The following essay reexamines Saul Bellow's much discussed relationship to Dostoevsky by focussing on the genealogy of boredom, with its dual origins as source of lyrical expression and/or prison of moral ambivalence. Specifically, though Bellow criticism past and present has argued by turns, and sometimes simultaneously, that Bellow is a disciple of Dostoevsky the moralist or of his "polyphonic" art, it finds upon closer inspection that what Bellow truly strives to envisage in/through the glass of Dostoevsky's "Eastern" art is a harmonious resolution to the paradox inherent in this alliance of apparently incompatible ideals—the artist's creed of disinterestedness and the moralist-polemicist's commitment to self-realization through conviction and action. However, where Bellow and his critics see concord, Dostoevsky and his critics see discord. And with reason, since Bellow's desire to reconcile the artist and the moralist in Dostoevsky (and in himself) leads him to ignore boredom's moral-intellectual antecedents in the literature of Western Enlightenment and consequently assert his bias as a "spokesman for our culture . . . a defender of the Western cultural tradition" (Clayton 1979, 3). Conversely, but by the same token, the "constant conflict . . . between the propagandist and creative artist" (Magarshak 1975, 311) enacted in Dostoevsky's oeuvre points to his polemic not only with the West but, of course, with himself.
What would it mean were someone to proclaim, in a certain apocalyptic tone, "the Time is near, the End of America is at hand?" In "Hawthorne and His Mosses," Herman Melville announces "the coming of the literary Shiloh of America," whose advent is further to herald and to prepare for that "political supremacy among the nations, which prophetically awaits [America] at the close of the present century" (Melville [1850] 1967, 550, 546). Ac- cording to this version of the End, the ark of Truth would find its final sanc- tuary in the democratic republic with the American Shiloh. In spite of this nationalist, fin de siècle rendering, such apocalypticism is not endemic solely to nineteenth-century America. In his Monsieur Melville (1978) and Les Voyageries (1973-83; published separately), Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, a con- temporary québécois author and polemicist, appropriates the American rhetoric of the New Frontier and the New Man for his own purposes. With Melville as literary co-conspirator, Beaulieu undertakes the accomplishment of La Grande Tribu, a Homeric reconstruction of Québec's origins. Para- doxically, however, Monsieur Melville discerns the roots of Québec's future grandeur not in the earthbound past, but in the starlit firmament of the coming New World (Beaulieu 1978, vol. 3, 129).
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.