Alex Joffe: Mr. Sammler, a Dissent

Disagreeing with the son of an author is a dangerous business. Reputation, memory, projection, elements of the relationship between, in this case, father and son, swirl around the consideration of the work itself. The real disagreement, however, is about the relationship between a narrator — the man called Artur Sammler — and his planes of existence.

Sammler is not primarily a novel about New York or 1960s culture, or a liberal conservative view of society in decay, then or now. Nor is it about race as a metaphor or tool for losing and finding empathy. Rather it is about something that Adam Bellow characterizes only as “the recovery of Sammler’s humanity and his sense of connection with others.”

But this should be put more directly, more insistently: Sammler is about the responsibilities that the dead owe the living, the manner in which a dead person must crawl out from below a pile of bodies and eventually choose to live in order to save the hapless, idiotic lives around him, all the time arguing with God.

Sammler — a dead man in all senses but one — is the ironic pivot of resistance against detachment and meaninglessness, for he is the man who came back, who necessarily, inescapably, does what must be done for others, because that is life as opposed to death. He belatedly discovers he is the jewel in the movement, that which keeps it running, realizing his own indispensability only at the end as another key part of the mechanism, the sustaining nephew Elya Gruner, “worn thin and frayed with a lifetime of pulsation,” succumbs.

But there is more. Coming back from the dead to act as the jewel in the movement is the task of the Jews. Compassion and pity, bringing knowledge from beyond this earth, beyond that grave, however lamentable, in a contract with God, damnable but inescapable. And it is a mission, not to H.G. Wells, as his daughter Shula believes, but first to his sad, collapsing family —  even his nephew’s moronic son Wallace, the literal luftmensch, aloft in his plane high above Scarsdale, crashing as if on cue — and only then to concentric circles beyond, whether the cretinous children of Columbia or that most intelligent representative of humanity, Dr. Lal.

We are never entirely sure whether Sammler is, in fact, alive, only that he realizes that he must live. But whether apparition or flesh and blood he rises up and goes on, an indestructible force, an organizing principle, a walking chastisement, a one eyed source of wisdom and hope. This is why Sammler is Bellow’s most Jewish novel. Perhaps his mission is our mission.