Dangling Man

I made a terrible mistake in my first reading of Dangling Man. Hailed as one of the great works to come out of World War II America, I figured that it was great in the conventional way that war novels are great. My expectations were horribly violated by the book's form (it is a journal) and by the subject matter (a man in the doldrums because of bureaucratic and self-imposed inaction while waiting to be drafted). I was not expecting an existential mediation on the human condition conducted on that most bland of World War II fronts--the American home front. Because of this violation of expectations, I was initially put off by the book. This was ultimately extremely wrong- headed. The genius of this work lies in how it uses the vast historical background of the war and unemployment to show Joseph, the fictional journal keeper, descend further and further into his own personal short-comings, narcissism, and irascibility. A mixture of pessimism and comical farce, the reader of the work is privy to the inner workings of a personality that is watching its degradation. We find at the journal's opening that Joseph has been awaiting conscription for several months. Initially believing that he was to be mobilized within several weeks of his initial notice of mobilization, Joseph had left his regular work-a-day life behind him in order to concentrate on putting all his affairs in order. Government bureaucracy interceded to make this much more complicated than it otherwise should have been. Because of his Canadian nationality and because of certain completely reasonable regulations, Joseph found himself in a position that would have been familiar to many of his generation only a few years before during the Depression; out of work and with a lot of time on his hands. A somewhat bookish and highly intellectual person, Joseph and his infinitely patient wife Iva, both welcomed the free time as a chance for study and as an extended vacation. As time wears on though, and it really wears on Joseph, he develops not only an intelligent critical viewer of friends, family, the war, and society, but also an unbearable wretch as he goes further and further into himself. Every disgusting personality trait that Joseph possess becomes exacerbated and almost beyond his control. To many readers of this work in 1944, this would have resonated with their personal experiences with political and economic redundancy, or with what they saw occur in their families and communities during the Depression. For Joseph though, this would have to much more alienating than it would have been for him just a few years before. During the Depression, it was plain to see that if you were unemployed, you were part of a vast multitude of the like. With full employment during the war, the opposite would have been true. Joseph really is alienated from the mainstream of America. Although Joseph's irrational side is what we are first exposed to, his insights into what America

Some consider this novella Bellow's worst piece. At the other extreme, it has been compared to Dostoevsky's "Notes From the Underground". I am in the latter camp. "Dangling Man" might not strike chords quite as high as Dostoevsky's "Notes", but it's at least in the same ballpark. The April 8 and April 9 entries (the book is written in journal form), on the last two pages of the book, bring everything home, and put this book among the top ten of existentialist fiction. For those who may have read a full-length novel or two of Bellow's, and found it/them overly heavy and tortured, try his early novellas, especially "Dangling Man".

"There was a time when people were in the habit of addressing themselves frequently and felt no shame at making a record of their inward transactions." So begins Bellow's first novel and one of the most consistently excellent oeuvres in American fiction. It's Chicago, 1942, and in preparation for his imminent draft into the army, Joseph has given up his job and moved himself and his wife into one-room lodgings in a boarding house. That was nine months ago and the draft letter hasn't come. Joseph is dangling - alienated, without real purpose, but no longer distracted by the banal minutiae of everyday working life. He begins to see the absurdity of social roles, the hypocrisy of long-held ideologies, and the horror of life without routine. Breaking from friends and family, Joseph observes the slow disintegration of his social self. Significantly, while unthinking discipline is offered as one way out of such a nightmare, we're not encouraged to see this as the only or best solution. Bellow never comes down on one side or the other. This announces one of the central themes of Bellow's work generally: that there is a big difference between thinking and having an idea. Thinking involves a free opposition of ideas, and it raises the work from the level of a tract to the level of art. The opposites are free to range themselves against each other, and they are passionately expressed on both sides. At its best, it is energetic, passionate, and open. An idea, in contrast, is a state of closure which kills truth because it denies the multivalence of experience. According to Bellow, thinking is vital to a novel. The continuing dilemma which concludes most of his narratives may well be aimed at this effect. Thinking is still in progress - hopefully in your head. "Dangling Man" achieves this: Bellow doesn't tell us what to think, he invites us to think for ourselves. This novel is also notable for its bold project of bringing a European form - the sophisticated, introverted, philosophical diary novel - into the American mainstream as a deliberate antidote to hardboiled-dom, both in fiction and in life. Bellow adheres closely to its formal requirements: like his European forbears, Joseph is an alienated, bookish, unemployed part-time flaneur, part-time room hermit, whose impotence and hermetic isolation are underscored. Yet he has an unmistakable touch of America about him, which makes him all the more accessible for readers in the English-American tradition. Bellow puts American life under a European microscope, and finds the central issue much the same: the problem of being human.

Bellow's first novel is a finely written, tightly constructed little gem of American alienation. The main character has received his call-up papers for WW II, and is now waiting in a hotel room - dangling - as the weeks go by and he is still not called up. He begins to think about himself and those around him in a new light - being out of circulation, in enforced idleness, causing him to think about himself and others really for the first time. His detachment grows and he becomes stranger and stranger - or is it the others, his family, friends, work mates, passers by, who are getting stranger. One day in a cafeteria he goes really bonkers upon seeing an old political acquaintence from his youthful days in a radical party, who is now ignoring him. This leads to an explosive, almost surreal scene in which the dangling man is screaming about his "right to be answered" - which of course is a salesman's motto, the cold-caller's motto, while other people's supreme right is, of course, the right to personal privacy. This interesting question, that goes to the heart of what we are as Americans, is only one of the many interesting ideas thrown up by the young Bellow in this short book. If you like *Seize the Day,* you'll probably like this one, too. Bellow's shorter novels (I include *The Victim* in here, too) are among the best examples of American alienation ever written.

It's a perplexing thing: Reviews for later Bellow books (Adventures/Augie March, Mr. Sammler's Planet) definitely reflect a certain (Hell, let's say ponderous) prejudice against Mr. Bellow's often philosophically charged, book-reference studded prose. The reviewers for this book, I see, are at least giving Bellow's difficult but rewarding style a shot...even if, as his first book, it should provide the abstract, the gel for future Bellow fabrications. Different readers...This short book is depressing, I'll say. The portrait of Joseph as he waits to be called by the draft in murky Chicago, as he becomes estranged from his wife and family and friends (he even assaults his niece), all the while relating his troubles to various authors' exemplary works (Goethe was mentioned by other reviewers); all this bound together under the umbrella of the atrabilious and taut war years (rationing, so on) does not make for the kind of reading one hopes to find in every bookshelf in Heaven (my apologies, agnostics and atheists). But, as is true of most great literature (was Arrowsmith, after all, a very happy book...except for the end), the sad aspects shouldn't be given a second thought. Just enjoy the incredible craftsmanship here. You'll thank the Five Star crowd.