“You Had to be a Crank to Insist On Being Right”: Saul Bellow’s Comedy

Abstract:The article considers the nature and value of comic expression in Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970). It begins by taking note of the many public statements Bellow made about the stifling qualities of what he came to call “low seriousness,” the mode he saw as alive in mid-century literary reception. It then shows how Bellow’s comic strategies revise his otherwise overwhelming tendency toward public intellectualizing—and how these ultimately ground a case for literary distinctiveness. The article then focuses on how Mr. Sammler’s Planet makes a mockery of instrumentalized understandings of the legacies of the Shoah, of whatever stripe. This in turn troubles critical attempts to translate the book into some specific political or moral insight. This article demonstrates how the novel levels disturbing thoughts about the ultimate irredeemability of recent history, as we experience all forms of seriousness being stalked by the ghosts of unseriousness.