The Dean's December

However, his next novel, The Dean's December, seems a rather wintry piece. It has none of the balancing comedy of Humboldt's Gift. The task of all previous Bellow heroes has been to crack asunder the false academic formulations of modernist philosophy. In The Dean's December (1982), the central protagonist, Dean Albert Corde, must learn how to effect a Houdini-like escape from the false modern descriptions of history and human experience. With Citrine, Corde must resist the modernist nightmare, learn to read the signs of an ultimate reality beyond quotidian experience, explore the notion of a Platonic home-world, and build a buffer zone between himself and all outer manifestations of disorder. Through Corde, Bellow is attacking an even larger problem than that faced by Citrine--the human knowability of truth, and the concoctedness of our views of history. Dean Albert Corde , a resident of Chicago, travels with his Roumanian wife, Minna, back to her home country and dying process of her famous mother. Here Crode is afforded a comparison of the decay of fascism and the decay of democracy as he observes the diminshing of the human factor in his tale of two cities. The great nightmare, Corde observes to his wife, Minna, is that "although people talked to themselves all the time, never stopped communing with themselves, nobody had a good connection or knew what racket he was in--his real racket."As he hibernates in Bucharest thinking about the grimness of the Eastern bloc existence, the Lester murder in Chicago, the doomed, black underclass of America, the possible lead poisoning of the planet, the failure of prison reform in Chicago, the distortions of the media, the failure of the modern university, he is overwhelmed by the nightmare of it all. He puzzles over whether creatures made of variously-evolved human material are capable of perceiving a higher order of existence than that apprehensible to the senses and the logical faculties. His focus is on the Hegelian notion that man can never directly confront the real world because of the inumerable sensory phenomena that intervene. He seems to be rejecting the Hegelian notion of a world outside of humanly-perceivable phenomena and embracing of the notions of Walter Lippmann, who argues that we are limited to the reality we build within ourselves from everyday experience and borrowed explanations.

For Dean Albert Corde, it is a matter of penetrating the "fantasmo imperium"--a state where facts cannot be perceived and provoke only feelings of suffocation. Starting with hibernation in Minna's room, he meditates on the symbolic and actual iron curtains behind which millions have been sealed off. He concludes that scientific minds have only succeeded in producing "blockaded zones" and "zones of incomprehension" about the larger issues of human existence. Irresponsible media people, scientists, university administrators, and totalitarian politicians perpetuate a gigantic fraud. Only hermetic and quasi-mystical apprehension of reality will break down the barriers of sightlessness between the self and the external universe. The remainder of the novel is an amplification of that spiritual recovery which is only hinted at by the end of the previous novel. Having dismissed such stick figures as Romantic Man, Psychological Man, Existential Man, Sociological Man, and Scientific Man, Corde opts for the antimodernist definition of Man as Seer. Standing in the giant Mount Palomar telescope, Corde sees not the real heavens but "white marks, bright vibrations, clouds of sky roe, tokens of the real thing. . . . The rest was to be felt. And it wasn't only that you felt, but that you were drawn to feel and to penetrate further, as if you were being informed that what was spread over you had to do with your existence, down to the very blood and crystal forms inside your bones."

The Dean's December has received relatively little critical attention and has mostly been viewed as a "tired" novel which lacks the linguistic and intellectual fireworks of earlier novels. However, it does contain one of Bellow's more notable portraits of a women. Valeria, Corde's mother-in-law, is a remarkably complex character in whom Bellow vests some of the most spiritually heroic qualities he has invested any character, male or female. As for Dean Corde himself, his world, unlike that of so many of the previous male protagonists, is feminocentric rather than masculine. In many ways it is a transitional novel in which Bellow continues to examine issues of masculinity and femininity, not to mention race, and culture. Frequently dubbed a "tale of two cities" it maintains the by now familiar Bellow dialectic between male and female, east and west, democracy and totalitarianism, discovery and loss, death and life, blindness and insight.