD and
Mother Night on the basis of their conversation about man's
predicament in the contemporary world for the last four decades.
Without necessarily influencing each other, they employ two
different modes of narrative writing and treat two dissimilar
problems tin their novels. Bellow writes in the traditional
realistic mode, while Vonnegut writes in a postmodern
metafictional manner. Vonnegut talks of the subversive forces of
science, technology, and war, while Bellow believes human beings
can survive humanly. Provides an elaborate comparative chart of
parallel and parallel themes and issues. Concludes that for
explicatory purposes, such a study can illuminate themes,
character , and parallel situations regardless of any direct
conversation, allusion, or reference, in either text to the
other.
Singh, Sukhbir. "Placing Seize
the Day in Bellow Chronology."
Littcrit 7.2 (1981): 22–26.
Discusses the
textual conections between TV, AAM, and
SD. Traces
the shared characteristics between Joseph, Asa Levanthal and
Wilhelm. Also comments on their affinities with Kafka's victims.
Suggests SD belongs to the earliest creative work by Bellow
and was written at the same time, and not in 1956 when it was
published.
Stout, Janis P. "Suffering as Meaning in Saul Bellow's
Seize the Day." Renascence 39.2
(1987): 365–73.
Notes the
intensity of suffering in the Bellow protagonist and argues that
"their plight is not offered as a statement that the ultimate
nature of reality is either hopeless or absurd. Bellow does not
let his people evade the harsh facts of pain and death, but
neither does he mire them in meaningless misery . . . . Instead,
writing with what John Clayton calls' a 'moral seriousness' that
is noticeably anti-modernist, Bellow restates in fresh idiom the
traditional dictum that suffering is educational, suffering
humanizes" (365).
Svrljuga, Zeljka. "Et bidrag til genreteoorien:
Bekjennelsesromanen: En analyse av Saul Bellow's Seize the Day." New Essays on
Seize the Day. Ed. Michael P. Kramer.
Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge UP, 1998. 43–70.
Teodorescu, Anda. "Introduction." Traieste-ti clipa [Seize the Day]. Saul Bellow. Bueuresti: Univers.,
5–11. Cited in Annual
Bibliography of English Language and Literature, 1972.
Trowbridge, Clinton W. "Water Imagery in Seize the Day." Critique 9.3
(1967): 62–73.
SD
is an essentially positive work depicting
the birth of Tommy Wilhelm's soul through a pervasive pattern of
drowning and other water imagery. Traces Tommy's ironic passage
from apparent despair to a rebirth through drowning. Water
imagery is especially significant since it is an emotional birth
which is occurring. Argues that SD demonstrates
the use of the symbolist technique at its best.
Tuerk, Richard. "Tommy
Wilhelm—Wilhelm Adler: Names in Seize the Day." Naughty
Names. Ed. Fred Tarpley. Commerce,
Texas: Names Institute Press, 1975. 27–33.
Sees the central
theme of the novel as being Tommy Wilhelm's identity—a
problem intimately tied up with his confusing number of names.
Reviews all of the phases of Wilhelm's search for identity in
relation to names he is currently using and their particular
cultural and symbolic significance.
Weber, Donald. "Manners
and Morals, Civility and Barbarism: The Cultural Contexts
of Seize the Day." New Essays on
Seize the Day. Ed. Michael P. Kramer.
Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge UP, 1998. 43–70.
Examines
SD for
evidence of Bellow's preoccupation with the costs for the human
soul of achieving civilization. Sees SD as one of
Bellow's major discussions of "civility" in its staging of
contrasting styles of behavior, moral and economic, within the
psychosocial dynamics of the father-son relationship. Sees
SD as a
reverse immigrant novel showing the intrafamilial costs of new
American economic striving and the loss of "old System" Eastern
European emotional styles. Argues that Bellow is fiercely
attached to the immigrant generation, and that spiritually he is
descended from the baffled and heroic Jewish fathers with their
"Jewish opera." Uses "The Old System" as a cultural and familial
context for SD by examining the emotional losses and dilemmas of
Isaac Braun. Also uses Irving Howe's A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual
Biography (1984) and Isaac
Rosenfeld's Passage From
Home (1946) to provide further
context for SD's complex examination of the immigrant past, its
fathers, the palpable sense of loss and cultural estrangement,
and its filial rupture.
Weiss, Daniel. "Caliban on Prospero: A Psychoanalytic Study on
the Novel Seize the Day,
by Saul Bellow." American Imago 19.3 (1962): 277–306. Rpt. in Saul Bellow and the Critics. Ed. Irving Malin. New York: New York UP, 1967.
114–141; Psychoanalysis and
American Fiction. Ed. Irving Malin.
New York: Dutton, 1965. 279–307. Rpt. in The Critic Agonistes: Psychology, Myth, and
the Art of Fiction. Daniel Weiss.
Eds. Eric Solomon and Stephen Arkin. Seattle: U of Washington P,
1985. 185–213.
SD
concentrates on the father-son relationship
that proceeds with unceasing conflict toward ultimate atonement.
In this novel it stems from neurotic conflict between instinctual
cravings and outwardly determined frustrations. The pattern of
repression and its eventual shattering suggests close parallels
with the situation revealed in Kafka's "Letter to His Father"
Sees Tommy as a moral masochist who hates his father and adopts
Tamkin as a substitute for his dead mother. The actual day of the
novel's action is a day of traumatophilia that induces, among
other neurotic reactions, conversion hysteria in the suffocation
episodes. All resolves itself with Tommy's eventual healing
through Tamkin, the surrogate and psychoanalyst.
West, Ray B., Jr. "Six
Authors in Search of a Hero" Sewanee Review 65.3 (1957): 498–508.
Sees Tommy Wilhelm
as perversely unheroic. Despite its pathos the novel is really a
comic study in mediocrity. Criticizes the book for being small
and for returning to the themes of the earlier fiction, rather
than moving out toward those suggested by AAM.
Wirth-Nesher, Hana. "'Who's He When He's at Home?': Saul Bellow's
Translations." New Essays
on Seize the Day. Ed. Michael P.
Kramer. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge UP, 1998. 25–41.
Explains how other
languages and language texts, especially Bellow's own
translations from Yiddish, shape the context of SD. Describes each
of Bellow's three major acts of translation and how they create a
dynamic that then takes place in the imaginary fictional space.
Notes that all three were performed by Bellow in the decade
1953–63, thus framing the period in which SD was written.
Provides a detailed account of how Bellow construes himself as
cultural mediator in his translations of "Gimpel the Fool," and
the Great Jewish Short
Stories by removing the Yiddish and
Hebrew liturgy and language for an American audience. Describes
how for Bellow Singer servers as a point of departure, an origin
and sign of the authentic past now annihilated, abandoned, and
assimilated. Hence the Bellow/ Singer intertextual dynamic is
instructive with regard to the rewriting of Jewish literary
memory. Provides an exhaustive treatment of the intertextual
Hebrew and Yiddish sources which permeate SD. Demonstrates
how Bellow has crossed the boundary to the past and reshaped the
representation of that past to achieve both continuity and
discontinuity. In this way he simultaneously creates the survival
of the Yiddish text for Jewish literature, and the accommodation
of it for American literature. Concludes that this leaves open
the question of who Bellow is when he is at home.
Reviews
Allen, Walter. New Statesman and
Nation ns 27 Apr. 1957:
547–48.
