“In his essay “The Sharp Edge of Life,” Saul Bellow argued, “The great issue of fiction is the stature of characters. It starts with something like the Psalmist’s question, ‘What is man that though art mindful of him?’ Responses range from ‘a little lower than the angels’ to ‘a poor bare, forked animal.’” Today we could add to that range of responses, featuring various utopian or apocalyptic suppositions about our shared natural or digital future. But interestingly enough, it seems that contemporary literary criticism has less to say about our expanding range of answers than it does about the presumed futility of the question.”
“Perhaps the most notable example of this presumption is Mark Greif’s The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973, where we are told, quite directly, to “stop” asking dubious, socially constructed and (now) exhausted metaphysical questions about ‘M’an, or ‘W’oman.”
“But from what position of authority can a human agent make such an assertion? Whether our social constructs are motivated by sacred revelation or secular information, human beings remain peculiar creatures that persistently investigate themselves, not to mention what Bellow called a superior reality (be it something like God or the Cosmos). From a literary standpoint, “this contrast of a superior reality with daily fact is the peculiar field of the novel,” and if “man is of no importance,” he asks, “how is the novel — how, for that matter, is any human activity — justified?””
“Edward Mendelson’s Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers does not provide a direct answer, as much as it reinforces the legitimacy of asking such questions, both privately and publically. In a collection of entertaining and informative essays we’re introduced to the life and literary development of Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, Alfred Kazin, William Maxwell, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, W. H. Auden, and Frank O’Hara.”
“The text shows how varying socio-economic backgrounds, ethnic and religious heritages, political ideals, and sexual longings, influenced the intellectual and aesthetic formation of writers who “seized for themselves power and authority to shape American literary culture.””
“It also demonstrates Mendelson’s ability to carefully hold together critical reflection and emotional sensitivity. He observes these essayists, novelists, and poets in their darkest hours — lonely, unfulfilled, compulsively jealous, neurotic, and murderous.”
“Though they relished their literary power, each in his own way also recoiled from it, and all confronted “moral tests and temptations that were inseparable from it.” For Mendelson, examining those private tests is essential to understanding the literary culture that emerged in a century of rapid technological change, depression, war, Holocaust, and racial strife.”