Physicist of the Heart
On the Work of Saul Bellow
“Powerless to reject the hedonistic joke of a mammoth industrial civilization on the spiritual desires, the high cravings of a Herzog, on his moral suffering, his longing for the good, the true. All the while his heart is contemptibly aching. He would like to give this heart a shaking, or put it out of his breast. Evict it. Moses hated the humiliating comedy of heartache. But can thought wake you from the dream of existence? Not if it becomes a second realm of confusion, another more complicated dream, the dream of intellect, the delusion of total explanations.”
– Herzog pg 207
I like to think literary fiction and physics share at least one common characteristic. Richard Feynman said about quantum mechanics; “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t.” I like to think, in this phrase, one could replace quantum mechanics with fiction mechanics. Suggesting there are difficult pieces of literary fiction which are not ever going to be “teachable” or able to replicate through knowledge of structure. Stories which, at their best, are the study of life and human dynamics and the eternal necessity of narrative in the structure of our consciousness. Or, how narrative turns to describe randomness by giving events meaning. Fiction mechanics which attempt to give characters in narrative specific functions, like mathematical Greek letters, in the complex equations of our lives. Trying to ask the big question; how does consciousness work for most living things?
I like to think about a shared similarity of questing towards the mystical complexity of the universe on at least two counts. I like any comparison of what I do in writing stories to the rigorous high minded efforts of physicists. I also like how silly it sounds. Comparing Greek letters to characters and I cannot help but imagine a story with Σ and ∞ suffering through a tragic love affair. The idea being; to explore just what eternal love might mean?
There are few things writers have said about their work which do any elucidation the work hasn’t done itself.
Yet the first time I heard Bellow say of his own novels that; “there wasn’t a serious word in them” I was confused because this needed to reorganize his work in my mind.
His novels seem serious. A first reading of Herzog will leave the young mind spinning. Bellow writes novels of ideas and in youth ideas seem deadly serious. Beginning to understand one’s life needs ideas (how else to begin?). What the youth has yet to learn is these ‘ideas’ are multitude and often banal in repetition. What one can hope to get from ideas becomes more oblique with time. In short, comedic.
It really took me a long while to understand this juxtaposition between what a character finds serious and the intention of what, as a reader or writer, one is subtly pushing and pulling through the narrative. That is; in its existence as story. Bellow was excellent at blurring the line between character and author. At the peak of his distinctive style — Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, More Die of Heartbreak — the distinction between author and character, to even the well trained reader, seems barely discernible.
So I was confused. Was Bellow declaring himself un-serious when he said there “wasn’t a serious word”? Well, yes. But not because he didn’t understand about the things of which he spoke. He certainly took pleasure in ideas. Even in the capacity for a mind to become tortured by them. This was his reflection on the modern condition; ideas were huge pieces of daily existence and therefore could not be left out of his novels. But as a storyteller he wasn’t trying to change anyone’s mind or make an argument of any type.
This is where I look to the best parts of physics, where nothing is ever truly solid. Just theories. Good ones to be sure but fundamentally capable of change. The literal definition of theories. The word theory needing to exist in the space contingent to thoughts so far. (Contingent to understanding.) With the quantum nature of the universe come to light in the last century, this understanding is as nebulous its ever been (if not more so).
Literature has largely ignored the efforts of physicists (and many other forms of science for that matter). Lately there has been some effort to rectify this however. Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World is an interesting survey of personalities from the 20th Century who were in the avant garde of physical thought. Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger trilogy has characters asking “What else?” to hear details about physicists and the creation of the atom bomb. Details from conversations McCarthy had at the Santa Fe institute with Murray Gell-Mann and extrapolations into mathematical theory.
I think it is important to synthesize and combine the fascinating theories coming out of avant garde science with stories, and as noted above I’m clearly not the only one. But the above books are largely historical re-tellings of figures in physics — which are great and fascinating — but not the same as taking the way of thinking like a physicist and applying that process to the creation of mind in a story.
In Richard Feynman’s words; thinking like a scientist would mean living with uncertainty.
“I think that when we know that we actually do live in uncertainty, then we ought to admit it; it is of great value to realize that we do not know the answers to different questions. This attitude of mind — this attitude of uncertainty — is vital to the scientist, and it is this attitude of mind which the student must first acquire. It becomes a habit of thought. Once acquired, one cannot retreat from it anymore.” (The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, 247)
Uncertainty is difficult to expose in stories, even as it is a fundamental component of their pleasure. The reader slowly unraveling what they did not know. Yet the author gets no such luxuries. Things need to happen. There’s been attempts at workarounds; choose your own adventure stories etc but they never have the real satisfactions of a story curated and performed with intent.
There’s a little bit of uncertainty in the idea of the ‘unreliable narrator’ but this only brings up other questions about what type of narration could ever be truly reliable. It seems the best way to tango with uncertainty is also the most obvious. Have characters in your books be uncertain.
At this Bellow was a master. Of Bellow’s characters we are sure of one thing: they have ideas and yet don’t know what they are worth. (We can also be sure these lead characters are male and college educated.) They largely mistrust their own learning. “Shortly after dawn … Mr. Artur Sammler with his bushy eye took in the books and papers of his West Side bedroom and suspected strongly that they were the wrong books, the wrong papers.” (Opening line of Mr. Sammler’s Planet). In the rest of the novel this observation hardly matters but it sets the tone for a protagonist who is uncertain. How could the books and papers be wrong? (This is the same as asking the question, how could they be right?) This is a feeling, or better yet, in Feynman’s own words, a habit.
Bellow’s characters are habitually lost in thought. This was a very interesting refinement of novelistic style. Dialogue, in a novel, cannot be disputed. Dialogue is an indisputable record as what the character said. But thoughts can exist somewhere inbetween. A little bit the author and a little bit the character. (One can try to make thoughts exist only as a character’s — not without heavy risk of making those thoughts banal by never knowing if they were truly thunk by another or not.)
“Intelligent observers have pointed out that “spiritual” honor or respect formerly reserved for justice, courage, temperance, mercy, may now be earned in the negative by the grotesque. I often think this development is possibly related to the fact that so much of “value” has been absorbed by technology itself. It is “good” to electrify a primitive area. Civilization and even morality are implicit in technological transformation … Good is easily done by machines of production and transportation. Can virtue compete? New techniques are in themselves bien pensant and represent not only rationality but benevolence. Thus a crowd, a herd of bien pensants has been driven into nihilism, which, as is now well known, has Christian and moral roots and for its wildest frenzies offers a “constructive” rationale.” (Herzog 199)
The gimmick of Herzog is his thoughts are written down as letters never sent. Often to outlandish historical figures like Eisenhower or Nietzsche. The above thoughts are of this type — and there’s a compelling mind behind them. For a book published in the early 1960’s the ideas seem as worthy of consideration as ever. But to return to the third paragraph of this article, in Bellow’s own words, this is not serious. Because the thoughts can have no certainty. Are simply theories.
As of this moment what are theories worth? That is a different question entire. Bellow was publishing his books at a time when physics departments were also flourishing. (No comment on the current state of literary publishing or academic physics.) But let us take a rather broad example and see what to make of it.
Considering what seems to me to be the current state of public discourse — what might be called biological determinism or a ‘healthocracy’ — I would like to examine a statement or theory like More Die of Heartbreak (a lesser read Bellow novel). Firstly, we can examine the semantic structure. What to make of that more? More than what or how many more? There’s problem one, we get no solid figures. And die? Not simply suffer or languish? More die of heartbreak? A doctor would have to agree that heart failure is one of the more common causes of death but I imagine would get rather stubborn about the terms. In the phrase (more die of heartbreak) there isn’t even any clinical psychology terminology which might at least put us in the realm of the mental and out of the musculature. Causes of death and disease need to get rather precise for biological analysis.
And yet … isn’t there something plausible in the theory that more die of heartbreak? In the last twenty years hasn’t life expectancy gone down despite our technological and medical advances? Inside the word more is something very subtle in its uncertainty. It might come down to the phrase ‘more die of heartbreak than you would think or guess.’ Because that is the place where theory is supposed to put us. Questioning of our certainty. Here’s another statement; people choose their own deaths more often than you’d think. This has to do with what they’ve chosen as a goal or purpose which has not come to fruition — or maybe they’ve never felt like they could choose and have simply been floating in and out with the tides thrashed around by the world until they can no longer take the pain.
Of course such a condition is exactly why most people look for and choose certainty. But it seems to me both ways of thinking, doubt and belief, have equal chances for breaking one’s heart. At least with uncertainty you can laugh sometimes.
There is something of a connection between Feynman and Bellow’s faces in my mind. Thin educated men, always smiling. Perhaps this is simply promotional material but reading Feynman’s popular books one can feel pleasure dripping out of them. Bellow has more constraints. His books need to tell a story and thusly need a character arc. For part of the story our character is down in the dumps. Yet these are not the memorable moments of Bellow’s novels.
My favorite is Humboldt’s Gift because the thinking, more often than not, seems enjoyable. With some doubt (but seeming clarity) it is the most autobiographical of Bellow’s work. The main character, Charlie Citrine, is a playwright who has used an individual (a poet of fading glory) a character from his real life as inspiration for a hit play. To describe its plot does no justice. What it meant to me, personally, was the potential joy which seeped out of its pages. Before I read HG I thought suffering was the principal component for being an artist/writer. I think this is common. I’d be surprised to hear from someone who made it this far into the article and had never even considered the idea of depression. The artist needs to wrestle temperamental features of the heart, this process cannot be avoided. But maybe there was as much play and experiment available to this process as any other. Perhaps being uncertain in habit led to the most pleasurable avenues for thinking. At least Bellow made it seem so.
At the ends of both Herzog and Humboldt’s Gift we find our main narrator nearly on the skids. In HG Charlie is at a pension in Spain wrapping a fur jacket around his shoulders to use the drafty wooden outhouse (the jacket one of the last remnants of a more privileged life just months earlier). Yet he remains nearly at peace within his mind. Or, better yet, happy with his habits. No need to convince anyone of anything. His own little projects and theories to keep him occupied (one of the main curiosities of Charlie’s being reflections on anthroposophy — Rudolf Steiner’s wacky attempt at making sense of the human heart/soul). And, to end, I think it’s appropriate to quote from the last pages of Herzog. What to make of this heart and theories thereof? Bellow’s voice still rings in my head. There isn’t a serious word in it.
“I look at myself and see chest, thighs, feet — a head. This strange organization, I know it will die. And inside — something, something, happiness … Something produces intensity, a holy feeling, as oranges produce orange, as grass green, as birds heat. Some hearts put out more love and some less of it, presumably. Does it signify anything? I couldn’t say that, for sure. My face too blind, my mind too limited, my instincts too narrow. Is it an idiot joy that makes this animal, the most peculiar animal of all, exclaim something? And he thinks this reaction a sign, a proof, of eternity? And he has it in his breast? But I have no arguments to make about it … I am pretty well satisfied to be, to be just as it is willed, and for as long as I may remain in occupancy.” (414)
