Saul Bellow - Dangling Man

Dangling Man is a short novel in the form of a journal. The journal keeper is a young ChicagoanJosephan unemployed history graduate, supported by his working wife. He uses his journal to explore how he became what he is, and in particular to understand why, about a year ago, he abandoned the philosophical essays he was writing and began to dangle.

So wide does the gap seem between himself as he is now and this earnest, innocent past self that he thinks of himself as the earlier Josephs double, wearing his cast-off clothes.

Though the earlier Joseph self had been able to function in society, to strike a balance between his work in a travel agency and his scholarly inquiries, he was troubled by a sense of alienation from the world. From his window he would survey the urban prospectchimneys, warehouses, billboards, parked cars. Does such an environment not deform the soul? Where was there a particle of what, elsewhere, or in the past, had spoken in mans favour? What would Goethe say to the view from this window?

It may seem comical that in the Chicago of 1941 someone should have been occupied in such grandiose musings, says Joseph the journal keeper, but in each of us there is an element of the comic or fantastic. Yet he recognizes that by mocking the earlier Josephs philosophizing he is denying his better self.

Though in the abstract the early Joseph is prepared to accept that man is aggressive by nature, he can detect in his own heart nothing but gentleness. One of his remoter ambitions is to found a utopian colony where spite and cruelty would be forbidden.

Therefore he is dismayed to find himself being overtaken by fits of unpredictable violence. He loses his temper with his adolescent niece and spanks her, shocking her parents. He manhandles his landlord. He shouts at a bank employee. He seems to be a sort of human grenade whose pin has been withdrawn. What is happening to him?

An artist friend tells him that the monstrous city around them is not the real world: the real world is the world of art and thought. Joseph respects this position: through sharing with others the products of his imagination, the artist allows an aggregate of lonely individuals to become some kind of community.

He, Joseph, is unfortunately not an artist. His sole talent is for being a good man. But what is the point of being good by oneself? Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love. Whereas I, in this room, separate, alienated, distrustful, find in my purpose not an open world, but a closed, hopeless jail.

In a powerful passage, Joseph the journal keeper links his violent outbursts to the unbearable contradictions of modern life. Brainwashed into believing that each of us is an individual of inestimable value with an individual destiny, that there is no limit to what we can attain, we set off in quest of our own individual greatness. Failing to find it, we begin to hate immoderately and punish ourselves and one another immoderately. The fear of lagging [behind] pursues and maddens us It makes an inner climate of darkness. And occasionally there is a storm of hate and wounding rain out of us.

In other words, by enthroning Man at the center of the universe, the Enlightenment, particularly in its Romantic phase, imposed impossible psychic demands on us, demands that work themselves out not just in petty fits of violence such as his own, or in such moral aberrations as the pursuit of greatness through crime (vide Dostoevskys Raskolnikov), but also perhaps in the war that is consuming the world. That is why, in a paradoxical move, Joseph the journal writer finally lays down his pen and enlists. The isolation imposed by the ideology of individualism, he concludes, redoubled by the isolation of self-scrutiny, has brought him to the brink of insanity. Perhaps war will teach him what he has been unable to learn from philosophy. So he ends his journal with the cry: