The Dean's December

Criticism

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  Confirms Bellow's gritty and detailed accounts of Bucharest from his own personal experience. An extremely detailed accounting of the veracity of Bellow's material facts and realistic descriptive details of life in Bucharest. Provides commendation and corroboration of Bellow's treatment of personality types and their various social levels. Gives an extensive treatment of the psychological effects of intimidation and the omnipresence of spying, surveillance, and bugging as well as regulations affecting sleeping accommodations. Describes the visa and passport restrictions, techniques of censorship, bribery, and various other despotisms. Concludes by tying all of these issues to the deals in DD and affirming the accuracy of Bellow's novelistic portrayal of Bucharest.

• Aderman, Ralph M. "The Dean's Bucharest: Saul Bellow and Romania." Journal of the American Romanian Academy of Arts and Science. 5 (1984): 41–48.
  
  
• Blumenfeld, Odette Irenne. "A Cross-Cultural Response to Saul Bellow's The Dean's December." American Literature for Non-American Readers: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on American Literature. Frankfurt: Lang, 1995. 61–75.
  

  Describes the impact of the publication of DD on Bellow's reputation in Romania. Details the Romanian objections and the responses of cultural officials. Also discusses critical paradigms within which Bellow's texts have been discussed in Romanian university seminars. Describes the students' responses to Bellow's account of Chicago, American democracy, and its racial problems.

• Booth, Sherryl. "Living Your Own Experience: The Role of Communities in Saul Bellow's The Dean's December." Saul Bellow Journal 10.1 (1991): 13–24.
  

  Discusses the theme of the breakdown of language in DD Argues that individuals, therefore, must reconstitute themselves, their language, and their community. Uses this paradigm to explain Bellow's continuing preoccupation with language and the construction of the Self, particularly as it illuminates Dean Corde's remaking of Self through his experience of various communities of individuals in an ever- widening spiral that eventually includes all of humanity. Comments on how Corde's relationship with language and his consciousness about the proper relationships among human beings also signals a new feminist consciousness in Bellow's work, in which the struggle of one man outside the status quo parallels the experience of women with language and society. Describes in detail how the novel proceeds from enclosed spaces, and ends with an ascent to the stars, a movement paralleled by Corde's attempt to recover his ability to feel. Concludes that this essentially feminist struggle is founded in the hope that language shaped into art can be apprehended by the soul.

• Chupin, Helen. "Bellow's Changing Attitude to Couples: The Dean's December." Etudes Anglaises 36.4 (1983): 455–60.
  

  Reviews the theme of love and Bellow's attitudes toward female characters and marriage in earlier novels. Sees DD as a surprising departure from the failure of the relationships in the earlier novels. Concentrates primarily on Minna as an independent professional woman. Remarks also on the community of women in the novel. Concludes that Bellow now believes in the possibility of love and harmony between marriage partners.

• Clemons, Walter. "A Tale of Two Cities." Rev. of The Dean's December.Newsweek 18 Jan. 1982: 86.
  

  Clemons claims that DD is Bellow's dourest and most dispirited book since MSP. It contains his most meagerly fleshed hero. However, the novel becomes absorbing as a novelistic essay. Though the book is uneven, the prose is an instrument of exact pitch and wide-ranging expressiveness.

• Cohen, Joseph. "Saul Bellow's Heroes in an Unheroic Age" Saul Bellow Journal 3.1 (1983): 53–58.
  

  Sees DD as a watershed work. The Dean, seemingly devoid of heroic propensities, may turn out to be his best balanced hero, which is to say, his most human and, therefore, most appealing character. The Dean does not indulge in excesses bordering on lunacy. He does manage to cope with women. Neither is he as narcissistic. Flattering portraits of women have replaced misogyny. Likewise, his treatment of urban Blacks has been adjusted. Turning further away from Jewish values, Bellow makes this new hero an Irish Huguenot.

• Cohen, Matt. "A Tale of Two Cities." Rev. of The Dean's December. Books in Canada 12 May 1982: 12, 14.
  

  Praises Bellow generally and provides an admiring overview of the chief characters, themes, and plot events in the novel. Though not Bellow's best book, its strength lies in Bellow's capacity for maintaining contradictions, its superb prose, and its sheer ambition. Briefly discusses structural flaws.

• Evanier, David. "Bare Bones." Rev. of The Dean's December. National Review 2 Apr. 1982: 364–66.
  

  This is the novel as essay, stripped of whimsy, decoration, character, and fanciful prose. It is Bellow's worst novel because it is full of musty ideas, stilted language, mere cerebration, and vaporous characters. The Chicago scenes never transcend journalese. Its plot creaks in an inexplicably wrong tone. Concludes that DD contains Bellow's worst traits.

• Harmon, William. Rev. of The Dean's December. Southern Humanities Review 17.3 (1983): 280–81.
  

  Sees DD as a distillation of all Bellow's weaknesses and strengths. Admires the synthesis of previous intellectual concerns, and faults the novel for its point of view problems and for its stylistic shortcomings. Labels the ending sentimental. Also sees DD as an open-minded novel in which Corde draws us into his own sensibility so that, consequently, we feel more through Corde than we could without him.

• Hunt, George W. "The Breadth and Breath of Life." Rev. of The Dean's December. America 20 Feb. 1982: 136, 137.
  

  Reveals Bellow's mastery of tonal shifts, variations in sentence structure, clarity of perception, lucidity of language and mastery of eccentric verbal styles. Also sees much of the old lively sassiness, ironic intelligence, self-deprecation and sheer verbal fun. Its strength is the flexibility of the narrative voice. Its weakness comes after the first one hundred pages where the voice fails to resonate and where the set pieces and crypto-monologues begin. This is Bellow the professor-elf intruding like an essayist. However, these are only small slips in an otherwise steady novel.

• Johnson, Diane. "Point of Departure." Rev. of The Dean's December. New York Review of Books 4 Mar. 1982: 6, 8. Rpt. as "Saul Bellow as Reformer." Terrorists and Novelists. Diane Johnson. New York: Knopf, 1982. 134–40.
  

  Accuses Bellow of approving of Corde too much and of taking too little time to make him convincing. DD is really two novels and each fades when focussed upon. The other characters are faded and anonymous. Corde is not convincing as a WASP. Essentially Bellow has written a book about how and why nobody will read his book.

• Johnson, Greg. "A Winter's Tale." Rev. of The Dean's December. Southwest Review 67.3 (1982): 342–45.
  

  Claims that this novel is deliberately intended as a "Winter's Tale." It represents an admirable risk by a writer who, rather than repeat himself, offers us a somber, unassuming, quietly lyrical evocation of intellectual disappointment. The tone is appropriately elegiac rather than celebratory. Renders movingly the natural and spiritual bleakness of Bucharest and the unshakeable relationship between Corde and his wife. Even the minor characters are drawn with a convincing compassion. The book contains an abundance of imaginative energy and freshly perceived life. Less entertaining than earlier novels, but not less admirable.

• Pinsker, Sanford. "A Kaddish for Valeria Raresh: Dean Albert Corde's Long Dark Month of the Soul." Studies in American Jewish Literature 3 (1983): 128–37.
  

  DD is seen here as another in a long series of death-bed meditations. A gray, drab Bucharest, a dying mother-in-law, the season of death, a potentially sensational murder trial and Albert Corde's long dark night of the soul all conspire to give the novel its elegiac tone—its sense of an extended kaddish. The kaddish, however, may ultimately be for the world and ourselves.

• Roberts, David. "Bellow's Month." Rev. of The Dean's December. Horizon Jan.–Feb. 1982: 22.
  

  Comments on the similarities of the prose spoken by Corde and that spoken by Nabakov's Professor Pnin. At first the reader is left to the utter jumble of associations in Corde's mind, and then suddenly the book comes together. The novel is finally full of grand issues which cohere convincingly. This is one of Bellow's most uncharacteristic novels in that its "undersea" shapes can easily be ignored.

• Roudane, Matthew C. "A Cri De Coer: The Inner Reality of Saul Bellow's The Dean's December." Studies in the Humanities 11.2 (1984): 5–17.
  

  For Roudane this novel reveals a successful fusion in the Coleridgean sense of idea and image. The novel forms a coherent whole through the objectification of Corde's inner reality, which mirrors our contemporary world far too accurately. The fact that the novel takes its form from the inner meditative processes of Corde's mind as he records the "slum of the psyche" should successfully counter arguments about its inertia. Characters are often arranged in groups and pairs as antagonists and sympathizers. However, morally central to the novel is Corde's relationship to Valeria because of the palpable love between them. The mature Corde is finally able to accept the giveness of the world and to celebrate its particulars. He experiences first a renewed spiritual bonding with his wife first, and then a transcendental existential freedom through the telescope on Mount Palomar. True to the derivations of his title "Dean," he becomes a kind of "poetic astrologer" who is balanced by the hard science of his wife.

• 702. Wilson, Jonathan. "Bellow's Dangling Dean." Literary Review 26.1 (1982): 165–75.
  

  Suggests that the bleakness of the novel stems from Bellow's having lost interest in making fiction. Sees Corde as insufficiently distinguished from previous Bellow heroes. Though it begins well, the novel fails to develop a wide range of themes. Corde, like the dangling man, feels not quite there, and neither is there a cast of inspirational minor characters. This is one more solipsistic drama like the previous two novels, and lacks enough concreteness to balance the ideational weight increasingly borne by the central hero. Besides, Corde fails to arouse the reader's interest. The only character who interests Bellow is Bellow himself. The weltanschauung of this novel is so familiar to the Bellow reader he cannot help but have the feeling of deja vu.

• Neelakantan, G. “Beast in Chicago: Saul Bellow’s Apocalypse in The Dean’s December.” International Fiction Review 30.1–2 (2003): 66–75. Print.

  
  

  Describes how Bellow differs from contemporary apocalyptic writers Malamud, Pyncheon, Updike, and DeLillo. Locates Bellow’s particular apocalypse and unique contribution to the apocalyptic representations of his time. Analyzes DD for its apocalyptic aesthetics and artistic vision, while lauding the complex literary sensibility of its author. Points out the central contradiction in Bellow’s critique of Blake and Nietzsche, describes Corde as a prophet desiring spiritual rejuvenation, and notes the Emersonian idealism that underlies the whole. Critiques Bellow’s stereotypical treatment of the self-destructive behaviors of Chicago’s African Americans and then describes Corde as typical of the post-1960s discouragement that spilled over into the 80s and 90s to produce America’s shaken belief in Manifest Destiny. Concludes that DD is a neoconservative’s meditation on the self-destructive proclivities of human beings that have almost paralyzed life in contemporary urban America. 

• Salomon, Willis. “Particularity and the Comic in Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December.” Saul Bellow Journal. 21.1–2 (2005–06): 5–18. Print.

  
  

  Argues that it is through the intensity of Bellow’s gaze at realist particularity that enables his fiction to engage ordinary life. At the same time notes that its ethico-political judgments are tendentious, its universalizing of ordinary life ultimately destabilizing of familiar points of reference. Uses DD to explore the particularity of Bellow’s gaze and its treatment of physical and cultural history, large and small, as well as its response to the challenge of how to find universalizing fictional language for the mundane processes of physical and cultural death. Explains that this involves detailing the Bellowian parade of irritations, delays, fiascos, functionaries, rumors, cryptic utterances, public and private, ordinary and scientific, plus all the fragmentation and decay of modern life. Concludes that DD is a unique kind of realist novel because it sidesteps the epistemological baggage of the modernist novel’s subversion of the classical realist narrative’s progression by staging action, not so much across time, but across the spaces of Chicago, Bucharest, black Chicago, white Chicago, the earth and the heavens, in such a way that space retains a finitude parallel to the finitude of a materialist conception of the psyche. Bellow’s characters are real because he bases them on real people and because they are given speaking life in the closely quartered, even claustrophobic way that we encounter psychic otherness.

• Halio, Jay L. "The Dean's December and Saul Bellow's Novels of Contemplation." Saul Bellow Journal 22.1-2 (Fall 2006 / Winter 2007): 51-65.

  
  

  Bellow clearly did not fit into F.R. Leavis’ “The great Tradition” including Eliot and Dickens. He was less interested in narrative and more interested in contemplation of ideas and the human condition. In DD penetrating perceptions of reality, breaking through unreality and then coming to terms with human existence, Bellow and his Dean decide in the process of becoming fully human. Examines in detail the contemplative process in DD.

• Quayum, M.A. “Chapter 6: The Dean’s December.” Saul Bellow and American Transcendentalism. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. 221–69. Print.

  
  

  Maintains that DD focuses on the decadence, disorder, and dichotomy of the modern world as observed by Dean Corde, a Welsh prophet and anti-humanist professor/intellectual. Unlike the earlier protagonists, Dean Corde has already found his inner equilibrium; however, he is severely agitated by what he sees to be the fate of mankind in modernity. Though he has transcended personal discord, he is world-sick as he views civilization both in Chicago and in Roumania. He must now come to terms with the idea of death. He does this by being enriched by Valeria’s death and by locating the problems of modern man in the transcendental philosophy of equilibrium and steadiness. Concludes that out of his composure he admits he is not fully at ease with the cold of the astral heavens of pure spirit but not fully at ease with the material ground either. 

• Amis, Martin. "The Moronic Inferno." London Review of Books 1 Apr.1982: 3. Rpt. The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America. Martin Amis. London: Cape, 1986. 1–8.
  

  Calls DD a more somber book, a warning. The vision, however, has all the strain and clangour of a juggernaut changing gear. The vision has widened but also become narrower because he is playing in a minor key and using the mute. Describes each one of the characters in considerable detail and comments that Bellow is at full cerebral pitch. The characters are thinkers, readers, and intellectuals, thus enabling Bellow to employ a High Style which speaks for all mankind. Neither East nor West is an alternative here. The final effect is a flattened, chastened, almost puritanical mood. Finally Albert Corde is an image man, a radar dish, a hungry observer. While the final result is top heavy and not full enough of delight, there are many thrilling pages. A major article.

• Anderson, David D. "The Dean's Chicago." Midamerica 12 (1985): 136–47. Atlas, James. "Interpreting the World." Rev. of Dean's December. Atlantic Feb. 1982: 78–82.
  

  Sees Corde as a highly strung thinking ma, like his predecessors. Of messianic temperament, he insists his testament can make a difference. However, Corde is no more than another reformed liberal who eventually retreats to his high-rise apartment overlooking Lake Michigan. Complains that the prose is less powerful, the characters less than believable, and the dialogue wooden compared to earlier novels. Also accuses Bellow of open hostility to some of his characters. The generally hectic style and demotic voice are labored and monotonous. Finally accuses Bellow of haste in chronicling the latest events in his personal life at the expense of art.

• Bach, Gerhard P. "The Dean Who Came in from the Cold: Saul Bellow's America of the 1980s." Studies in American Jewish Literature 8.1 (1989): 104–14.
  

  Traces Bellow's self-projections from the publication of MSP, noting the critic's assertions that he was firmly establishing a personal platform of traditionalism against the modernism of his literary contemporaries. Argues that in DD we see Bellow's clarified political position with regard to the real needs and preoccupations of humanity in an urbanized technology-worshipping and commodity-ridden world. Shows how this invokes charting Corde's course as an experiential principle: if realities are to become visible to the inner eye, the senses with which to experience them must be readmitted to the modern mind, which is currently devoid of imaginative powers.

• Beatty, Jack. "A Novel of East and West." Rev. of The Dean's December. New Republic 3 Feb. 1982: 38–40.
  

  According to Beatty, this novel shows a loss of plastic representation and sensuous immediacy. Sheer thought displaces powerfully realized images, scenes, and characters. Mostly it lacks the intensity of former novels. Worse, the intellectual obsessions are not dramatized. Corde is a thin invention. However, the vision of the novel is indisputable, mirrored as it is in the austere, clipped tone and broken prose of the novel.

• Bertonneau, T. F. "The Dean's December: Saul Bellow's Spenglerian Vision."
  

  Describes the Stalinesque, Orwellian Kafkaesque atmosphere of the Bucharest Chicago scenes in DD. Then traces the influence of Spengler in both H and DD, and in a variety of other novels, the essays and some interviews. Simultaneously poet and scientist, Bellow journeys into the darkness of the contemporary world and reminds us in powerful prose of our duty to sustain the light that is called the West. Concludes that Bellow is contemporary American Spengler.

• Betsky, Seymour. "In Defense of Literature: Saul Bellow's The Dean's December." Universities Quarterly: Culture, Education and Society 39.1 (1984–85): 59–84.
  

  Discusses this novel in light of Bellow's statements from all previous novels and essays and discusses what constitutes a good novel. Sees this as one of Bellow's most powerful novels. Examines characters, themes, and language.

• Bragg, Melvyn. "Eastward Ho!" Rev. of The Dean's December. Punch 31 Mar. 1982: 536.
  

  Assesses DD not as vintage Bellow, but as new ground. This novel is Dostoevskian in its social criticism and displays some Thoreauvian tendencies. Objects to the concept of Corde as a Huguenot when he feels more like an American–Jewish intellectual. Complains that the organization of the novel into flashbacks and winding documentary does not work.

• Chavkin, Allan, and Nancy Feyl Chavkin. "Bellow's Dire Prophecy." Centennial Review 33.2 (1989): 93–107.
  

  Claims that DD is 1) a retrospective crisis meditation on Albert Corde's attempts to recover the world that is buried under the debris of false description or non-experience, and 2) an attempt to see clearly into twentieth century reality. Shows how his character analyses of the powerful and the powerless call attention to the dilemma of the underclass. Shows that by the end of the novel "every man's inner inner city" is responsible for external slums. Sees Bellow asserting that urban ghettos are a concrete embodiment of our internal slums because Bellow shows how modern people, overcome by apathy and extreme skepticism, have lost their sense of enchantment with reality, their connection with their spiritual roots, and their deeper connection with life generally.

• Chavkin, Allan. "The Dean's December and Blake's The Ghost of Abel." Saul Bellow Journal 13.1 (1995): 22–26.
  

  Argues that Dean Corde's meditation upon the city in MDH is actually a meditation on the spiritual malady of modern civilization and an exploration of the soul. As in William Blake's work, cities must function symbolically, hence the journalistic approach, which must abide by the restrictions of "objectivity," was not suitable for Bellow's purpose. Corde's two-part Harper's Weekly article on Chicago, like Bellow's DD, is an attempt to define the self and to determine what it is that is eternal in the human soul. Modern man, despite his excessive introspection, does not really explore the Self. It is Blake who reveals that what is at the core of the novel is the notion of the city as a great center of delusion, bondage, and death. In his long poems, Blake symbolizes spiritual conditions with geography and considers the basic opposition between "Mystery" and spiritual liberty. This work is important to a proper understanding of MDH because Corde also refers to mystery which is spiritual bondage, Babylon, and the biblical city of the Jewish Captivity, where scientific materialism and determinism, the religion of fear, slavery, sexual masochism, prudery, and lust appear. For Corde, Chicago is Babylon. His reference is to The Ghost of Abel (1822) is a counterstatement to Lord Byro''s Cain: A Mystery. Corde paraphrases a line from this blood thirsty speech made by Satan about requiring human blood, not merely that of animals. Both Bellow and Blake see a connection between social injustice and imaginative impoverishment of the individual and are concerned with delusion and spiritual bondage. However, their concern for the objective facts of social existence is subsumed by their despair over the crippling of the imagination associated with this injustice. They believe the spiritual impoverishment of contemporary society is at the root of a multitude of social ills that afflict modern society. Suggests that whereas in William Blake's work cities function symbolically, so in DD Bellow uses Corde's meditation on the two cities, Chicago and Bucharest, to represent the decline of great Western cities and thus the contemporary crisis.

• Chavkin, Allan. "Recovering 'The World That Is Buried under the Debris of False Description.'" Saul Bellow Journal 1.2 (1982): 47–57.
  

  Describes the intention of DD as a meditative novel in which the protagonist ponders personal and public problems. Hence criticizing it for lack of plot is to miss its purpose. Discusses DD as a novel of two cities, Chicago and Bucharest, in which Bellow meditates upon the worth of an individual life in teh civilizations of the Free World and the Communist block countries. In this novel Bellow eschews the sensational in order to become a moralist of seeing. Comments on Bellow's brilliant style which conveys the experience of meditation, and the lack of comedy. Concludes that despite the occasional comic flourish and passage of satiric wit, this is a somber book.

• Chavkin, Allan. "The Feminism of The Dean's December." Studies in American Jewish Literature 3 (1983): 113–27.
  

  Suggests that critics of DD have ignored thc feminist consciousness that informs the work, and that the book attempts to atone for previous prejudices. Distorted views because of a disturbed first-person narrator do not appear in DD. Bellow's feminism is a product of a radical political vision that defies traditional labeling, and is neither liberal nor conservative. Corde and Bellow refuse to be tagged with labels that would vastly underestimate the severity of contemporary problems and limit human freedom—i.e., the "slum of the innermost being." While working out the theme concerning the inequality between the races, he also subtly delineates subsidiary and complementary problems, such as the inequality between the sexes.

• Colbert, Robert E. "Saul Bellow's King of Confidence." Yiddish 4.4 (1982): 41–47.
  

  Close scrutiny of the extent to which HRK is a parody of Conrad's Heart of Darkness enables the reader to understand the character of King Dahfu. This running Conradian parody is one of the chief devices Bellow uses to maintain a necessary aesthetic distance from the dangerously fascinating, but ultimately problematical, figure of the African monarch.

• Corner, Martin. "The Novel and Public Truth: Saul Bellow's The Dean's December." Studies in American Fiction 28.1 (2000): 113–28.
  

  Though Bellow's fiction recognizes the novel's historic investment in individual experience—his own work is centered on successful, powerful individualities—the public understanding of contemporary experience is an aspiration neither Bellow's characters, nor their creator, have ever abandoned. Yet wonders how can the novel move from private to subjective statement. Recounts the various critical responses to DD which accuse it of being solipistic and univocal, and argues instead that Bellow tries to plot a route from individual consciousness to public truth by freeing both the central character and the novel itself from an inappropriate burden of totalizing explanation in order to have the novel engage with public reality. Through Corde, Bellow expresses an individual and public truth about the complicity of twentieth century societies with a silent presumption for death. Whether it is Ceausescu's 1970s Romania, or Chicago, we are given entry to this world through the eyes of an individual, but what we see is the public truth of a society rooted and mired in its history, complicit in all its aspects with the pervasive realities of loss and death.

• Croghan, L. A. "WLB Book Reviews." Rev. of The Dean's December. Wilson Library Bulletin Feb. 1982: 466–67.
  

  Argues that Corde is appealing to readers of Bellow because of his intense concentration on mortality and morality, his melancholy, and his ability to engross. Sees Corde as a hero who has made and unmade himself, and who is about to make himself again, like one reborn.

• Cronin, Gloria L. "Through a Glass Brightly: Dean Corde's Escape from History in The Dean's December." Saul Bellow Journal 5.1 (1986): 24–33.
  

  Describes Corde as Bellow's tool for resolving the longstanding philosophical dichotemy in Western Civilization between empirical and mystical modes of knowing. Corde becomes the pioneer who eschews the visions of society conferred by ordinary consciousness and who seeks to penetrate the fantasmo imperium where real facts are hidden from human perception. Beyond that, he is also the fictional means by which Bellow and the reader may escape reductive and nihilistic fabric of twentieth-century history to a corrected vision of that transcendental harmony both within the individual and throughout the larger creation, a harmony which is discernible only to the person of corrected perceptual and emotional vision.

• Dudar, Helen. "The Graying of Saul Bellow." Saturday Review Jan. 1982: 17–20.
  

  Characterizes DD as a strange, bleak autumnal work which is somewhat less than artistic. Its an uneven book that veers from drear to dazzle. The Dean is a vague image and his wife an embarrassed shadow. The Rumanian sequences show Bellow's fatigue and there is altogether too much pallor of style. Tired tone and patchy structure betray his haste in writing. Only the Chicago passages leap to life.

• Enright, D. J. "Saul Bellow's New Novel: Good Exists and Cannot Wholly be Credited to Favourable Weather." Listener 1 Apr. 1982: 20.
  

  DD is really two novels. Though it suffers from a slightly over-insistent style and a double telling, it is an impressive novel which, if it does not solve problems, at least accounts for them.

• Fishman, Ethan. "Saul Bellow's 'Likely Stories.'" Journal of Politics 45.3 (1983): 615–34.
  

  Discusses Bellow generally as a political novelist and DD as a particular evocation of Platonic thought. Claims that both Plato's Republic and DD represent attempts at justice in individual and political terms. To arrive at this definition, both authors find it necessary to explore other integrally related concepts within a classical philosophical framework. Discusses concepts such as salvation, transcendence, transitoriness, moral accountability, and death.

• Flower, Dean. "Fiction Chronicle." Rev. of The Dean's December. Hudson Review 35.2 (1982): 281–86.
  

  Complains that only Bellow and James could use such a withdrawn protagonist who feeds almost exclusively on his own thoughts. Too much weighty philosophizing. Yet Corde's thoughts do have a palpable immediacy and the prose has convincing shifts in tone, abruptness, big ideas, humor, and self-doubt.

• Goldman, Liela H. "The Dean's December: A Companion Piece to Mr. Sammler's Planet." Saul Bellow Journal 5.2 (1986): 36–45.
  

  Discusses the extent to which DD bears an affinity to MSP. Compares the two works in terms of global political concerns, the deaths of key characters, repressive urban environments, moral/ethical alienation, the sacredness that lies at the core of life, the value of the individual, mood, tone, and style.

• Halio, Jay L. "Contemplation, Fiction, and the Writer's Sensibility." Southern Review [Baton Rouge] 19.1 (1983): 203–18.
  

  Bellow is principally concerned with the nature of reality and our apprehension of it. Brings insights from DD concerning issues of perception, and likens this story to the longer piece. Explores the principal characters and story line, highlights intellectual shallowness as the principal theme, and the distortions of the consciousness as the secondary preoccupation of the story. The story reveals Bellow's disdain of simple narratives, his measured style and confrontation of the real issues of contemporary human experience evelvate his fiction to a higher order. To lie to oneself, as Bellow demonstrates, leads to intellectual decay, and moral and spiritual death as well.

• Hall, Joe. "The Dean's December: A Separate Account of a Separate Account." Saul Bellow Journal 5.2 (1986): 22–31.
  

  Provides a defense and explanation of Bellow's experimentation with the seemingly plotless novel of reflection and philosophical thought. Describes Corde as a satisfying artistic embodiment of the narrator's puzzling over his sense of ethical outrage. Suggests that he finds his sources for judgment in the classical ethical tradition of Western Civilization, but finds at the same time that this tradition and the account of the world which sustained it are dying.

• Hinchcliffe, Richard. "Striking A. Chorde: The Dean's Melancholy Vision of Blackness in Saul Bellow's The Dean's December." Saul Bellow Journal 16.2/17.1–2 (2001): 186–214.
  

  Dean Corde's ocularcentrism sets him on a collision course with the principal defining themes of America in that the subject/object of his Jeremiad, the predominantly black slums, is set in opposition to Americans as representative of Judeo Christian Enlightenment culture and thus quintessentially white. He represents the exclusivity of whiteness, something which is embedded deep in his beliefs, and catalogues. He is busy mapping out of the white view of society's problems without recognizing the presence of an antipodal culture. Corde's neocolonial gaze is built on illusive foundations of imperial power which confers on him invisibility and a panoptic continuous history. He means well but fails to interrogate his own liberal principles. This is the source of his own self-doubt about himself as a reliable narrator. Corde's overprivileges the visual and can only see a grim and melancholy landscape in the manner of surveillance, tourism, or Western voyeurism. While the black man waits in the wings. His greatest indiscretion is the ocularcentricity of his gaze revealing his white man's ideology. He is alienated from his subject as revealed in his articles and in his courtroom depictions. Corde's metaphysical musings indicate his desire to transcend problems and difference. The universe, in black and white as observed at Mt. Palomar finally proves too great a reality for the white master narrative to comprehend. He can only apprehend partial realities. In terms of blackness, the focus on the whiteness of the stars represents another foreclosure on literary blackness synonymous with the exclusion of the African American in Corde's "world of death."

• Högel, Rolf. "Saul Bellow's Roman The Dean's December: Primäre and sekundäre Schauplätze als nterpretationsperspecktive." Literatur in Wissenschaft and Unterricht 20.1 (1987): 266–78.
  
  
• Jones, Lewis. "Soul-searching." Rev. of The Dean's December. Spectator 10 Apr. 1982: 21–22.
  

  Jones sees DD comparing the hard nihilism of the Soviet bloc and the soft nihilism of America. Corde, like Solzhenitsyn, seeks to find meaning in suffering. Bellow's ideas are fully rendered emotionally and his characters are created with vigor and tenderness. The novel gives the impression of having been written in haste and urgency. However, it achieves overall mastery of form and, at times, sublime intensity.

• Kapp, Isa. 'Bellow's New Reading." New Leader 8 Feb. 1982: 14–16.
  

  DD is seen here as tantalizing, wryly self-critical and austerely demanding. Particularly in the Bucharest scenes, he disciplines himself into short, plain serviceable sentences in order to convey the necessary winteriness of tone. In other places we see the old rambunctious brilliance, crowds of images and clashing thoughts. There is much sermonizing, many engaging scenes, considerable charm, and several affectionate portraits of women. DD is part of the ongoing drama of Bellow self-correction.

• Kennedy, William. "If Saul Bellow Doesn't Have a True Word to Say he Keeps his Mouth Shut." Esquire Feb. 1982: 49–54.
  

  A valuable reported-on Bellow interview about the social critique in DD. It also contains Bellow's critical assessments on John Cheever, Wright Morris, J. F. Powers, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer, I. B. Singer, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Solzhenitsyn, Rebecca West, D. H. Lawrence, Samuel Beckett, and others.

• Kenner, Hugh. "From Lower Bellowvia: Leopold Bloom with a Ph.D." Harper's Feb. 1982: 62–65. Rpt. as "From Lower Bellowvia,"in Historical Ficitons. San Fransisco: North Point, 1990. 177–83.
  

  Kenner assesses this novel as part of the Nobel-certified "Novel as First-Draft Dissertation: A rumination on the sorry state of the world" genre. The characters are dead men and women. The ideas here are rehashes of the ideas of MSP and have not gained trenchancy with time. The opening of the novel is rich in possibility. No writer has more authority with the feel of place. However, ultimately the book fails for lack of a comic epiphany. Points out the meandering style of argumentation and loquaciousness characteristic of the Bellow protagonists, the farcical qualities, comedy, grand debate, moralizing, fabulation, use of alter egos, puppeteering, point-of-view, comic epiphany, and odd ball characters. Wanders from subject to subject illustrating presumably the meandering, chaotic progress of the typical Bellow novel, and protagonist in elegant phrases and catchy descriptions.

• Klausler, Alfred P. Rev. of The Dean's December. Christian Century 31 Mar. 1982: 384–85.
  

  DD is one of Bellow's most distinguished novels. Contains elegiac descriptions, decent human beings, and scenes of passion and fury, as well as superb prose and characteristic irony.

• Kociatkiewicz, Juslyna Maria. "Aspects of Oppression and Decline of Freedom in Saul Bellow's The Dean's December." Anglica Wratislaviensia (Wroclaw, Poland) 31: (1996): 67–74.
  

  Sees DD as a novel of two cities in which the question of personal and political freedom, and all issues of liberty, are weighed. Describes the inner workings of totalitarianism vis a vis DD, and then the inner workings of democracy which finally appear more dismal and sinister than those of Romania. Details deprivations within both systems and their failure to comprehend one another. At the bottom of both systems, in Bellow's view, alienation, isolation, and decadence lurk. Both exert pressure to give up the individual in favor of the universal, to reject its private aims, wishes, and needs. Ultimately, Corde's solution is to temporarily admit defeat with the promise to compromise and come back to the world seeking a balance between oppressive and liberating conditions.

• Levine, Paul. "The Dean's December: Between the Observatory and the Crematorium." Saul Bellow at Seventy-five: A Collection of Critical Essays. Studies & Texts in English 9. Tübingen: Narr, 1991. 125–36.
  

  Reviews the literature about the tragedy of Eastern Europe published in the West in the 1970s and 1980s, and the readiness with which totalitarian regimes "air brush" moral dissenters out of history. Goes on to discuss American and Western innocence versus the political experience of real politik in Eastern Europe with regard to book banning, banishment of the artist, and a future in which the literary critic has been replaced by the secret police in states under censorship. Discusses concepts such as "the culture of allusion" in which readers must read between the lines and the shifting of aesthetic policy in an increasingly one-dimensional culture. Sees DD as the continuing commentary of public issuesand private concerns, and how we collectively create a civil society, and how we individually face death. Claims that in Bellow's view, both East and West are in decline, the one endangered by dictatorial oppression,and the other by anarchic violence from below, two forms of dehumanization producing morally unproductive obedience or indifference. Concludes that Bellow's DD demonstrates how the first order of morality is to disinter reality and represent it anew.

• Lévy, Claude. "The Dean's December: Le contrepoint fantasmatique." Profils Americains (France) 9 (1997): 119–32.
  

  DD has often been read as "a series of dry messages" about the values of contemporary America and the brutalities of the Communist system in Eastern Europe, while Corde, the title-figure, has been dismissed as "a vague image." Attempts to reconnect DD with Bellow's previous works. Suggests that even though the tone is different, the intellectual concerns, the obsessions, remain the same. Some typical oedipal patterns—recurrent in Bellow's novels—can be detected in the weave of DD. Not only is he both attracted and repelled by a super-virile cousin, but he is also excessively defensive of his sister's femininity. When he goes to Bucharest to visit his mother-in-law who is dying in a hospital, it is to re-enact his own's mother's last days and atone for his own sins. Corde may be seen as another older Herzog, another Sammler, pondering over the collapse of Western values.

• Lively, Penelope. "Backwards and Forwards—Recent Fiction." Rev. of The Dean's December. Encounter June–July 1982: 86–88.
  

  Praises the skill with which Bellow has slotted whole belts of time into the span of a few weeks. Such a novel makes nonsense of the supposition that the novel is a linear form. Praises the high craft of the flashback technique used in the novel. The very structure of the novel underscores the central theme of appearance and illusion. The novel is a vehicle for ideas but the ideas are seductively packaged. Settings are sharply defined and the language of Corde's polemics is equally intense. However, the novel has its longeurs and narrative disjointedness. Since there are not many fictional chroniclers of ideas in America, Bellow should be praised for this rich and provocative book.

• MacFarlane, David. "A View of One's Own." Rev. of The Dean's December. Macleans 15 Feb. 1982: 54.
  

  DD is a refined example of Bellow's skill in the comic novel. Secondary characters, however, remain faceless and some incidents are less than believable. These are mere cavils though because of the undeviating manner in which Corde pursues his own thoughts and experiences.

• Maloff, Saul. "Minding the World: Our Principal Novelist of Nutty Ideas." Commonweal 21 May 1982: 301–04.
  

  Provides a plot summary of DD and some impressions on a variety of comparative aspects of this novel and earlier works.

• Marcus, Stevan. "Reading the Illegible: Modern Representations of Urban Experience." The Southern Review 22.3 (1986 Summer): 443–464
  

  Examines Bellow's responses to the classical conception of the city. Traces characterizations of the urban milieu from DM to DD. Sums up Bellow's evolving sense of the city as uncertain, querulous, censoriousness, befuddled, and hopelessly vandalized. Concludes that his reading of the city has become very dim indeed.

• Maver, Igor. "The Delicate Balance of Tension in Saul Bellow's The Dean's December: An Attempt at Interpretation from a European Perspective." Cross Cultural Studies: American, Canadian and European Literatures, 1945–1985. Ed. Mirko Jurak. Ljubljana: English Dept., Filozofska Fakulteta, 1988. 107–13.
  

  Argues that through a detailed examination of the structure of DD the reader can see how the book works in dialectical oppositions. Claims that this leads the author to assert a dialectical condition of human existence in general, which should eventually bring about a new synthesis, a universal tolerance between Earth and Universe, Man and Nature, Life and Death. Concludes that Bellow's one-sided pictures of America and Bucharest reveal him to be a grotesque realist who has rendered the novel once again fit for intelligence.

• McGuinness, Martin J. "Invisible Man in Saul Bellow's The Dean's December." Saul Bellow Journal 16.2/17.1–2 (2001): 165–85.
  

  In DD, the African American is still largely invisible but then for Bellow, so are so many other Americans. Invokes the nameless nomad of Ellison's Invisible Man, whose invisibility stems from the colonial processes of denial and division. Bellow's own experience with othering stemmed from being the son of Russian Jews. In DD, both exploiter and exploited lose their integrity when human power is abused. Chief among the factors that complicate the task of human authenticity is a phoney language of euphemism. DD is Bellow poking fun at the self-conscious goodness of the Americans who pride themselves on being able to mouth the latest liberal race jargon which reveals a shallow approach to complex moral issues of race and gender. However, many of Corde's prejudices are related to African American's whom he sees as stereotypes although the liberal, Mason Zaehnern, who hates his own whiteness, and can't see the wrong in his violent African American friend. Corde has tried to bring the rich negrophile economic issues to people's attention but fails. For him they are invisible spiritually and intellectually, known only for sexual prowess. Bellow views the later obsession, and particularly the myth of the black stud as decidedly unhealthy. This is a book about the devalued humans of all racial identifications.

• Montrose, David. "Conventional Wisdom." New Statesman 28 May 1982: 20–22.
  
  
• Mutalik-Desai, A. A. "Innocence & Experience in Saul Bellow's The Dean's December." Indian Contribution to American Studies. Ed. B. P. Dalal. Bombay: Somaiya, 1992. 87–94.
  

  Sees DD as a novel in which Bellow registers the terrible impact of technology or moral and intuitive human perception—on the human damage inflicted by the disturbing retreat of liberal humanism, and the gradual diminishment of the centuries-old American covenant and dream of innocence and idealism. It is a book about the inescapable sense of corruption, or the Fall. With Valeria, a generation's dreams may be dying. Concludes that in DD, Bellow brings us to the sobering realization that whether we live in a closed or a free society, evil, officially ignored and/or sanctioned, lurks just around the corner. Corde's final desire is to remain suspended, gazing into starlit darkness rather than returning to earth.

• Nagy, Peter. "The Dean's December." New Hungarian Quarterly 94 (1984): 167–69.
  
  
• Newman, Judie. 'Bellow and Nihilism: The Dean's December." Studies in the Literary Imagination 17.2 (1984): 111–22.
  

  Bellow's central idea, nihilism, is precisely integrated into the action and structure of the novel. Corde's relationship to Nietzsche's ideas is carefully explored as Nietzsche's ideas are categorized and ascribed to sets of characters within the novel. Newman also explores the myth of Eros and Psyche in this same context, and that of the community of supportive women he finds in Bucharest under the matriarchy that Valeria has established. Valeria is seen as the chthonian earth mother who has projected her daughter, Minna, out into cosmic space toward freedom. Hence, Corde is seen as a Psyche who is distanced from the role of Eros monster by the precise parallelism of the Chicago plot. Newman also demonstrates the extent to which the book becomes a dramatization of Bellow's analysis of the ills of American culture. Sees Lester as akin to the younger Corde in his denial of the forces of Eros. Traces the development of the Corde-Minna relationship in its renewed capacity to restore them both to their higher and more integrated selves. Unlike previous novels, truth and wisdom in this novel originate in the female. Corde's tentative affirmation in the novel results from a renewed perception of a starry archetype of the heavens arching both over and within him.

• Rowland, Susan. "The Need for Alchemy in The Dean's December." Saul Bellow Journal 13.2 (1995): 19–29.
  

  Suggests that in DD we see Bellow's dialectical debt to Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, whose core methodology is creative use of oppositional thinking. While Freud believed the unconscious could signify trauma by inverse images, Jung extended the use of dialectical thinking to form the basis of this psychology and to suggest ways the psyche could generate synthesis. DD absorbs dialectical anxieties into its narrative structure: the novel's two cities, Bucharest and Chicago, are examples of diametrically opposed ruling systems. Both are examined through shifts of consciousness of the protagonist. Through the alchemical metaphors all lead is transformed into gold. Bellow suggests the need for alchemic gold to encompass urban regeneration through the gold of education, poetry, love, and spirit.

• Schwartz, Joseph. "Good Guys with no Labels." Rev. of The Dean's December. Chronicles of Culture 6.5 (1982): 8–11.
  

  Sees the novel as a twentieth-century version of A Tale of Two Cities that is concerned only with the worst of times. Bellow sees himself as the corrective to Dickens' "the best of times." Sees Corde as Darnay, Minna as Lucy, and Valeria as Dr. Manette. The most serious flaw in the novel is the incompleteness of Corde's ideas. This is Bellow's angriest book. Sees Bellow's ultimate target as Modernism. Concludes that as a devastating critique of haute couture, Bellow's message is urgent and necessary.

• Spivey, Ted R. "Death, Love, and the Rebirth of Language in Saul Bellow's Fiction." Saul Bellow Journal 4.1 (1985): 5–18.
  

  Sees Bellow as typical of Modernist literature in his treatment of death and love, but claims that Bellow is undertaking a treatise on the subject of language renewal in connection with these themes.

• Sullivan, Walter. "Terrors Old and New: Bellow's Rumania and Three Views of the Holocaust." Sewanee Review 90.3 (1982): 484–92.
  

  Concentrates on the depiction of humane people harassed by an inhumane bureaucracy. Though Corde's world does not offer solutions, it does offer choices—and among them the choice to live. Praises Bellow's ear for dialogue, his skill at characterization, and his ability to maintain the velocity of the narrative while constantly inserting lengthy intellectual asides.

• Tipton, David. "Image Man." Rev. of The Dean's December. London Magazine (Apr.–May 1982): 131–33.
  

  Claims that this novel deals more quietly and realistically with social issues than his earlier works. Praises the cast of memorable characters and the general complexity, ambiguity and paradox achieved by the novel. Though it offers no solutions, the novel is impressive and its flavor lingers long after one has finished reading it.

• Towers, Robert. 'A Novel of Politics, Wit and Sorrow." Rev. of The Dean's December." New York Times Book Review 10 Jan. 1982: 1, 22.
  

  The comic spirit is different in this book. Ironic bemusement has given sway to open protest and revulsion. Bellow still has dazzling powers of animation. Yet the same old problem of narrative momentum is especially acute in DD. Switching back and forth from Chicago and Bucharest results in nervous flickering energy lighting up the two poles between which the modern world oscillates. Concludes that Bellow is still the best writer we have sentence by sentence and page by page.

• Updike, John. "Toppling Towers Seen by a Whirling Soul." Rev. of The Dean's December. New Yorker 22 Feb. 1982: 120–28.
  

  Commends the book for its "wit, vividness, tenderness, brave thought, earthy mysticism, and a most generous, searching humorous humanity." Complains, however, about the strongly autobiographical element. An elegant essay.

• Weinstein, Ann. "The Dean's December: Bellow's Plea for the Humanities." Saul Bellow Journal 2.2 (1983): 30–41.
  

  In this novel Bellow once again asks the question "How can cities, culture, humanity, be saved from disappearing?" Weinstein accuses critics of failing to concentrate on the validity of Betlow's solution to the dilemma of culture instead of seeking in his latest novel signs of the decay of yet another Nobel Prize winner. Concentrates primarily on Bellow's liberal humanist critique of culture and history.

• Weinstein, Mark. "Communication in The Dean's December." Saul Bellow Journal 5.1 (1986): 63–74.
  

  Sees the main subject of DD as that of communication on a variety of levels—personal, political, philosophical and societal. Especially elaborated is the subject of communication in both an open and a closed society. Argues that DD is a tightly organized novel when viewed from this perspective.

• Wisse, Ruth. "Saul Bellow's Winter of Discontent." Commentary Apr. 1982: 71–73.
  

  DD describes two cities, each of which is in the worst of times. Its strength is Bellow's ability to compass the philosophical speculations on these times and the precise pattern of tapes across the face of a stroke victim (Valeria) hooked to a machine, plus everything in between. To the normal abundance of the Bellow novel is added a political study in contrasts between communism and democracy. The coldest of Bellow's novels, DD is intentionally disturbing. However, Bellow himself shows too clearly through the thin disguise of Corde and the claims made for the impact of the Harper's Weekly articles seem unrealistic and exaggerated.

• Wolcott, James. "Dissecting our Decline." Rev. of The Dean's December. Esquire Mar. 1982: 134, 36.
  

  Structurally the novel is a lumpy carryall, with reveries, flashbacks, flashbacks within flashbacks, and chunks of Corde's controversial Harper's Weekly articles about Chicago bulging like wads of clothing stuffed into a hastily packed valise. This is the most studiously dishevelled novel to date. The whole thing is controlled well by Bellow's lordly tone that turns playful, ironic, teasing, despairing and snappish by turns. Corde is a dullish prop and Minna is unmemorable. Bellow is too prone to buttonholing the reader and holding court. This book does not have the ease, splendor, and shapeliness of a great novel.

Reviews

• Thomas, D. M. "Saul Bellow's Darkening Vision." Washington Post Book World 10 Jan. 1982: 1–2.
  
  
• Wilson, William S. "Saul Bellow in Agreement." American Book Review May 1982: 6.
  
  
• "Avec Saul Bellow le franc-tireur." Quinzaine Litteraire 380 (1982): 11–12.
  
  
• Christensen, John. Best Sellers (Apr. 1982): 4.
  
  
• Darras, Jacques. "Librairie du mois." Esprit (Aug./Sept. 1983): 170–71.
  
  
• Inou, Kenji. "Shosetsuka kara Keiseika e." Eigo Seinen 128.4 (1982): 211–12.
  
  
• Iwamoto, Gen. "Monogatari wa Dare no Te ni." Eigo Seinen 128.4 (1982): 213–14.
  
  
• Jacobs, Rita D. "Fiction." World Literature Today 57.1 (1983): 107.
  
  
• Jones, Lewis. "Soul-searching." Spectator 10 Apr. 1982: 21–22.
  
  
• Josipovici, Gabriel. "A Foot in the Stockyard and an Eye on the Stars." Times Literary Supplement 2 Apr. 1982: 371.
  
  
• Kirkus I Dec. 1981: Pt. II, 1472–73.
  
  
• Maloff, Saul. "Critics' Christmas Choices: Saul Maloff." Commonweal (3 Dec. 1982): 664–666.
  
  
• Miller, Stephen. American Spectator Apr. 1982: 33–36.
  
  
• Oi, Koji. "America Sakka no Identity o Motomete." Eigo Seinen 128.4 (1982): 215–16.
  
  
• Peck, Abe. "Bellow Is Back." Progressive Apr. 1982: 57–59.
  
  
• Pollit, Katha. "Bellow Blows Hot and Cold." Mother Jones (Feb.–Mar. 1982): 66–67.
  
  
• Raban, Jonathan. "The Stargazer and His Sermon." Sunday Times 28 Mar. 1982: 14+.
  
  
• Rushdie, Salman. "The Big Match." New Statesman 2 Apr. 1982: 22. Rpt. as "Saul Bellow." Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991. New York: Viking, 1991. 349–51.
  
  
• Scheffler, Judith A. "Reviews: The Dean's December." USA Today May 1982: 64, 66.
  
  
• Sheppard, R. Z. "Truth and Consequences." Time 18 Jan. 1982: 77, 80.
  
  
• Stade, George. "I, Me, Mine." Nation 30 Jan. 1982: 117–18.
  
  
• Stromberg, Ragnar. "Bellow's vagsakra stationsvagh mellan Bukarest och Chicago." Bonniers Litterara Magasin 51.6 (1982): 426–28.