Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam > Blaise Pascal Instituut > Girard Studiekring > COV&R 2007 > Abstracts Papers 

david willingham

Triumphalist Individualism and Interdividual Vulnerability in Saul Bellow’s The Victim

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ABSTRACT

Although anti-Semitic characters often taunt Asa Leventhal, the protagonist of Saul Bellow’s The Victim, for not exhibiting sufficient “Christian charity,” the ethos in which both he and these inhospitable others live, move, and have their being is more properly Emersonian than Judeo-Christian.  As something of an outsider trying to fit in, Leventhal wrestles with the implications of the prevailing American ideology of self-reliance, but does not find any semblance of peace until he finally adopts conceptions of self and ethics that are both Jewish and Christian. It is a dawning sense of inter-dividualism and commitment to others, rather than a suspicious and competitive individualism, that accounts for his marked increase of well-being by the novel’s close.

Harold Bloom has noted that “Emerson remains the central figure in American culture and informs our politics, as well as our unofficial religion.”  Despite lip-service about the US being a Christian nation, Emerson’s religion of success and self-interest trumps all other values in the world of The Victim, if not day-to-day American life.   Girardian analysis suggests that there is indeed a profusion of victims occupying the shadows of putatively “self-made” men, collateral damage of the religion of success whom Emerson, at his anawim-bashing worst, claims have no moral hold on him:  

[D]o not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations.  Are they my poor?  I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me, and to whom I do not belong.  

In contrast to such claims to self-creation and self-interest, the Judeo-Christian Scriptures point towards a pacific or positive mimesis which is an invitation to imitate an ethic of solidarity.  Put into practice, this ethic promises life in greater abundance (in the here-and-now!) for both the giver and the receiver.  In embracing this ethic, Leventhal lives up to his given name Asa, which denotes “healer” in Hebrew, enacting possibilities for new life and new alliances rather than abiding in the sterile withdrawal and hollow victories of “self-created” and illusive sufficiency.