Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Autobiographical
- Part I Critics and criticism
- Part II Contemporary culture in conflict
- Part III Writing in America and elsewhere
- 13 The New Country: Stories from the Yiddish About Life in America
- 14 Three Novels, by Daniel Fuchs
- 15 The demonic charm of Bashevis Singer
- 16 The thirties revisited: Meyer Liben's Justice Hunger and Nine Stories
- 17 Bernard Malamud's A New Life
- 18 Ralph Ellison's Shadow and Act
- 19 William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner
- 20 Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father
- 21 Raymond Carver's Cathedral
- 22 Saul Bellow's Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories
- 23 The claustral world of Nadine Gordimer
22 - Saul Bellow's Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Autobiographical
- Part I Critics and criticism
- Part II Contemporary culture in conflict
- Part III Writing in America and elsewhere
- 13 The New Country: Stories from the Yiddish About Life in America
- 14 Three Novels, by Daniel Fuchs
- 15 The demonic charm of Bashevis Singer
- 16 The thirties revisited: Meyer Liben's Justice Hunger and Nine Stories
- 17 Bernard Malamud's A New Life
- 18 Ralph Ellison's Shadow and Act
- 19 William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner
- 20 Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father
- 21 Raymond Carver's Cathedral
- 22 Saul Bellow's Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories
- 23 The claustral world of Nadine Gordimer
Summary
The title story of Saul Bellow's superb collection of stories is a portrait of the artist as an offensive man. Shawmut, a musicologist by profession, characterizes himself fairly as an utterer of “bad witticisms that well up from the depths of his nature,” as good a definition of much of the inspiration of contemporary fiction as one would wish. “A surrealist in spite of himself,” a random shooter from the mouth, Shawmut blames himself more than others. (“‘Oh, Dr. Shawmut, in that cap you look like an archeologist.’ Before I can stop myself, I answer, ‘And you look like something I just dug up.’”) The story, told in the form of a letter to the victim of the witticism, is an act of expiation. Shawmut is wise enough to know that the witticism is vile. But the temptation remains irresistible. Even his friendships seem to be defined by the temptation. His gimpy friend Edward Walish (shades of Valentine Gersbach, the villain in Herzog) reflects his own darker nature: “a wise guy in an up-to-date post-modern existentialist sly manner.”
The wisecracking artist is endemic to contemporary fiction. In God Knows, Joseph Heller, for example, discovers that God is not an earnest social democrat, but (imagine the chutzpah!) the original comic Jewish novelist.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Pieces of Resistance , pp. 167 - 170Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987