Fictions of the Self and Nature: Reading Romanticism in Saul Bellow

This chapter examines how Bellow advocates an intuitive Romantic knowledge in Herzog (1964), Mr Sammler’s Planet (1970) and Ravelstein (1999) that recognises that the sacrosanct resides in the ordinary nature of things and teaches us that we have wider communal obligations to one another as fellow human beings. Such obligations in Bellow’s fiction, especially Herzog, recall William Blake’s emphasis on the divine within the human breast and the possibility of a Wordsworthian communion with nature. British and American Romanticism were decisive in shaping his aesthetic vision of the relations between the self and the urban and rural environment. Bellow’s brand of Romanticism is read as indebted to Emersonian and Wordsworthian reflections on the interconnection between the visionary and the natural world, as well as moving towards a darker, sceptical, even Shelleyan sensibility.