Is Genuine Communication Possible for Saul Bellow? - A Reading of The Dean's December

Abstract

Saul Bellow(1915-) received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, which firmly established his literary reputation in the eyes of the critics. After receiving the honor he felt that he now had to fulfil even greater expectations than before. Few American authors have been awarded the Nobel Prize and those who received it generally saw it as a sign that their best creative days had ended. It may have been this sense that the prize is somehow a blight on the career of a writer that caused a slow down in Bellow's production of fiction fiction. His next novel, The Dean's December, did not appear until 1982. It wan't well received; many critics wondered whether Bellow had, indeed, gone into a decline. Fearing for his reputation, but with the desire for an adequate form of representation to communicate of his world to readers, Bellow was engaged with the problem of what kind of writer he could aspire to be in the postmodern world. As are most writers, he is interested in the political and social context of literature. The Dean's December is his most political novel. In it he is wrestling with his major preoccupation: What is it that enables us to communicate, to transmit our hearts?