Literature and Politics

As critics have pointed out, the problem of the doppelganger which underlies Saul Bellow’s The Victim (1947) could have been enacted through any theme. The novel’s insistent use of fears regarding anti-Semitism therefore compels a social interpretation. Yet the interpretations most critics have posited have steadfastly avoided the specific political and historical events of the Holocaust, mostly because the novel gives little overt proof of its centrality. The Victim includes an opening epigraph depicting mass trauma, a title referring to individual suffering, and a narrative revolving around anti-Semitism. Yet despite these clear pointers to the Holocaust, what has come to be referred to as “the event” is noticeable primarily through its absence in the text. While Bellow’s 1970 novel Sammler’s Planet focuses on a Jewish protagonist whose war experience includes escaping from a pit of corpses and spending the war hiding in a tomb, his 1947 novel resolutely avoids the recent trauma of the Holocaust.  While the universality of the novel is incontestable, its title, the dynamic between Jewish and Gentile identities, and the epigraphs all point to an interpretation which links the claustrophobic atmosphere, pervasive guilt, simmering violence and images of suffocating heat to a specific historical example of victimisation. This paper will explore Bellow’s consternation over how to deal with the Holocaust and outline the way its textual repression stages a “return” in the form of a haunting uncanny double.