My first Bellow book was Henderson the Rain King. I fell in love with Bellow's writing almost instantly. The New York Review of Books has a two-part series in which the transcript of a talk Bellow gave in 1988 is being published. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/oct/27/jewish-writer-america/
A sample, "One's language is a spiritual location, it houses your soul. If you were born in America all essential communications, your deepest communications with yourself, will be in English--in American English. You will neither lie nor tell the truth in any other language. Without it no basic reckonings can be made. You will not reflect on your own death in Hebrew or in French. Your English is the principal instrument of your humanity. And when the door of the gas chamber was shut many of the German Jews who called upon God for the last time inevitably used the language of their murders, for they had no other."
Quibble with Bellow's universal assertion for American English among those born here if you must. Still, the point about language being a spiritual location is a beautiful one worth considering. The passage is typical, to me, of Bellow's ability to meld the literary, the philosophical, and the pragmatic assessment of the situation in which we find ourselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment