Baumbach, Jonathan. "The Double Vision: The Victim by Saul
Bellow." The Landscape of
Nightmare: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel. Jonathan Baumbach. New York: New York UP, 1965.
35–54.
An exemplary nightmare novel in the
Jamesian tradition of the well-made novel. Leventhal emerges in
this critique as a complex and ambiguous protagonist in whom
Bellow invests all the mystery of the victim-victimizer syndrome.
Develops in great depth the complex relationship between Allbee
and Leventhal. Part of this focuses on the redemptive
implications of it for Leventhal as he learns compassion. Also
accounts effectively for the Mickey and Elena subplot.
Bradbury, Malcolm. "On Saul Bellow's The Victim." New
Statesman 29 Nov. 1999: 84.
An anecdotal
account of first encountering Bellow's novels as he himself was
also coming of age as a writer in the 1950s when British and
European fiction was also in a state of crisis. Recounts
believing that TV was a new kind of conscience in the post-Auschwitz
era of existentialism angst and
alienation. Discusses his awareness of Bellow's attempts to
describe the perils of humanism, and explicates TV in some detail.
Calls TV a book illuminated with moral vision, vivid prose,
and secure intellectualism. Concludes with the tribute that as a
young British writer, he foundBellow at a key moment in his life
and found him to be one of his greatest influences.
Calanchi, Alessandra. "The
Victim: La memoria come
'detection.'" Il Recupero del
Testo: Aspetti della Letteratura Ebraico-Americana. Ed. Guido Fink and Gabriella Morisco. Bologna:
Cooperative Lib. Univ. Ed. Bologna, 1988. 121–46.
Chavkin, Allan. "Ivan Karamazov's Rebellion and Bellow's
The Victim." Papers on
Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of
Language and Literature 16.3 (1980):
316–20.
Discusses the influence of
Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamzov and TV. Traces the possible
influences incident by incident. Both novels develop the theme of
who is responsible for accidental suffering and both radiate an
eloquent protest against this. Ultimately, Leventhal fails to
make the kind of growth Ivan is capable of. He remains a passive
victim being led to a seat in a darkened theatre by an unknown
usher. He is the typically weak-willed twentieth-century hero
unable to engage with higher reality.
Clayton, John J. "The
Victim." Saul Bellow: In Defense of Man. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1968. 139–65.
Rpt. in Saul Bellow: A Collection
of Critical Essays. Ed. Earl Rovit.
Twentieth Century Views. Englewood Cliffs, N J: Prentice, 1975.
31–51.
Crownshaw, Richard. "Blacking Out Holocaust Memory in Saul
Bellow's The Victim." Saul Bellow
Journal 16.217.1–2 (2001):
215–52.
Albee's employment of the figure of
Caliban as a racist metaphor is the reification of modern racism.
Furthermore, his casting of Jews as immigrants outside of
American culture erodes racist and anti-Semitic discourse. The
governing dynamic of Bellow's narrative seems to be a deflection
of anti-Semitic identification of blackeness and serves to
exacerbate the desire of those outside traditional and
predominant definitions of Americanness to occupy the centers of
cultural power and exercise the powerful discourses that emanate
thence. Other characters also participate in this anti-Semitism
TV is an illustration of post-war scientific rationalization of
racist politics and racist anti-immigration policies. Eventually,
desire for assimilation conflicts with remembering the Holocaust,
producing, in TV, Bellow's anxious configurations of
post-Holocaust self-hatred and his projections of blackness onto
others. Leventhal is traumatized by his survival. In TV the
excavation of anti-Semitism, and, more particularly the Holocaust
and its remembrance, will also drag a coterminous and concomitant
black history to the literary surface. Embedded in Bellow's
Caliban is a literary history of the configuration of blackness.
It is the anxious return of Holocaust memory which raises issues
of blackness. Witnessing blackness in TV registers the failure of
a collective memory to, in effect, rewitness the Holocaust. The
figure of Caliban is the paradigmatic locus of translation and
metaphoricization of relations along the European-American-Native
American frontier. Bellow admits the grounds on which the
articulation of blacks, Jews, slavery and the Holocaust can take
place in American itself. Finally, traumatic effectivity, though,
in Bellow's America of 1947, with the Holocaust too recent an
event, prevents his fuller articulation of the Black-Jewish
Atlantic displacing in TV anything other than the traces of such
a matrix.
Dittmar, Kurt. "Realitat und Fiktion in der zeitgenossischen
amerikanisehen Erzahlliteratur." Literarische Ansichten der Wirklichkeit:
Studien zur Wirklichkeitskonstitution in englischsprachiger
Literatur. Eds. Hans-Heinrich Freitag
and Peter Huhn. Anglo–American Forum 12. Frankfurt aM:
Lang, 1980. 401–27.
Hadfield, Andrew. "'Ethics Cannot Afford to be Nation-Blind':
Saul Bellow and the Problem of The Victim." The Ethics in
Literature. Eds. Andrew Hadfield,
Dominic Rainsford, and Tim Woods. Blasingstoke, Eng.: Macmillan;
New York: St. Martins, 1999. 38–51.
Argues that with regard to ethics and
the influence of nationalism, Bellow would appear to be caught
between a number of identities to which he can legitimately lay
claim and his chosen to explore in his work: Jewish, American,
and that of the Western liberal democrat. Compares Bellow's
self-fashioning and ethical position in two works written 30
years apart: TV and TJB. While the former appears to manipulate
the reader's responses one way, the later work is designed as a
tart reminder of the opposite direction. Concludes that while TJB
attempts to establish a clear opposition between true and fake
victims and their respective champions, and ends up being a
myopic book which avoids the ethical complexities of TV. TJB
removes complexity by removing vast hordes of people from the
map, literally and metaphorically. He has failed to realize that
it is never simply a question of whether my country is right or
wrong.
Hardwick describes
the novel as thoroughly and exquisitely honest. Less episodic
than DM, this novel is more objective, less cramped and
uncertain, and equally vigorous intellectually. The prose is both
unpretentious and fine.
Aharoni, Ada. "The
Victim: Freedom of Choice." Saul
Bellow Journal 4.1 (1985):
33–44.
Explicates the metaphysical issue of
whether a man might choose his own fate or whether it is chosen
for him. Traces Bellow's handling of these ideas through his
early short stories and through DM. Proceeds then to examine Asa
Levanthal's problem in TV. Concludes that in TV Bellow treats the
subject simultaneously at two different levels?the realistic and
the symbolic.
Sees the Bellow
hero as intellectual, uncertain of his nature, remote from
traditional faith, and concerned to discover his proper
relationship to his fellowman. Leventhal is typical of the Bellow
hero in his individual assertion of will against a deterministic
environment. Carefully traces the nature of Leventhal's moral
development through nightmare and anarchy into social complicity.
Believes Bellow has extended himself far beyond realism into the
larger sphere of the poetic, the lyrical and the psychological,
thus rivalling the best of the French existentialist
writers.
Downer, Alan S. "Skulduggery in Chungking and Manhattan."
New York Times Book Review 30 Nov. 1947: 29.
Accuses
TV of being
contrived and unclear in its meaning. Sees Levanthal as deriving
from Oeidipus, Leopold Bloom, and Joseph K. Decries the ending of
the novel for its timidity.
Farrelly, John. "Among the Fallen." New Republic 8
Dec. 1947: 27–28.
Placed in relation
to one another, the victim victimizing the victimizer, their
opposite problems define their characters and contain their
solution. Concludes that the book contains much wit and wisdom.
Hails Bellow as a major writer.
Fiedler, Leslie. "The Fate of the Novel." Kenyon Review 10.3
(1948): 519–27.
Sees Leventhal as
Jew both particularized and universal. He is Leopold Bloom, the
urban man, the sojourner, the bastard artist, infinite in feeling
and limited in expression. Fiedler commends the book for the
tensions sustained between its palpable realistic surfaces, its
symbolic implications, and its achieved ideas.
Furman, Andrew. "Imaging Jews, Imagining Gentiles: A New Look at
Saul Bellow's The Victim
and Bernard Malamud's The Assistant." Studies in
American Jewish Literature 16 (1997):
93–102.
Suggests that
bloodlines aside, what commands our attention here is the
fiercely and implacably individual nature of writers' voices.
Bellow, Malamud, and Roth cannot simply be subsumed inside an
ethnic genre named Jewish–American fiction. Despite their
common threads, there are very distinctive characteristics in the
way Jews and Gentiles are imagined in Bellow's TV and
Malamud's The
Assistant.
Gilmore, Thomas B. "Allbee's Drinking." Twentieth Century Literature 28.4 (1982): 381–96.
TV
affords a rich commentary on drinking,
attitudes toward it and reasons for it. Asa Leventhal furnishes
many of the attitudes and reactions, but Kirby Allbee, supposed
problem drinker, also has much to say. Discusses in depth
Leventhal's antipathy, fear and stereotyping of Allbee, thus
limiting Allbee's humanity and revealing his own character and
Jewish attitudes toward drinking. Likewise, Allbee has his own
stereotypical ideas on Jews that he delivers to the hostile
Leventhal. A sophisticated study of how these attitudes reveal
the inner characters and relational attitudes of these two
men.
Glieksberg, Charles I. "The Theme of Alienation in the American
Jewish Novel." Reconstructionist 29 Nov. 1957: 8–13.
Gordon, Andrew. "Pushy Jew: Leventhal in The Victim." Modern Fiction
Studies 25.1 (1979):
129–38.
Argues that
Leventhal's emotional problem is finding a balance between his
aggressive and passive impulses, between being pushy and being
pushed around. Isolated and tested during an unbearably hot
summer, he is forced to come to terms with himself. Gordon
analyzes Leventhal's psychological background, then traces his
difficulties with these two aspects of his personality.
Typically, he manifests the push of the second generation Jew to
find a place in an upwardly mobile society, yet he suffers from
lack of self-worth. Life for him is a crowded, hostile race. Also
explains his ambivalence toward women. Pursues convincingly the
theme of "pushing" throughout the novel.
Greenberg, Martin.
"Modern Man as Jew." Commentary Jan.
1948: 86–87.
Argues that
TV is the
first American novel to see Jewishness not in its singularity,
not as constitutive of a special world of experience, but as a
quality that informs all of modern life, as the quality of
modernity itself. All that stamps Leventhal as Jew also stamps
him as representative homo
urbis. Bellow captures the malaise of
the megalopolis very skillfully. Allbee the anti-Semite is the
materialization of all the real threats that surround Leventhal.
He is also a negative inversion of Leventhal. Jewishness in the
story is what gives it its radical depth. Criticizes the
typically American spareness and abruptness of the genre compared
to its European counterparts.
Kremer, S. Lillian. "Acquiescence to Anti-Semitism in : An
Alternate Reading of Bellow's Daniel Harkavy." Saul Bellow Journal 1.2 (1982): 27–30.
In TV Bellow probes
not only the pathology of anti-Semitism, but polar Jewish
responses to anti-Semitism. Harkavy functions as a healthy foil
to Leventhal's paranoia. Both are finally seen as fellow victims
of an historic evil. Asa chooses to see enemies everywhere while
Harkavy chooses to be blind. Harkavy finally offers not an
antidote to anti-Semitic poison, but a placebo.
Kremer, S. Lillian. "The
Holocaust in The
Victim." Saul Bellow Journal 2.2 (1983): 15–23.
Bellow's fiction
both subordinates and confronts the Holocaust. Though absent from
the dramatic center of Bellow's works, his characters are haunted
by its specter. Centering on the dynamics of anti-Semitism, TV
abounds in Holocaust symbolism. In this reading Leventhal, a
first generation American Jew, and Allbee, who represents the old
order traditionally bred to rule, demonstrate allegorically the
intricate and diverse nature of anti-Semitism and the dynamics of
the Holocaust. There are echoes of Nazi propaganda and values in
the speech of Allbee. Bellow uses many archetypal images of the
Holocaust centering on the associations with the color yellow,
claustrophobic air pressure, heat, bad smells, gas, fire, the
color orange, train images, dream sequences, suffocation and
dislocation.
Le Pellec, Yves. "New York in Summer: Its Symbolic Function
in The Victim." Caliban
8 (1971): 101–10.
Throughout
TV we are
made to feel the oppressive weight of the crowd, the environment,
and the suffocating heat of the city summer in order to symbolize
Asa Leventhal's inner psychic states. These elements are always
contrapuntal to the hero's feelings. His New York is depicted as
a jungle because he is trying to reduce raw existence to its very
essentials.
McGowan, Philip. "The Writing of Blackness in Saul
Bellow's The Victim." Saul Bellow
Journal 16.2/17.1–2 (2001):
74–103.
Acknowledges prior
readings of TV and then documents the fact that there are a
number of black presences and references in this text which are
not central to the action of the novel, but which do function on
occasion. All of this functions as a counterpart to film noir, a
cinematic genre structure around the presence of black occurences
or actions which, through motifs of lightness and darkness are
interpreted as both morally and racially significant. The reading
of reace and race stereotypes in the distorting and distorted
mirrors of American non-identities is the activity Leventhal and
Allbee perform with regard to each other in TV.
Miller, Karl. "Leventhal." New
Statesman 10 Sept. 1965:
360–61.
Denies the
accusations by Fiedler that there is an homoerotic relationship
between Leventhal and Allbee. However, much in this novel is mad,
part of the psychopathology of everyday life. Criticizes Bellow
for not providing an adequate diagnosis of the relationship and
comments that all along it has seemed finite. Allbee is a type
who comes and goes in any life.
Mural, Mami. "A Study of The
Victim by Saul Bellow?Human Mortality
and Chain of Life." Kyushu
American Literature 23 (1982):
85–88.
Nilsen, Helge N. "Anti-Semitism and Persecution Complex: A
Comment on Saul Bellow's The
Victim." English Studies 60.2 (1979): 183–91.
TV
treats the problem of anti-Semitism as being
sustained by Jew and Gentile alike. It can only be created by two
willing parties. Leventhal is the eternal Jew accepting moral
responsibility for a world he has not created. Traces in detail
the paranoia and ghetto psychology of the Jew and the hostility
and prejudices of the displaced WASP. These twin responses deny
the common humanity of all people as evidenced by the recurring
images of faceless "throngs of people throughout the novel.
Though Leventhal is able to deal with Allbee in the last scene of
the novel, new stresses would probably induce the old
traumas.
Rubin, Derek. "The Experience of Marginality in Saul Bellow's The
Victim." Proceedings of the XIIth
Congress of the International Comparative Literature
Association. Ed. Roger Bauer and
Douwe Fokkema. Vol. 2. Munich: Iudicium, 1990. 90–96. 5
vols.
Begins with a
study of the origins of the term marginality and proceeds to
examine the experience of Bellow and his protagonists in that
light. Comments on Jews as natural outsiders, and of American
Jews as the same. Discusses marginality in TV by arguing in
detail that Levanthal cannot push Albee away because of his own
sense of social inferiority and marginality.
