第3章 Saul Bellow and the Poetics of Ephebism[20]

Among American novelists of the latter half of the 20th century, Saul Bellow stands out as one of the greatest giants. He is often regarded as the writer of parallel importance as William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, F.Scott Fitzgerald et al., and more importantly, one of the founders of contemporary American literature. Lording over the literary horizon of America after the Second World War, his monumental works inscribe both modern and postmodern social landscapes, providing "the backbone of the 20th-century American literature"(Brucker 1990, 888)[21]. He is distinguished for his profound understanding of the complicated spiritual world of modern man and penetrating insight into its cultural mechanism. His contribution to the world literature lies mainly in the fact that, as is read in his Nobel Prize citation, "the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture are combined in his work."[22]

Born in Lachine, Montreal in 1915, Bellow began his literary career when such modern writers as Joyce, Lawrence and Eliot were becoming a fixed orthodoxy in universities. Thus, it was these great modern writers who shaped Bellow's consciousness as a young man and greatly influenced the theme and style of his first two novels, Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947). But even then Bellow began to break with modernism. When The Adventure of Augie March was published in 1953, Bellow showed his first open rejection of the tradition. Scorning absurdism, nihilism and alienation ethics, rejecting historicist pessimism, preaching against the void, and defending the embattled private self, Bellow tried to restore the integrity of feeling, the meaning of private, ordinary existence and the primacy of social obligation to a society (Cronin 1980, 1). As Saul Bellow later announced: "I am going against the stream. That's not an attitude. Attitudes are foolishness. It's just that there's no use doing anything else, is there? I blame myself for not having gone hard enough against it, and if I live I shall go harder" (Simmons 1979, 31).

It is evident that Saul Bellow is a man of ideas and rebellious spirit, filled with a dynamic for transgression. With such great creative power, Bellow is not only a very prolific writer,[23] but also a writer of insight. Since the publication of The Adventures of Augie March (1953), which wins him a National Book Award, Bellow has been gradually getting rid of modernism. Two more National Book Awards, in 1964 for Herzog and in 1969 for Mr. Sammler's Planet, plus a Pulitzer Prize for Humboldt's Gift in 1975, indicate that his reputation has grown steadily with each succeeding novel.

Besides, Bellow is also a "moralist," who is always aware of his unique responsibility as a writer. In his essay, "The Writer as Moralist," Bellow states: "The writer in any sense finds that he bears the burdens of priests or teachers. Sometimes he looks like the most grotesque of priests, the most eccentric of teachers but I believe the moral function cannot be divorced from art" (Mahoney 1995, 2—3). Bellow takes it as his responsibility to advocate his own justified idea against the decadent mainstream culture through his novels and essays.

What's more, Bellow is an "amorous" man, who, all through his life, married four times. In 1938, Bellow married Anita Goshkin, his first wife, with whom he had a son. When he was 41, he got divorced with Anita and came into his second marriage with Alexandra Tsachachasov, who gave birth to his second son. This marriage lasted merely for 4 years because his second wife despised the simple and crude house they lived in. Although Bellow had never mentioned his family privacy, many critics considered that he was the protagonist in Herzog, a middle-aged Jewish intellectual, who, just like Bellow, had "two married, two children" (H, 3)[24] and led a very similar life. Critics also noted that the creation of the heroine in Herzog was inspired by his second wife. Then he married Susan Alexandra Glassman in 1961 and got divorced again 7 years later. In 1975, he finally found his happiness in his fourth marriage at the age of 60. Thus, no wonder Bellow's protagonists regardless of age, such as Henderson of 55 years old and Herzog at the age of 43, have a life-time pursuit for youth, love, and passion.

Saul Bellow's earlier novels, The Adventure of Augie March (1953), Henderson the Rain King (1959) and Herzog (1964), were written in the intellectual context of the mainstream culture of modernism, especially the "Wasteland Outlook," but all of his protagonists are unique and universal as well, different from the prevailing types of the absurd, alienated heroes. Despite their actual age differences, the protagonists in the three novels share the same identity, the same ideal and the same value of life, because they all possess "the temperamental predominance of courage over timidity," and "the appetite for adventure over the love of ease." They are not mortgaged to life in its lumber-room. Their will, their imagination, their vigor of the emotions, their lure of wonders, their waves of optimism as well as pessimism, and what's more, their inexhaustible energy, their unfailing childlike desire for what is next, and their insatiable love for beauty, hope, cheer, and power, all these make up a world of their own. They incessantly try to be the Lord of life, keeping a kingdom gleaming with their illusions, aspirations and dreams. The most conspicuous is that they all have been granted with a strong transgressive energy that drives them to trespass against the mainstream as social or cultural outcasts. They are cultural "aliens" of the world. It seems that Bellow's protagonists are repressed by, but revolt against, a culture that resists any heterogeneous definition or conceptualization, a definition or conceptualization that is always elusive, forbidden, distant, and uncanny, and at the same time that forever haunts the abyss of their psyche. To define and conceptualize the unnameable search of Bellow's protagonists is both fascinating and challenging. This chapter attempts to draw a critical perspective from modern and postmodern theoretical discourses and approaches to the world that these protagonists long for. Based on the age difference but not limited to the physical age difference, my argument will focus on the tension which the "generation gap" emits. Besides, it will also delve into the nature of the young as against the old, deconstructing the power relationship between the cultures represented by the gerontic group and those by the subaltern group of the youth.

Differences between the gerontic and the young are one of the academic concerns in contemporary sociology or social psychology, especially the critique of the binary oppositions in contemporary culture studies. The widely applied conception of "difference" has its origin in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. In his Course in General Linguistics, Saussure argues that language works as a system of differences, as he puts it, "in a language-state everything is based on relations."[25] This theorization informs the structuralist approach adopted in the 1960s and 1970s within literary, media and cultural studies. In those eventful elaborations, the analysis often focuses on the relation of opposition (the starkest form of difference) structuring the form and meaning of a text. Symbolic and ideological connotations could thus be seen as founded, for example, on the binary oppositions between types of heroine, such as the vamp and housewife, or between domestic and urban locations, or between the lonely individual and a faceless bureaucracy. A further implication, however, is that meanings depend on what is not present or "not-said" in texts, or upon other disregarded, oppressed or silenced discourses. An awareness of "difference" therefore encourages a reading in terms of similarly structured relations of intertextuality in which certain texts are preferred and others were relegated to the periphery (Brooker 1999, 72). What's more, as Michele Barrett observes, one of the main feminist usages of the conception of difference is a Saussurean view of meaning as positional or relational, which sees gender, race and class as sites of difference ("sites of the operation of the power" in Barrett's terminology), which deconstructs the idea of gendered subjectivity (Barrett 1989, 37—48).

Compared with enormous intensity and depth of theorizing gender, class, race and ethnicity in contemporary critical horizon, age difference has nevertheless been less developed by literary critics and theorists. From the 1990s, however, a few feminist age theories have been formulated, in a shift marked by the nomenclature, from "literary gerontology" toward "age studies" (Gullette 1997, 9).

Literary gerontology studies, through media, literature, film, and other artistic forms, initially aim to expand the field of gerontology by insisting on the humanistic approaches (Wyatt-Brown 1990, 299—315). However, age studies named by Margaret Morganroth Gullette in her 1993 essay entitled "Creativity, Gender, Aging," is an interdisciplinary study of literature and culture. It underscores age more explicitly as a set of historical and cultural concepts (like gender or race) used for investigating how a culture builds age constructions and reproduces them in "all formulations of life events," as Kathleen Woodward has explained (Woodward 1991, 34). A social-constructionist approach to age allows critics to understand "discourses, institutions, and material conditions as producers of age categories and attributes, power differentials, emotions like dread of aging, and systems that interlock age and gender" (Gullette 1993, 19).

In his identification with youth, Saul Bellow seems to have a firm disbelief in things associated with the old and the elderly. As culturally represented by his criticizing modernism, and personally by his personality of disruption, this literary sentiment has penetrated into the depths of his subjectivity and appeared overwhelmingly in his novels. With attempts to address Bellow's gerontophobic discourse and its underlining ideologies, this chapter at first traces the author's construction of the elderly images in contrast with the youth images, then explores his strategy to subvert what he thinks of as the "gerontocentric culture," and finally looks for a poetics of Ephebism as his textual or intertextual rhetoric.

As for the scholarships concerning the three of Bellow's early works, many critics have attached much of their attention to the theme of alienation, which is the most popular perspective from the existentialist point of view. Roy Robert Dutton once observed: "In Bellow's world, society is rendered in an almost naturalistic manner, almost as an unchanging, indifferent, yet powerful background against which his protagonists in all of their sensitive awareness, their vitality, their frustrating absurdities, are seen" (Dutton 1971, 13). Living in such a dilemmatic world of existential void, Bellow's protagonists have constantly rebelled and transgressed, but frequently encountered frustrations and failures. Dutton continued to talk about this dilemma: "How does the individual in all of his individuality, with his dreams, aspirations, and idealism, along with his ever-present awareness of society as a naturalistic reality, find a place for himself, establish a personal and a unique identity and still maintain an honest integrity of self?" (Dutton 1971, 15) Bellow's heroes, from his point of view, find the complexities of life on the basis of alienation from society. These heroes are further confronted with "a kind of treason within themselves, which creates an even more insoluble problem" (Dutton 1971, 17). Similarly, Marcus Klein also heeded their paradoxical situation: "They face problems: to meet with a strong sense of self and the sacrifice of self demanded by a social circumstance." (Klein 1962, 203—04)

Both Dutton and Klein's observations imply that Bellow's heroes seem to be, philosophically, in the Sartrean position of "the being-in-itself versus the being-for-itself" (Dutton 1971, 27). It is the typical existentialist point of view. Their alienation themes of Bellow's novels are strongly influenced by his contemporary mainstream mentality, namely, naturalism and existentialism. Though they regard the society as the external force against the protagonists' nature, they hold that there is no fault of the neutral and objective society and it is the individual that should be blamed for not being able to adapt himself to it. Thus, the two critics' views are biased and misleading because they simply regard society as "an unchanging, indifferent, yet powerful background" against which the inability of an individual to adapt into the society is a kind of alienation. Hence, from their points of view, alienation would be the basic state of the individual existence, and it should be the fallacy of the individual, not the pathology of the society and culture, that counts for such an alienation.

Among other elaborations of alienation, John Clayton goes even further and more explicitly. He observes: "Bellow's heroes are not only alienated; they alienated themselves. Filled with guilt, they loathe themselves and, in most of the novels, need to heap suffering and indignity on their own heads. Joseph, Asa, Tommy, Henderson, Herzog - all are moral [social] masochists." (Clayton 1968, 61) In his theory, the state of alienation not only stems from the tension between the individual and society but also is reinforced by the tension within the individual, that is, the individual's inability to identify with himself. Hence, it seems that the individual deserves miserable state of alienation and is hopeless to get out of it.

Unlike the above critics, Keith Opdahl takes a different stance on the alienation thesis by attributing it to Bellow's accurate and somewhat haunting depiction of the city living - a world which estranges many of his characters from society: "Although this sense of strangeness is never the overt issue of Bellow's story, it forms in the background the issue upon which the novel's action depends. It accounts for the alienation, the bad temper, the compulsive action, the fear or dependency, which are the major issue" (Opdahl 1967, 20). As a process of socialization, the city living is determined by the culture of the city or society. Therefore, it is society and culture that should be blamed for their alienation. It is a step forward to see the society and culture critically. However, under the framework of alienation, Opdahl couldn't disclose the real meaning of the protagonists' struggles and pursuits, which he has simply regarded as an absurdity of existence.

Apart from the widely-accepted critical consensus on the alienation thesis, several other critics have attempted to characterize the hero with descriptive titles. For example, David Galloway calls the protagonist "the absurd hero," Paul Levine and Robert Penn Warren call him "the uncommitted man" (Warren 1953, 22—23) and "the philosophical fool" (Levine 1959, 163). Galloway suggests that the modern hero who confronts human limitation faces a similar unending task like a prototype hero from the mythology of Sisyphus[26] and consequently the impossibility of wish fulfillment makes his life an absurd ordeal. Galloway says that in the course of the eternal stone-rolling of modern life, Bellow's heroes learn to accept the endless struggle; yet they attain a measure of happiness or an affirmation of life despite the inherent suffering of the struggle. However, the affirmation is very limited under his acknowledgement of the absurdity (Galloway 1962, 23—27).

In his article "The Affirmation of the Philosophical Fool," Paul Levine characterizes Bellow's heroes as "fools." He uses Isaac Bashevis Singer's "Gimpel the Fool"[27] to show the kind of blind trust which Bellow's heroes have in people. Judging from the criterion of the socialized adulthood, he criticizes Bellow's heroes for their blind trust in humanity. As a matter of fact, the so-called "blind trust" can be categorized as innocence and honesty, virtues of youth, which Levine could not recognize due to the limitation of his perspective of the adult value judgment. In addition, Levine calls Bellow's heroes "uncommitted men," who refuse to be committed to conventional ways of life, which do not lead to self-discovery, or blur the quest for self-discovery. Since the diction "uncommitted" implies a negative sense of being "irresponsible," it seems as if only by complying with the widely-accepted ways of life or the society, the individual is "committed."

In addition, some critics take the feminist approach to explore the patriarchy in Bellow's novels and of the Bellow critics. In her doctoral dissertation of "The Women Characters in the Novels of Saul Bellow," Esther Mackintonsh states: "When they [the women characters] are discussed, they are usually treated as symbols or as subsidiary parts of the protagonist, rather than as distinct, separate individuals" (Mackintonsh 1979, 8). In her view, the women characters are disintegrated and marginalized by the critics and by Bellow himself. Similarly, Louana L. Peontek observes in her "Images of Women in Saul Bellow's Novels": "A closer scrutiny of his novels, however, indicates some unfortunate limitation to Bellow's vision, for they abundantly demonstrates that his ‘affirmation of man’ is, sadly, only that-an affirmation of half the human species, made largely at the expense of, and often in spite of, women" (Peontek 1980, 3—4). Peontek further points out Bellow's patriarchal mentality, which is echoed by Younsook Na Chung in her "Bellow's Women: The Limitation of a Major American Writer": "The feminist critic can call into question the validity of the received criticism and argue that Bellow's humanism must not be considered as affirmative and encompassing as it has been taken in the patriarchal tradition" (Chung 2000, 6). Though the feminist approach based on the conception of "gender difference" is a great inspiration to study "age difference" in Bellow's novels, the conclusion of the author's patriarchal mentality is very misleading. As will be illustrated in the following, Bellow's atomization and marginalization of women characters might be true, but it is also absolutely true that his male characters are most atomized and marginalized.

As a matter of fact, Bellow's characterization often transcends the mere male-female binary opposition, suggesting a subversive potentiality reinscribing both genders. In his addresses, private conversations, interviews, essays and reviews, Bellow is severely critical of apocalyptic thinkers whose view of existence is extremely despairing. As Prafulla Chandra Kar puts it, "he [Bellow] feels that there is a creative force which resists the pressure of the environment and, despite the fact that the writers consistently paint life in dark and somber hues." (Kar 1973, 13) Therefore, the "creative force" inherent in the author is the very source of the creation of the heroes. Accordingly, the very creative force and his transgression against the mainstream make it possible to read the novels from the perspective of age difference and Ephebism.

Our argument at first formulates a hypothesis that the mainstream culture always emits a gerontocentric discourse, whose values, conventions, social configurations, psychological mechanism and even narrative strategies represent the interests as well as the preference of the old. Furthermore, it continues to delve into Bellow's transgression against the established social or symbolic norms as specifically a transgression of the youth against the gerontic. In order to do so, we, like Fang, draw critical power from psychoanalysis, archetypal criticism, feminist theorization, and cultural studies, and will present the arguments in the following three categories.

The first focuses on a discussion of the binary characterization of the gerontic and youth images in The Adventure of Augie March, and makes a contrast between the two types in an attempt to expose the tension between the two types of characters in literature, and attempts to analyze Bellow's different attitudes towards the young and the old, both of which, in the micro-level of interpersonal relationship, demonstrate Bellow's subversive strategy of poetics against the old.

The second attempts, on the macro-level of interpersonal relationship, or the relationship between an individual and society, to further exhibit Bellow's subversive strategy of poetics against the society dominated by the gerontic power through the analysis of his characterization of Henderson, the rebellious protagonist in Henderson the Rain King, and to search for that inherent driving force for the protagonist's transgression by answering the two questions concerning the text: 1) What compels Henderson to take a trip to Africa? 2) What does he find there?

The third, on the cultural level of interpersonal relationship, delves into Bellow's subversive poetics against the pathological culture through the analysis of Herzog, an autobiographical protagonist in Herzog, and attempts to look for Bellow's identification with the youth culture, especially the transgressive power of the youth against the mainstream culture represented by the gerontic group.

To sum up, the chapter will negotiate with modern or contemporary theoretical discourses on the question of the centrifugal force, and attempt to contextualize Ephebism in the American culture of the 1950s and 1960s.

1. The Young and Gerontic Images: Binary Characterization in The Adventures of Augie March

The Adventure of Augie March is a contemporary "bildungsroman," a picaresque adventure chronicle. Like its precedents The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and The Catcher in the Rye (1951), it centers on a Chicago born character, who has been growing up during the Great Depression and shifted through diverse types of occupations, seeking more different missions with an unfailing self-empowerment. The plot is loosely arranged, in which events after events simply happen to Augie, and always randomly. Streams of social landscapes and eerie personas flash past the wandering outcast looking for an essence in life. In the novel, Bellow depicts various characters that are generally categorized into binary groups in opposition to one another: the gerontic image and the youth image.[28] The gerontic image consists of a huge collection of various gerontic personages, of which Grandma Lausch, Einhorn and Anna are the most typical.

Grandma Lausch is a boarder of Augie's family. Since her sons regard her as a burden and don't want to live with her, she rents a room of Augie's family's and lives with them. All through her life, Grandma Lausch is used to being in charge of a family. When she is deserted by her sons, she finds the substitution for her to rule, that is, Augie's family, a single-parent one of a simple-minded mother and three young kids, Simon, Augie and George (mentally handicapped). Though there is no consanguinity, Grandma Lausch becomes the authority dominant over the family due to her habitual gerontic hierarchy. She appropriates her social experience to "help" the family, for instance, to negotiate with the civil servant, to get the social welfare, to "educate" the young kids to be "gentlemen," etc., all of which, in essence, are to fulfill her own desire for dominance. When the kids grow up, she is sent to a beadhouse for the old, deprived of her dominance again.

In the novel, Grandma Lausch is depicted as physically ugly, sophisticated, egotistic, and strongly desirous for dominance. In terms of her ugliness, Bellow writes, "she was as wrinkled as an old paper bag"(AM, 7). Besides, her ugliness is compounded by her poodle, a "pursy old overfed" dog, Winnie, for "her small ribboned gray feet immobile on the shoekit...dingy old wool Winnie whose bad smell filled the flat on the cushion beside her"(AM, 7). Here, Grandma Lausch, together with her dog is quite nerve-wracking because she is somehow likened to the cartoon of an evil witch with her cat. It is just like what Oliver Wendell Holmes depicts in The Poet at the Breakfast Table: "Old people are a kind of monsters to little folks; mild manifestations of the terrible, it may be, but still, with their white locks and ridged and grooved features, which those horrid little eyes exhaust of their details like so many microscopes, not exactly what human beings ought to be" (Tripp 1987, 720).

To cover her haggardness and ugliness, Grandma Lausch often puts on an air of artificial elegance. Ironically, when she is sent to the "Nelson Home," a beadhouse for the old, she soon loses such a wry manner, as Augie observes: "She was [...] to my [Augie's] eyes, having lost her distinguishing independence, weakened, mole-ish" (AM, 157). Grandma Lausch might have been kind, considerate, lovable and even beautiful when she was young. But as she grows old, her kindness becomes a mere nuisance, her consideration an insatiable desire for dominance and finally the loss of youthful beauty a compensative avarice.

Old as she is, Grandma Lausch is far from being easy to cope with because she is sophisticated. One glimpse of Grandma Lausch's sophisticatedness lies in her negotiation with Lubin, the caseworker who investigates the welfare of a family to decide whether they need the government aid or not. Confronting Lubin, she takes a very firm stance by showing the fact: "How do you expect children to be brought up?" (AM, 6) This is truly the harsh reality for Augie's family with "no man in the house and children to be brought up"(AM, 6). The fact that Augie's father abandons them and the family consists merely of pathetic mother and small kids shows that the life of Augie's family isn't easy. Therefore Grandma Lausch uses it as an edge to deal with Lubin. But the low rent is also a hindrance for the increase of the family's income, which Grandma Lausch would never mention. However, Lubin, as a serious caseworker "like a man determined not to let a grasshopper escape from his hand"(AM, 6), doesn't hesitate to put forth the solution to the case: "Well, my dear, Mrs. March could raise your [Grandma Lausch's] rent"(AM, 6). Being slightly criticized and sensing the possibility of diminishing her interest, Grandma Lausch shifts to another strategy by showing off her so-called great contribution to the government through her management of Augie's family: "Do you know what things would be without me [Grandma Lausch]? You ought to be grateful for the way I hold them [Augie's family] together"(AM, 6). Furthermore, she even threatens Lubin: "And when I die, Mr. Lubin, you'll see what you've got on your hands"(AM, 6). Finally, with the conclusion that "I [she] pay as much as I [she] can afford," Grandma Lausch defeats Mr. Rubin who has only to withdraw to avoid more bombardment from her squabbles. Ostensibly, owing to her sophisticatedness, she not only safeguards her own interest but also helps Augie's family to get governmental support, which seems to be beneficial to all. As a matter of fact, she mainly protects her own interest because otherwise she ought to pay more to Augie's family. This is unfair for other poor families because the government is actually compelled by her sophisticatedness to help her with her partial rent. Otherwise, the money should have gone to the needy hands.

Another exhibition of her sophisticatedness is that she coaches Augie how to get a pair of free glasses for his mother. Grandma Lausch is so tricky that she thinks out all the important, possible questions in the dispensary and then teaches Augie how to answer them. Under her tutorship, if asked about his father whom Augie actually has no contact with since he was born, Augie "must tell her [the clerk] that the last time he sent a money order was about two years ago from Buffalo, New York"(AM, 8). If Augie tells the truth, the clerk will find out they are receiving charity. In that case, no free glasses will be provided. Besides, Augie should "never say a word about the charity"(AM, 8). This is the explicit command from the old lady, because mentioning charity implicitly or explicitly will destroy the whole plan. Then, Augie must bear this particular piece of her teaching in mind that "no matter how she [the clerk] is, you [Augie] shouldn't forget to say ‘Miss’"(AM, 8). For she knows the good courtesy along with a piece of compliment is necessary when you ask for help and sometimes is of great use. Additionally, the old lady also designs other replies to the possible inquires, such as "eighteen dollars" to "how much the rent is," "boarders" to "where the money comes from," "two" to "how many [boarders]"(AM, 8). All of these show the calculated sophisticatedness of Grandma Lausch. Finally, they even propose a rehearsal.

"Now, say to me, how much rent?"

"Eighteen dollars."

"And how many boarders?"

"Two."

"And how much do they pay?"

"How much should I say?"

"Eight dollars each week."

"Eight dollars."

"So you can't go to a private doctor, if you get sixty-four dollars a week."(AM, 8—9)

Here, it is evident that Grandma Lausch is not only a master of but a tutor of deception and conspiracy to the young. Augie, who acts as she has instructed, successfully obtains the glasses for free.

There are a great number of sociological studies on money and the psychology of the old. For instance, in his The Philosophy of Money (1990), George Simmel remarks that "old people become avaricious because, ‘subjectively,’ the sensual enjoyment of life has lost its charm, and the ‘ideals’ have lost their ‘agitating power’" (34). Besides, Bellow describes that even Grandma Lausch's posture of smoking is symbolic of her characteristic sophistication: "With the holder in her dark little gums between which all her guile, malice, and command issued, she had her best inspirations of strategy" (AM, 7). When she is smoking, her posture gives a feeling that she is just making up another canny plot of conspiracy.

In addition to her sophistication, Grandma Lausch is very egotistic as well. The most vivid exhibition is the performance she puts on when she treats George, Augie's mentally-handicapped brother. George loves Grandma Lausch, whom he will at any time kiss on the sleeve and on the knee. The old lady lets him embrace her and speaks to him always in the same tune: "Hey you, boy, clever jungle, you like the old Grandma, my minister, my cavalier? That's-a-boy"(AM, 9). With these words, she praises George for his cleverness and acts as if she were a queen who addresses to her subject and hero. However, it is only the case when she enjoys the feeling of being worshiped, respected and loved. She treats George badly after she feels satisfied with her proud self and doesn't want more: "Enough, you're making my dress wet"(AM, 10). Being extremely impatient, she will sharply push George's head off with her "old prim hand" (AM, 10). Here, it is quite obvious that the old lady is so egotistic, cold and indifferent that she makes use of the simple-minded George for self-satisfaction. Later in the plot, she even proposes to send George away to the madhouse where he grows up and doesn't need him to act as her "worshipper" to satisfy her vanity.

Of all the personalities of Grandma Lausch's, the most conspicuous one is her strong desire for dominance and power. Just as Bellow writes, "She [Grandma Lausch] preferred to live with us [Augie's family], because for so many years she was used to direct a house, to command, to govern, to manage, scheme, devise and intrigue in all her languages" (AM, 5). In a sense, Grandma Lausch's life can simply be divided into two phases of dominance, previously in her own family and later in Augie's. As she grows old, she is abandoned by her two sons who can't stand her tyranny, which ends her first phase of dominance. However, she fortunately finds an ideal substitute kingdom for her execution of power, that is, Augie's family, which is made up of a submissive mother and three kids, one of whom is even mentally handicapped. A boarder as she is, she acted as if she were master of the family or queen of the kingdom, and all the members of the family became her servants or subjects. Augie's mother cooks for her, cleans her room, listens carefully to her instruction and criticism; Augie is often ordered to run various errands for her, for instance, to borrow the Russian books from the library, to call for the doctor, etc.; Simon, Augie's brother, though very individualistic, is still manipulated to do things, for example, to find Augie a job in the stand near the station, to work in the summer vacation, etc.; George, Augie's mentally handicapped brother, is coaxed to worship her as aforementioned. Even Grandma Lausch's dog, Winnie, enjoys a high rank together with her, for "Mama was Winnie's servant, as she is Grandma Lausch's" (AM, 1). Furthermore, she is really experienced and skillful in maintaining her dominance, as is observed by Augie: "To us nothing was ever said to weaken her rule by suggesting it would end... and in her miraculous knowledge of us, able to be extremely close to our thoughts... she was one sovereign who knew exactly the proportions of love, respect and fear of power in her subjects' hearts" (AM, 6).

Another typical aspect of her strong dominance over the family is reflected in her educating the two boys, Augie and Simon, especially the former. At the age of twelve, Augie and Simon "were farmed out in the summer by the old woman to get a taste of life and the rudiments of earning" (AM, 14). Grandma Lausch ignores the risky fact that the kids are too young to resist the bad influence of society and it turns out that Simon, originally a good boy who "had a distinguished record in the school" (AM, 29), is affected greatly, discarding all his study and becoming a truant. However, the old lady, "following her own idea of what that fate would be" (AM, 28), doesn't intend them to be "common laborers" (AM, 28). In her opinion, they are to wear suits, not overalls, and she is going to set them on the way to becoming "gentlemen" just like her sons whom she actually fails to "educate out" and who, as aforesaid, don't hesitate to desert her. What's more, Grandma Lausch also employs the "humiliation education" to magnify her influence on Augie, as he recalls the effect of her lecture: "There were faults I couldn't afford to have, situated where I was in life, a child of an abandoned family with no father to keep me out of trouble, nobody but two women, feeble-handed, who couldn't forever hold a cover over us from hunger, misery, crime and the wrath of the world." (AM, 36)

Her lecture is destructive rather than constructive because she humiliates Augie with his family misfortune and inculcate him with a sense of inferiority and self-contempt. The impact of this "education" is so obviously "effective" because when her hand lands on Augie's arm accidentally, to Augie, "the effect was frightful, for I [Augie] yelled as if this tap had tenfold hit my [Augie's] soul" (AM, 37). Here, the old lady seems to be a nightmarish figure that haunts Augie with horrors of a ghost. Her "education" on the boys is in essence the symbolic relief of her unfulfilled desires about her ungrateful sons. Thus she cares for merely her model of "gentlemen" instead of the real need of the children.

With Augie and his brother Simon growing up, Grandma Lausch is gradually losing her dominant power over the family. The turning point is when she is sent to "the Nelson Home for the Aged" (AM, 95), which means she is overthrown from the symbolic throne of Augie's family, and her life will not last for a year since then. When Augie comes to visit her later, he finds she has doated a lot: "she [Grandma Lausch] was almost like everyone else in the joint, to my [Augie's] eyes, having lost her distinguishing independence, weakened, mole-ish, needing to look around for her old-time qualities when she greeted me, as if she had laid them down, forgetting where" (AM, 157). Staying there for a while, Grandma Lausch grows old quickly and loses all her pride and even her artificial elegance. To sum up, all through her life, she is strongly desirous for dominance. Without power, whether real or symbolic, she is just a lamp without oil.

Similar to Lausch, William Einhorn, a cripple with only his hands still functioning, is a gerontic image with a stereotyped negative appearance. In Bellow's characterization, "Einhorn was very pale, a little flabby in the face; considerable curvature of the nose, small lips, and graying hair let grow thickly so that it touched on the ears; and continually watchful, his looking going forward uninterruptedly to fasten on subject matters" (AM, 64). Physically, Einhorn is inanimate and decadent ("pale," "flabby," "graying hair") with exaggerated, asymmetric facial features ("considerable curvature," "small"). Compared with Lausch's witch-like appearance, Einhorn is like a greedy gerontic wizard with a pair of conspicuous eyes, filled with eagerness for the material possession.

Physically deformed as he is, Einhorn is typically one of the "Machiavellis"[29] whom Augie encounters in his young years (AM, 4). As the elder son, Einhorn inherits the family business from the old Einhorn, a nicknamed commissioner who has another son nicknamed Dingbat, a pugnacious, good-for-nothing, conceited dandy. But it is not until the death of his father that Einhorn becomes the real authority of the family. Handicapped and unable to take care of himself, Einhorn hires Augie to help him in life and run business errands for him. So Augie has the chance to be in close contact with Einhorn when Augie witnesses Einhorn's shrewdness and greed for petty gains as well as his lust for and shamelessness in front of the young females. Besides, Einhorn has a son named Arthur who is a university student of pedantry. When Augie becomes quite intimate with the family, especially with the old Einhorn, Einhorn often implicitly reminds Augie of his position of a mere servant lest Augie will try to steal Arthur's part of inheritances from the old commissioner. Ironically, in fact, the old commissioner shows his fondness of Augie as a means to have Augie work harder and be loyal to the Einhorns.

Like Grandma Lausch, the characterization of Einhorn is quite negative as well. One glimpse of his shrewdness and greed for petty gains is the way he takes advantage of the telephone in his office. He keeps a little screwdriver for touching off the part of the telephone mechanism that registers the drop of the nickel. Bellow writes: "For even at his most prosperous" (AM, 157), Einhorn is not going to pay for every call he makes; besides, "the company was raking in a fortune from the coin-boxes used by the other businessman who came to the office" (AM, 68). It is evident that Einhorn is so shrewd and greedy for petty pains that he doesn't let even a nickel escape from his hand. However, this telephone trick is just a corner of the iceberg, compared with Einhorn's "real business" of "his numerous small swindles," in which his shrewdness and greed for small advantages is carried into the extreme. In this respect, there is hardly anything he doesn't get into, like ordering things on approval he doesn't intend to pay for-"stamps, little tubes of lilac perfume, packages of linen sachet, Japanese paper roses that opened in water, and all the sort of items advertised in the back pages of the Sunday supplement" (AM, 69). The tricks are carried out in perfectly shrewd disguise and order. As Augie recalls, "he [Einhorn] had me [Augie] write for them [the free goods] in my hand and give fictitious names, and threw away the dunning letters, of course, and he said all of these people calculated losses into what they charged" (AM, 69). To satisfy his greed, Einhorn sends away for everything that is free:

samples of food, soaps, medicine, the literature of all causes, reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology and publications of the Smithsonian Institution, the Bishop Museum in Hawaii the Congressional record, laws, pamphlets, prospectuses, college catalogue, quack hygiene books, advice on bust-development, on getting rid of pimples, on longevity and Coueism, pamphlets on Fletcherism, Yoga, spirit-rapping, antivivisection. (AM, 70)

What's more, he is even on the mailing list of academic institutes and organizations such as "the Henry George Institute," "the Rudolf Steiner Foundation in London," "the local bar association" and "the American Legion" (AM, 70). For some of the free papers and pamphlets, which go out of print, he can make profits by selling them to bookstores and libraries. In short, "he [Einhorn] had to be in touch with everything" (AM, 70). In this sense, the greed for petty gains has been deeply rooted in his consciousness.

In addition, Einhorn's shrewdness is compounded by his narrow-mindedness. As is mentioned before, Augie is quite intimate with the Einhorns, especially the old commissioner. Therefore, Einhorn often implicitly reminds Augie of his position of an outsider or a servant for fear that Augie will steal his son's portion of inheritance of the family property. As a matter of fact, it never occurs to Augie that he wants or tries to get the inheritance from the Einhorns: "I [Augie] wasn't trying to worm my way into any legacy and get any part of what was coming to his elegant and cultivated son Arthur" (AM, 73). Einhorn's anxiety is caused by his father, the Commissioner, who often shows fondness of Augie, "strok[s] his shoulder, [gives] him tips" (AM, 73). Therefore, Augie is sent out by Einhorn when any big family deal is discussed. Besides, to make absolutely sure Augie doesn't have any such ambition, Einhorn now and then reminds Augie of his position by asking him "some questions about his people, as if he hadn't informed himself through Coblin, Kreindle, Clem and Jimmy"[30] (AM, 72). Though he has many other more reliable sources of intelligence such as Coblin, Kreindle, Clem and Jimmy to get the information about Augie's family, Einhorn asks Augie directly instead in order to make Augie aware of his poor family background. Ironically, as is discussed above, Einhorn misinterprets his father's real intention of showing fondness of Augie. Therefore, it is evident that Einhorn's shrewdness, dwarfed by the old commissioner's, is combined with and hindered by his narrow-mindedness.

Einhorn's narrow-mindedness is also demonstrated in the advice that he gives Augie when Simon doesn't treat Augie fairly. That is the occasion when Augie is trapped in another city, penniless and disillusioned. So he telegraphs his brother Simon to ask for help from Einhorn, who gives Simon a sum of money to help Augie out. However, instead of a telegraph to Augie, Simon takes the money away for his own business. Therefore, when Augie comes to Einhorn later, he advises Augie: "Don't you [Augie] realize the advantage you have from now on? You'd better not be easy on him [Simon]. He's got to make it right to you. The advantage has passed to you, and you've got him by the balls... if anybody did this to me I'd certainly have satisfaction knowing he was good and burned himself" (AM, 183).

Einhorn tries to inflame Augie against his own brother, and simultaneously reminds Augie that he has an edge over his brother because he has done something wrong to Augie and should make compensation. So he advises Augie not to let Simon go easily. In his opinion, Augie should make full use of the opportunity to have his brother feel sorry and make up for his loss. With these words, Einhorn tells frankly what he would do if he were Augie, that is, to pay Simon back in his own coin. When Augie doesn't agree with him, he even thinks Augie "was not clear in his mind" (AM, 183). This is because Einhorn firmly believes in the jungle law in society that one should always put his own interests in the first place.

Besides, Einhorn is also very shameless and lustful in front of females. He is very good at taking advantage of his own disability because he is often obscenely joking about himself before the fair sex. As Bellow describes, "he [Einhorn] was not so secretly saying to women that if they'd look further they'd find to their surprise that there was the real thing, not disabled" (AM, 77). In this way, he jokingly boasts that he is still competent despite his two disabled legs. He is not at all shamed of what he says and enjoys showing off his obscenities which he regards as humor. Unlike his father's jokes, which pleasantly entertain girls, Einhorn's "didn't had the same ring," which isn't to say they are not funny but that he casts himself forward on them toward a goal-seduction (AM, 77). He is that lustful, as Bellow describes, "so that when he worked his wicked, lustful charm... he was really single-mindedly and grimly fixed on the one thing, ultimately the thing, for which men and women came together" (AM, 78). It seems that he is always "horny" with the presence of girls. No matter who she is, whether beautiful or not, he keeps thinking of the lustful and obscene. For instance, he even "screwed up" with Lollie Fewter, the cleaner in his office: "he'd clear us all out of the way to be alone with Lollie Fewter" (AM, 78).

Similar to the gerontic images discussed above, Anna, Augie's aunt, is depicted by Bellow firstly with a very homely appearance: "As she had great size and terrific energy of constitution she produced all kinds of excess. Even physical ones: moles, blebs, hairs, bumps in her forehead, huge concentration in her neck" (AM, 16). In addition to her ugly appearance, Anna's personality is quite negatively presented. In the novel, Anna has a son and a daughter. Anna's son Howard runs away with Joe Kinsman, the undertaker's son, and enlists in the Marine Corps by lying about his age. So Anna complains: "I told him [Howard] to stop going with the undertaker's. What kind of friend was that for him? He dragged him into it" (AM, 17). Anna blames Joe Kinsman for her son's enlistment because she has great expectation for her son and believes her son would not leave her for the army on his own and must be coaxed by Joe. When Anna is informed that her son, together with Kinsman's, has been sent to the battlefield, she sadly thinks her Howard already died, which even enhances her hatred towards the Kinsman's. Thus Anna "had the Kinsman's down for death-breeders" and makes a detour of blocks when shopping to avoid Kinsman's parlors, though "she always boasted that Mrs. Kinsman... was a lodge sister and friend of hers-the rich Kinsmans" (AM, 17). Here, Anna's snobbery is demonstrated vividly because she, on the one hand, loathes and avoids the Kinsmans on private occasions while on the other she wants to join the social class that the wealthy Kinsman belongs to and admits she is a friend of theirs. Besides, in order to get her daughter Friedl into the upper class, Anna tries her best to make her daughter prepared. As Bellow writes, "Friedl was being groomed with music and dancing lessons as well as elocution and going into the best society in the neighborhood" (AM, 18). In Anna's mind, only through all these can her daughter get access to the upper class, of which she is so longing to become a member. To Anna, her young kids, especially her daughter, are taken as a tool for practical purposes. It seems that love has always been appropriated as the goal for marriage, which often serves the construction of hierarchy. Anna's life-time scheme is for this genealogical promotion privilege.

Since her daughter is her only hope to fulfill her ambition to join the upper class, Anna is too sensitive and malicious to anyone who "snubbed her child" (AM, 18). In such a case, the poor guy would become her enemy and she would spread damaging rumors. For example, when the Carsons don't invite Friedl to a birthday party, Anna just rumors relentlessly: "The piano teacher told me herself. Every Saturday it was the same story. When she went to give Minnie Carson [the Carson's daughter] her lesson, Mister [Mr. Carson] tried to pull her [the piano teacher] behind the door with him" (AM, 18). Then the rumor soon becomes her conviction. She spares no pains in making up the story and spreading it. She is so "snorty" that "it made no difference who confronted with her or whether the teacher [the piano teacher] came to plead with her to stop [spreading the rumor]" (AM, 18). She takes an awesomely firm stance in rumor-spreading and she never spares any victim "alive."

Though she appears to be very tough to deal with, she is actually very submissive in confrontation with someone of higher gerontic hierarchy, namely her brothers. That is to say, Anna is dominant over her son and daughter while she has to comply with the gerontic power established by the older ones, such as her brothers. Just like Augie's mother, who is so submissive that she becomes a servant to Grandma Lausch of higher gerontic hierarchy, Augie's Aunt, Anna, is also very obedient to the old. For instance, it is not she but her brothers that decide who she is married to (AM, 24). Both Augie's mother and his aunt are submissive to the elderly members in the family. They are victims of the established gerontic hierarchical power, which is executed by other gerontic characters.

Sharply in contrast with, and more accurately in opposition to the gerontic imagery is Bellow's characterization of the youth group. Among these energetic, lively and passionate youngsters, Augie March symbolizes the exact type.

All through the novel, Augie March, handsome, impulsive, innocent, honest, aspiring for true love, self-reflective, and what's more, rebellious, represents all the characteristics of the youth. He is the protagonist and narrator of the novel. Although Bellow doesn't provide us with direct descriptions of Augie's appearance, readers can still get the message from various implications that Augie is really a handsome young man. For example, Einhorn regards Augie as an "Alcibiades"[31](AM, 75).

As a young man full of energy and vitality, he is very passionate and enthusiastic in everything that he is up to. From the odd jobs to his adventure to Mexico, he is always "impulsively"[32] acting like a newborn calf, daring to do anything and fearing nothing. For example, in Einhorn's poolroom, Augie encounters Joe Gorman, a thief, who invites Augie to a robbery. He impulsively participates in the robbery not for any material benefits but purely out of his curiosity. That is to say, the robbery for Argue is just like an interesting game for an adolescent, just as it is for Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain's monumental work. There is no consideration of conscience and legality but merely the drive of youth impulsion and curiosity. Therefore, after the rehearsal of adulthood fallacy, Augie loses interest in this "game"-robbery, because Augie "knew what it was like" (AM, 115).

Apart from his impulsive energy, Augie is very innocent and honest, which is in contrast of the sophistication and hypocrisy of the established world. One typical example is that Simon gives Augie a lesson on how to do it well in the stand. As Simon does a good job in selling newspapers in a stand and gets the boss' recognition, he helps Augie to get a position in a stand. However, Augie can't cover his frustrations even by the third week because some customers don't pay enough for the newspaper. Simon is very angry with Augie's performance because this makes him lose face before the boss. As a matter of fact, the innocent Augie just does his job by the book, as Augie defends himself: "I couldn't run after people who short-changed me. They throw the money down and grab a paper; you couldn't leave the stand to shag them" (AM, 35). It is true that it is the bad customers that cause the shortage of the revenue. However, in society, the revenue is everything and no one cares about the process. As Simon coldly points it out, "you couldn't get that money out of others' change, could you!" (AM, 35). This is Simon's open sesame to his job, that is, to cover the shortage by short changing the honest customers. However, Augie's innocence and honesty determine that the "smart" trick will never occur to him. Thus, Simon becomes a "successful" newspaper seller while honest Augie becomes a fool. In the world of adulthood, it is the common sense that the jungle rule prevails. Therefore, the virtue is not rewarded but punished. The innocent young like Augie can hardly survive by sticking to their original traits. Here comes the tension between the established world and the innocent young. The established society, which is represented by the gerontic images, will confines and represses his original virtues by socializing him. As Augie shouts out, "all the influences were lined up waiting for me. I was born, and there they were to form me" (AM, 43). The process of growing up is just a series of struggles and reconciliations with the established society, which is in essence a process of degradation by losing virtues of youth.

In addition, as a believer in human intimacy, Augie is aspiring for true love, which he cherishes beyond the material possession. Throughout the novel, Augie, in order to find his true love, is never too disheartened to fall in love. As a boy at puberty, Augie gives his first love to Hilda Novinson, a schoolmate of his. As Augie recalled, "I took sick with love, with classic symptoms of choked appetite and utter absorption, hankering, great refinements of respect in looks, incompetent, and full of movie-born ideas and phrases of popular songs" (AM, 47). It is evident that his love is innocent and pure without greed for possession, lust and worldly consideration. Later in his youth, Augie experiences the frustration of love caused by a beautiful working girl and later by a wealthy lady, which can never crash his faith in true love. At last he is rewarded for his perseverance and finds his true love with Stella, whom he had once helped "escape in Mexico" (AM, 470). When Augie is about to marry his true love, he thinks of his brother Simon who gets the access to wealth by marriage: "Envy? Why, I thought I had it all over him [Simon], seeing I was married to a woman I loved and therefore I was advancing on the only true course of life. ... And here was the bride with me, her face was burning with happy excitement; she wanted what I want" (AM, 488). Unlike his brother's, Augie's marriage is based on true love rather than a deal of business. Though his brother is wealthy in material possession, Argue is "rich" in his soul.

Additionally, self-reflectiveness is also his conspicuous virtue. After his adventure to Mexico, he reflects his experience and sums up his theory of "the axial lines of life":

I have a feeling about the axial lines of life, with respect to which you must be straight or else your existence is mere clownery, hiding tragedy. I must have had a feeling since I was a kid about these axial lines which made me want to have my existence on them, and so I have said "no" like a stubborn fellow to all my persuaders, just on the obstinacy of my memory of these lines, never entirely clear. But lately I have felt these thrilling lines again. When the striving stops, there they are as a gift. [... ] truth, love, peace, bounty, usefulness, harmony! And all noise and grates distortion and chatter, distraction, effort, and superfluity, passed off like something unreal. (AM, 454)

"The axial lines" are essentially virtues of youth, by which Augie lives, making Augie transgress the social norms represented by "persuaders," those mature middle-aged and old, who tiresomely try to persuade him to give up the original traits. But life without the youth virtues turns into absurdity or "mere clownery, hiding tragedy." Without the virtues of youth, the more one strives for a good result, the more an individual is plagued by the result of "noise and grates distortion and chatter, distraction, effort, and superfluity." Only by keeping the youth virtues against the corrosion of the socialization can one get the gift brought by "the axial lines," that is, the spiritual treasure-"truth, love, peace, bounty, usefulness, harmony." Therefore, it is evident Augie's self-reflection represents the genuine virtues of the youth.

Apart from those virtues mentioned above, Augie's most typical trait is his incessant impulsion for rebellion and transgression. As Bellow describes, "all the influence were lining up waiting for me [Augie]. I [Augie] was born, and there they were to form me [him]" (AM, 43). Augie's sharp and accurate perception of the mainstream social attitude towards the young generation is universal. As aforementioned, Huck has been under "influences," but refused to be "civilized; " Holden has been under "social pull," but "refused to grow up." Now Augie is under "all the influence lining up waiting for me [him]," but he refuses to be "persuaded." For generations and generations from antiquity to the present, the young have always been an object being persuaded, educated, civilized and finally socialized so that they are fit to live in the established society with its age-old and dying mode of production and reproduction, both economically and politically. Just as Robert Louis Stephenson, in his Talk and Talkers (1882), points out, "to the old our mouths are always partly closed; we must swallow our obvious retorts and listen. They sit above our head, on life's raised dais, and appeal at once to our respect and pity" (Tripp 1987, 721).

The first rebellion that Augie took is against powerful influence exerted by Grandma Lausch, who "had us (Augie and Simon) under hard control" (AM, 28). The old lady, with "her own idea of what fate would be" (AM, 28), imposes upon Augie the corruptive social norms. It is evident that Augie, as the narrator of the novel, rebels against her by disclosing the negativity of her gerontic image. Then, when he becomes Einhorn's assistance, Augie revolts against Einhorn, who "had a teaching turn similar to Grandma Lausch's, both believing they could show what could be done with the world" (AM, 67). However, this time Augie's strategy of rebellion is different because Einhorn's style of influence is different from Grandma Lausch's, as Bellow writes: "He was not like Grandma, with her educational seventy-fives trained on us [Augie and Simon]. He wanted to flow along, be admirable and eloquent." (AM, 72) This means that Einhorn's influence is explicitly exerted by way of his everyday ideology, so pervasive and deceptive that Augie is even made to admire him: "William Einhorn was the first superior man I knew" (AM, 60). During this period, Augie's rebellion develops a lot because he learns to be self-reflective, as Augie examines himself: "When I face back I can recognize myself as of this time in intimate undress, with my own and family traits of hands and feet, greenness and grayness of the eyes and up-hair; but at myself fully clothed and at my new social passes I have to look twice" (AM, 125). Under the influence of socialization, Augie is coming to realize the changes occurring to him and tries to examine himself critically. So after the self-reflection, his rebellion is much more conscious.

Augie's transgression culminates when he works in the Renling's. The wealthy Renlings are selling luxury sporting goods and Augie is seduced by the material enjoyment. Under Mrs. Renling's tutorship, Augie is moved by "social enthusiasm" and attaches more importance to "good looks, excellent wardrobe, mighty fine manners, social ease, wittiness, handsome-devil smiles, neat dancing and address with women-all in the freshest gold leaf" (AM, 138). All of these superficial socialities arouse Augie's curiosity and ignite his energetic power, so he tries to imitate and learn from the "elegant" Mrs. Renling. However, Augie gradually comes to see it clearly that these are all "forged credentials" to him (AM, 138). What he has pursued makes him lose his own identity. When Mrs. Renling takes a step further with her proposition to adopt Augie, he can't bear it any longer so that he declines it on the spot. In conventional eyes, it may be a good opportunity for Augie because Renling can provide him with material enjoyment, and Augie will become a member of the upper class. But to Augie, the adoption is a devastating threat to his true self, the self of independence as a youth. As Einhorn points out, "you [Augie] have got opposition in you. You don't slide through everything. You just make it look so" (AM, 117). This "opposition" in Augie is the transgressive power of the youth, which safeguards him against the influence of the gerontic power, that is, the established social norms and the so-called orthodox. With Einhorn's insightful assessment of him, Augie later agrees: "I never had accepted determination and wouldn't become what other people wanted to make of me. I had said ‘NO’ to Joe Gorman too. To Grandma. To Jimmy. To lots of people. Einhorn had seen it in me" (AM, 118).

To say "No" to the old is the most direct and conspicuous discourse of transgressing the established society and culture. In contemporary critical theory, boundary crossing, or transgression, and other terms of similar connotations such as rebellion, subversion, even deconstruction, have been employed extensively to indicate the centrifugal force that reinscribes the social, political, ideological and cultural realms. But different critics attribute the diverse sources of centrifugal force to different norms. In poetic language, it may be deviation or the semiotic; in the macroscopic society, it is the rebellion; in psychoanalysis, it is the defensive mechanism; and finally in culture, it is the transgression, subversion and deconstruction. But the subjects emitting this centrifugal force are mostly the young. Therefore, for the centrifugal force, the youth are the representative group.

The centrifugal force also features Saul Bellow's other young characters. For example, as aforementioned, Anna's son Howard transgresses the parental power through running away with Joe Kinsman, the undertaker's son, and getting enlisted in the Marine Corps. Besides, Basteshaw, a soldier mate when Augie is enlisted in the navy, is so rebellious against his father that he "downright hated him" and "was glad he was dead" (AM, 497). As Basteshaw tells Augie, "if the old man hadn't interfered I might have married her, but he was pro so I was contra" (AM, 499). Here, Bellow provides no direct reason to explain why Basteshaw behaves so. It seems that Bellow prefers the transgressive energy of the youth against society, the value of which is always embodied by the gerontic group.

To sum up, judging from Bellow's characterization of the gerontic, readers are not difficult to conclude that the gerontic images are quite negatively depicted, such as Grandma's ugliness, sophistication, egotism and strong desire for dominance, Einhorn's shrewdness and greed for petty gains, narrow-mindedness, shamelessness and lustfulness, and Anna's malice, snobbery, submissiveness to the higher gerontic hierarchy. Sharply in contrast, the youth images are always positive, for example, Augie is always handsome, impulsive, energetic, innocent, honest, reflective and rebellious against the orthodoxy or others' control. Therefore, the contrastive binary characterization seems to show the author's gerontophobia.

In the novel, there are altogether 71 characters, of which only 10 are youth images, constituting less than 1/7 of all. The rest are all gerontic images. Obviously the gerontic images outnumber the youth images. According to the aforementioned analysis, it is found that, on the one hand, the youth images are not only outnumbered by but also usually overpowered or repressed by the gerontic ones, and on the other, the youth revolts against or transgresses the gerontic.

As is said at the beginning of the section, The Adventure of Augie March belongs to the literary genre of "Bilderungsroman." The genre is usually a narrative which concerns itself with the development of a youthful protagonist as he or she matures. It is analogous in many ways to the "Apprentice Novel" (the so-called Erziehungsroman) or "Education Novel," which explores the youth and the young adulthood of a sensitive protagonist who is in search of the meaning of life and the nature of the world against the norms of the society. It can be further induced that Bellow's narrative transcends the social or cultural context in which he writes, representing a "repeated pattern" of all literatures that write as such, or a "universal truth" that has been well informed in human cultures, both of the West and East.

As a literary type in the Western literary tradition, "bilderungsroman" is derived from German literature that deals with the formative years of a main character, whose moral and psychological development is depicted. It typically ends on a positive note, with the hero or heroine's "foolish mistakes" and painful disappointments behind and a life of usefulness ahead. Famous novels of this type, for instance, include David Copperfield (1849—1850), in which the English novelist Charles Dickens traces David's life from childhood misery to worldly success, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), in which the Irish novelist James Joyce records Stephen Dedalus's emergence as a man and as an artist, and Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) by the American author Paule Marshall who describes the teenage years of Selina Boyce, who grows up in Brooklyn, New York, as the child of immigrants from Barbados'.[33]

The aforementioned conception of bilderungsroman from traditional standard dictionaries, critical textbooks or literary encyclopedias may likely be misleading, or at least biased. The key defining terms, development, maturation, education etc., which are all denotatively and connotatively positive in contemporary linguistic context, may in fact denote or connote degeneration, degradation and contamination. Those "youthful protagonists" in any bilderungsromans only develop and mature in age or do so physically, but definitely degenerate, degrade and lose virtues both morally and mentally.[34] As is described by Romain Rolland in Jean Christophe (1904), "As a result of all his education, from everything he hears and sees around him, the child absorbs such a lot of lies and foolish nonsense, mixed in with essential truths, that the first duty of the adolescent who wants to be a healthy man is to disgorge it all" (Tripp 1978, 719).

To grow up witnesses a process of socialization. To a large extent, in almost all bildungsromans, the socializing process is that of the personal corruption. In a world whose values are mostly represented by the middle-aged or the old, the age group having been socialized, the bildungsroman protagonists often refuse to grow up or become "civilized." Augie March is such a bildungsroman protagonist. What's more, he is a picaro, a cultural archetype, such as Huck[35] in Mark Twain's The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn and Holden[36] in J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. This literary archetype usually takes a journey symbolic of his process of growing up. The process of maturing is long, arduous and gradual, consisting of repeated clashes between the needs or desires of the hero and the views and judgments enforced by an unbending social order (Makaryk 1993, 510—11). Eventually, the spirit and values of the social order become manifest in the protagonist, who then accommodates himself to society. Thus the novel usually ends with an assessment by the protagonist of himself or herself and his or her new place in that society.

Here, The Adventure of Augie March is not an exception. Then, why do the young always transgress against the old? What do they really desire to look for? And what will they finally find? As to these key questions, difficult as they are, a further discussion proceeds in the next section.

2. Ephebism: Looking for the Elusive Truth in Henderson the Rain King

Henderson the Rain King (1959) tells an adventurous story of a desperate man in his "middle age," who tries his best to find a meaning for life. The desperate man Eugene Henderson, a 55-year-old violinist and pig farmer, is a menopausal social outcast. Born into the "venerated" Hendersons, he is always living in the shadow of his ancestors' glory. Under the great expectation of his father, Henderson becomes "a graduate of an Ivy League" and marries "a girl of our own social class" (HRK, 1—2). After the death of his father, Henderson becomes a millionaire for his inheritance of a great sum of money. Rich as he is, Henderson feels bewildered and repressed because it seems that the whole society seems to be at odds with him. Besides, at this moment of his life, Henderson feels compelled to go somewhere, for there is a kind of unending elusive "inner voice" which makes him energetic and restless. After he "has alienated his wife, children and friends, and literally shouted his housekeeper to death,"[37] he goes to Africa, where he hopes to find a new meaning to his seemingly prosperous life. Leaving his companions and striking off on his own with a faithful guide, he comes upon a remote isolated tribe, the Arnewi, of gentle people, whom he likes. Here, Henderson is greatly inspired by the queen of the tribe, eager to do them a favor and a great service, but ends up bringing disaster upon them.

Thus, Henderson has to leave the Arnewi and proceeds to visit the Wariri, a sterner uncultivated tribe. This time his impulse leads him to expend his great strength and enthusiasm in carrying a huge statue, and his success gives him an important role in rain-making ceremonies. Since the prayed rain does fall, he becomes the Sungo, the Rain King.

Dahfu, the king of the Wariri, has a kind of private lion cult into which he tries to initiate the reluctant Henderson to help him do the ritualistic search for a lion, the legendary lion, which is thought to be the incarnation of the king's predecessor in the tribe. Before long, Henderson eventually finds himself on intimate terms with the king, Dahfu, who has studied medicine in missionary schools and speaks English, and they are engaged in an intense discussion on the nature and destiny of man which serve as Henderson's spiritual guide. Then comes the climax-a daring lion hunt conducted due to the adventure-prone Wariri's ritual. During the hunt, Dahfu is killed, probably as the result of a plot against him, and Henderson has to flee to avoid becoming Dahfu's successor. Having been healed from the repression of society in the primitive land and sensing the elusive truth conceived in the mysterious uncultivated African continent, Henderson returns to America with the conviction that he has found what he is looking for, planning to be a doctor.

The whole novel proceeds around a search for what compels Henderson to leave for Africa and what he finds there. The adventure, as well as the plot of discourse, similar to Augie March both in the driving motive and subversive potential, unfolds a significant quest beyond what Bellow scholarships have defined.

"What made me take this trip to Africa?" is what Henderson tries to make clear to readers in the beginning of the novel (HRK, 1). Though he fails to explain it explicitly, Henderson does provide the process of search through which readers can arrive at the answer. Unlike Augie who was born in the poor family, Henderson inherits three million dollars from his ancestors. Rich as he is, the life is not easy for him. When he thinks of that life, Henderson is often bewildered and confused: "A disorderly rush begins - my parents, my wives, my girls, my children, my farm, my animals, my habits, my money, my music lessons, my drunkenness, my prejudices, my brutality, my teeth, my face, my soul!" (HRK, 7) The world of reality seems to be at odds with him, which gives him "a pressure in the chest" (HRK, 7). This pressure is more than a pressure from daily life. It comes from the existential horrors of the social and cultural order. It seems that every one around him is physically oppressive and psychologically repressive, frustrating him, paining him, and making him desperate. He can't find the meaning of life when all around seem to go against him. In this sense, the huge unbearable pressure, which consists of various specific pressures in life, can be analyzed according to the specific sources.

To begin with, one of these sources is Henderson's ancestors. As Bellow describes, "Henderson's great-grandfather was Secretary of State, his great-uncles were ambassadors to England and France, and his father was the famous scholar Willard Henderson who wrote that book on the ‘Albigensians,’[38] a friend of William James and Henry Adams" (HRK, 10). There are a lot of VIPs in the family genealogy of the Hendersons. Under such a glorious shadow, Henderson feels shamed of his own waste of life and tries to add his glory to the Hendersons. So in order to "please his father," he "got an M.A." of an Ivy League university and "chose a girl of our (his) own social class" (HRK, 8). His father's influence is so dominant that he tries to please him by doing what he doesn't like. However, he can't get the full recognition from his father as his brother Dick does. Besides, later he goes to war despite his old age, and, is awarded the "Purple Heart" medal in combat. This is the great power from his ancestors which forces him to lose his own self to contribute to the family glory, even if it risks his life. What's more unfortunate is that he never receives the due respect and proper treatment from his wife and others for "a Purple Heart veteran." Though trying hard, Henderson can't change the adverse reality. No wonder Henderson feels bewildered and dissatisfied with his life in the middle age when he reflects on his life.

Misery loves company. When he is submissive to his father's will by marrying his first wife Frances, a girl of his own social class, Henderson is burying the seed of misery for himself. It has been really a miracle for their marriage to last for twenty years, because there is little mutual understanding and respect between them, not to mention love. In Henderson's eyes, Frances is a "schizophrenic" while he himself is considered by Frances to be "mad." What's more, they are very indifferent to each other. As Henderson has recalled, "when we went to that party, and in middle of it she recalled something she had to do at once and so she took the car and left, forgetting all about me" (HRK, 11). It seems that their marriage is only a superficial bond without emotional attachments. If Henderson can still stand all these, what he can't bear is that Frances laughs at his ideal. It occurs when he comes back from the Army and tells her that he wants to enter a medical school to become a doctor. Instead of encouragement, as Bellow describes, "Frances opened her mouth, usually so sober, not to say dismal and straight, and laughed at me" (HRK, 15). Sober though she is, she is tickled by her husband's serious plan of fulfilling his ideal. What a relationship between the husband and wife! No wonder Henderson feels so happy that he "bought the Rue De Rivoli[39] on the day that Frances spoke the word divorce" (HRK, 28—29). Henderson's seemingly abnormal reaction to the divorce reflects how deeply the first marriage has hurt him and how long it has suppressed him.

However, it is far from being the end for Henderson. Apart from all the pressure caused by the family, society is also against him. When he raises pigs, his neighbors protest against him, "[get] the health officer after" him and even wants to sue him. When he is in the army, without doing anything wrong he is greatly humiliated by the GIs, who "left me [Henderson] bald and shivering, ugly, naked, prickling between the legs and under the arms, raging, laughing, and swearing revenge" (HRK, 23). As he recalls, "the war meant much to me" (HRK, 23). It is true that he is not killed by the enemy but contemptibly "defeated" by his own people. Additionally, when he is on vacation, Henderson is not welcomed by "a resort hotel on the Gulf" for he is not sociable to others (HRK, 10). In short, in the macro level of interpersonal relationship, the whole society or the modern world seems to be at odds with him. He is mistreated and repressed by the genealogy, the marriage and society, all of which are in essence the gerontic power due to their nature of repression. As a result, a millionaire though he is, he is dissatisfied with his life in America and goes to Africa to search for the meaning of life and the true self. Thus it is the important external factor for his trip to Africa.

Although the unbearable pressure of society is a prerequisite for his trip to Africa, it is far from being sufficient to compel him to take such an adventure. The direct incentive comes from the unsocialized part of Henderson's psyche. Though he is a man of 55 when he takes the trip, Henderson, in Bellow's depiction, can be categorized as the young not only because of his physical strength but also due to his natural inclination to transgress the orthodoxy and to pursue the truth.

Physically, Henderson is described by Bellow to be as strong as a horse and as impulsive and enthusiastic as all of the Bellow's archetypal young having been characterized. About his physical strength, Henderson is very confident: "I've always been like this, strong and healthy, rude and aggressive and something of a bully in boyhood" (HRK, 23). He withstands many tests when he is in Africa. In the tribe of the Arnewi, he beats Prince Itelo, an ever champion of the tribe, much younger than Henderson, in the wrestle, which wins him the prince's respect.

Among the African primitive tribes, physical strength is highly evaluated. Living in such a grim and primitive context where survival is the only, if not all, concern of the community, body strength is often assumed to be an overwhelming beauty. Even in prehistoric Greek culture, as the reputed American essayist, critic and novelist Susan Sontag has argued, there is no difference "between a person's ‘inside' and ‘outside'" and the virtue of excellence is expected to be that "inner beauty would be matched by beauty of the other kind" (Sontag 1975, 28). In her essay, Susan Sontag traces the history of the term "beauty" which was once defined as general excellence but has often been employed to characterize female appearance (Sontag 1975, 28—29). It is certainly true that Sontag's etymological exploration of the "outer" beauty shows the revolutionary identification of the outer with the female identity. It is also evident that the disintegration of the outside and the inside in one's identity makes the subaltern group of the young a victim. The psychological strength, once a virtue of the community, is gradually alienated, marginalized and finally turns out to be attached to the young only when the spiritual force is granted to the gerontic. The most conspicuous feat Henderson accomplishes by his physical strength is that he moves the holy statue in the Warri during the rain-making ceremony, of which no one is able to make a move. When he sees no one can move the statue, Henderson finds his "heart was hungry after provocation on this issue" (HRK, 151). His impulsion, enthusiasm and confidence in his physical strength make him so restless that he volunteers to have a try. Finally, he succeeds in moving the statue and becomes Sungo, the Rain King, according to the tribal tradition. Here, Bellow attaches great significance to Henderson's physical strength and enthusiasm regardless of his actual age of 55, which logically shows Bellow's identification of Henderson with the young.

Under the great physical strength and enthusiastic spirit lies Henderson's transgressive power, that is, the rebellious spirit against the orthodoxy and the pursuit of the truth. This can be traced back to his college years. As he confesses, "at college I wore gold earrings to provoke fights, and while I got an M.A. to please my father I always behaved like an ignorant man and a bum" (HRK, 23). This is just the case revealed by Elmer Davis in "The Eve: Reminiscences of 1913," that "all young people want to kick up their heels and defy convention; most of them would prefer to do it at a not too heavy cost" (Tripp 1987, 718). Like many other young men in puberty, while ostensibly being submissive to his father, Henderson is very rebellious against the orthodox norms at an endurable cost. When he is in his midlife after his father's death, the transgressive power takes a more elusive and disruptive form of an insistent and unappeasable inner voice: "I want! I want! I want!" Though he is "plagued" by the inner voice, Henderson doesn't know exactly what it is and what he really wants. About Henderson's elusive desire for quest, Bellow writes: "The demand came louder, I want, I want, I want, I want, I want! And I would cry, begging at last, ‘oh, tell me what you want!’" (HRK, 25). Henderson's quest of "I want" emits from the unconscious. It seems to be a ray of sunshine that forever drives him on. Though he doesn't make sense of the potential power inherent in him and what exactly he wants, Henderson never gives up the hope of finding out the truth, because he believes "something can be done" (HRK, 161). Despite the failures Henderson, like Augie who is persistently seeking true love, tries again and again though all his efforts turn out to be in vain. In Henderson's opinion, he is a fighter: "I'm often confused but at the same time I am a fighter... I fight very hard... for the truth... against falsehood" (HRK, 106—07). Here, Bellow characterizes Henderson's mentality as so aggressive and enthusiastic, which further affirms the youthful essence of Henderson. In a sense, his trip to Africa can be regarded as a strategy of transgression against the repressive power. That is to say, under the pressure of the gerontic power, Henderson, as a man of youthfulness, chooses to exile himself to Africa in order to escape from the repression and find out what he really wants.

Plagued by the repression of society and driven by the inner voice "I want," Henderson takes the trip to Africa, "hoping to find a remedy for my [his] situation" (HRK, 38). Henderson, together with an African who serves as his interpreter, travels deep into the remote and uncultivated area. It is on this mysterious land of Africa that Henderson finds what he wants. He is intoxicated with the local culture, fascinated with its simplicity of daily life. What's more, he finds the "elusive truth" in the sculptures, dances and tribal rites.

As is known, studies of the aesthetics followed by artists and critics in Africa indicate a deliberate concern for the youthful virtues. Thus, for example, among the Yoruba of Nigeria, the criteria for sculptural beauty consist of a number of specifically nonrepresentational elements. These include visibility, even if this necessitates proportional distortion; straightness, which implies youth and good health; symmetry, to the exclusion of more natural poses or postures; Ephebism, the depiction of each person at an idealized youthful age; smoothness, suggesting again youth and health without natural body imperfections; and hypermimesis, an emphasis on general resemblance rather than on exact representation.[40] The holy statue Mummah, of which Henderson succeeds in making a move in the Wariri, is just a representation of the primitive Ephebism, as Henderson observes: "I saw how huge she (the statue) was, how over-spilling and formless. [... ] She smelled like a living woman. Indeed, to me she was a living personality, not an idol" (HRK, 163).

In fact, Ephebism, as the most representative factor of the African aesthetics, is demonstrated not only in sculptures but also in other forms of art, for example, dancing. In his work, African Art in Motion, Robert Farris Thompson outlines ten of what he calls cannons of fine form of dancing, the primary one of which is "Ephebism": It "describes the stronger power that comes from youth. It is a fine form that is admired in Africa. Beauty comes out of bodies which are most alive and young. No matter the age of the dancer, the dancer returns to strong and youthful patterning, obeying the vitality within the music" (28).

In the novel, what Henderson encounters in the African tribe Wariri is just the kind of dancing of extreme youthfulness, or Ephebism. Bellow emphasizes, when Henderson succeeds in moving the holy statue, "the women about me [Henderson] were dancing. They were bounding and screaming and banging their bodies into me [him]. All together we were nearing the gods who stood in their group... " (HRK, 170). The dancing here is wild, natural, rapturous and unconstrained. He identifies himself with the extreme youthfulness exhibited by the dancing and other rituals and is intoxicated by them so that, as Bellow describes, "I [Henderson] amidst those naked companions, naked myself, bare fore and aft in the streamers of grass and vine, I [Henderson] was dancing on burnt and cut feet over the hot stones" (HRK, 168). Besides, he feels "impelled to make a sound... a roar like the great Assyrian bull" (HRK, 146). This is Henderson's echo to his soul. Here in Africa, he finds himself able to face up to himself directly, and enjoys the excitement of the stimulated vigor.

Besides the enjoyment, Henderson is also shocked by the tribal rite, which emits the primeval disruptive and transgressive power of youthfulness, and which Dahfu, king of the Wariri, discloses to him. According to the Wariri's rite, the king is valued only when he is "in possession of my [his] original youthfulness and strength" (HRK, 113). "When I weaken," as Dahfu says to Henderson, "the chief priest [... ] with other priests [... ] will convey me out into the bush and there I will be strangled" (HRK, 113). This seems to be exactly what the prehistoric ritual dances have suggested. Some anthropologists have found that in prehistoric times before the present human civilization became the norm, there used to be some tradition of deserting or even killing the old, that is, when people grow old they will be abandoned to death due to the limitation of the primitive force of production. In modern civilized world, the ritual of the abandonment of the old has been extinct. The aged or the weak are respected and taken good care of. They are senior citizens of society. Their knowledge, wisdom, experience, etc., all have become a treasure for a healthy community. Even the word "old" or "gerontic" has always born a special commendatory connotation. In both English and Chinese linguistic conventions, they are forever associated with "good," "modest," "moral," "learned," "experienced," etc., while the term "young" always with"inexperienced," "immoral," "impulsive," "dangerous," "emotionally unstable," etc. To the extreme extent, the old or the aged has replaced the position of the God, taken as the spiritual guide for humanity. While the degree of the extremity is hard to define, the binary opposition is evident, and what's more, the age-privileged group often serves as the social and cultural norm.

It is the elusive truth of the primitive that is concealed and conceived in this remote uncultivated place symbolic of the man's collective unconscious. According to Carl Jung, the man's collective unconscious largely comprises the early memories of general humanity originating in primal fantasies or scenes and instinctual drives or desires (Brooker 1999, 251). Henderson's trip to Africa just gives him a feeling into "the pre-human past" (HRK, 42). As Henderson recalls, "I felt I was entering the past-the real past, no history or junk like that" (HRK, 42). In this sense, Henderson's trip is just a symbolic journey to the man's collective unconscious in order to find the hidden truth-Ephebism, as the unconscious potential that has kept humanity on the permanent quest for the unknown.

Ephebism not only features a potential for transgression but also represents, as Henderson finds in Africa, a state of innocence without formality and simplicity without conspiracy. Both innocence and simplicity come from the subjects' love for nature. Taking nature as his companion rather privately, Henderson subverts the established culture. As for nature, a vision of "calm stars" demonstrates the simplicity to Henderson. As Bellow describes, "at night... there were the calm stars, turning around and singing... I [Henderson] couldn't have asked for anything better" (HRK, 43). The effect of stars upon Henderson is similar to what Ralph Waldo Emerson's description of stars upon the individual: "but if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds will separate between him and vulgar things. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime" (5). It is true that the stars calm Henderson's lonely soul and help him get rid of repression of the vulgar world. In the Arnewi, a remote tribe deep in the continent, Henderson meets Queen Willatale, who gives him the philosophy of simplicity. Uncivilized and primitive as she seems, the queen has the intuition to see Henderson through. In her eyes, Henderson is simply "a child to whom the world is strange" (HRK, 73). With this judgment, Henderson can't agree more: "How wonderful she is. True, all too true. I have never been at home in life. All my decay has taken place upon a child" (HRK, 74). Henderson marvels at the queen's insight which brings him great inspiration. Then she gives the most valuable lesson to Henderson, the queen's primitive "wisdom of life" that "man wants to live" (HRK, 74). Henderson suddenly realizes that the fundamental of his inner voice "I want" is his desire to live, to find out "what is the best way to live" (HRK, 71). Thus, the inner voice calms down as he makes sense of what he really wants.

To sum up, Henderson the Rain King is about a man of youthfulness who, under the repression of the gerontic power, takes a spiritual pilgrimage to Africa, symbolic of a journey into the man's collective unconscious, where he finds the essence of youthfulness. Bellow, in The Adventure of Augie March, abstracts his gerontophobia through the demonization of the gerontic individuals against whom the positively depicted youth images rebel, and exhibits his subversive strategy against the society of adulthood symbolic of the gerontic power in Henderson the Rain King.

3. Subverting the "Name of the Father": Pathological Culture in Herzog

Bellow's binary characterization as well as his exploration of the African culture has revealed a fact that the "civilized" culture, in which Bellow's protagonists are entrapped, is seriously diseased. It is inflected by some culturally structured "viruses" that contaminate the subjects, and destroy their essence of life. These contagious cultural viruses, pervading and self-providing, are transmitted from generation to generation. This is why Bellow's protagonists, not only his but also others' such as Mark Twain's, J. D. Salinger's and so on, are forever transgressive against them. Driven by their centrifugal force, they have tried every means to subvert the "Name of the Father."[41] Such is in Herzog.

Herzog, first published in 1964, brings Saul Bellow many awards including the National Book Award, the International Literary Prize (he was the first American to receive the prize), the Croix de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres (the highest literary honor given by France to non-French citizens), and America's Democratic Legacy Award (he was the first literary figure to receive this award). Robert Robinson once remarked: "Herzog is a massive accomplishment that has repeatedly been likened to Joyce's Ulysses. Modeled on the great, modernist masterpiece of nullity, Ulysses, Herzog is the only other novel of the 20th century which even approaches its prototype in the depth and totality" (Robinson 1975, 86). Besides, as aforementioned, the book is inspired by Bellow's own personal experience, in which his second wife Alexandra Tschacbasov had an affair with their mutual friend, Jack Ludwig. As the last of their circle to know that he had been deceived, Bellow lapsed into deep depression and created the protagonist Herzog, who is consequently regarded as an autobiographical hero.

The plot of the novel is quite slender because it is scattered with unsent letters written by the 43-year-old protagonist, Herzog, who just failed in the second marriage. Through the letters and his reminiscences, the complete story of Herzog can be patched up chronologically. Herzog used to be a reputed academic due to his brilliant research on the relationship between Christianity and Romanticism, which is accomplished during his first marriage with Daisy, "a conventional Jewish woman,"[42]with whom he has a son named Marco (H, 126). However, spiritually repressed by his first wife, he goes unwell with her and has affairs for relief with several women, such as Wanda, Zinka, Libbie and Sono. Then he meets and falls in love with Madeleine. So he divorces Daisy, cuts off with his old flames and marries Madeleine, who is a beauty. Intoxicated in his regained life with his new wife, Herzog not only quits the respectable academic position but also buys a big old house in Ludeyville, a rural place of Massachusetts, with twenty thousand dollars inherited from his father. There they develop an intimate relationship with their neighbors, the couple of the Valentines'. Soon Madeleine gives birth to his daughter, June. Later, they move to Chicago for Madeleine has been tired of the rural life. Under the request of Madeleine, Herzog has to help the neighboring couple move to Chicago too, and to find a decent job for Valentine, later only to find that he is cuckolded by the very Valentine Gersbach, whom he used to regarding as the best friend. The failure of his second marriage gives him a heavy blow. From that very moment on, he begins scribbling letters compulsively to family, friends, lovers, colleagues, enemies, dead philosophers, ex-presidents, to anyone by whom he feels compelled to assert his own position. In those unsent letters, Herzog is always adopting a critical stance, especially on cultural issues. However, writing letters doesn't adequately lessen his pain but somewhat aggravates his dissatisfaction so that he even takes his father's pistol and plans to kill Valentine and Madeleine. But as he peers at the scene of the two together with his own daughter, he gives up the plan. By the way, during this letter-writing period, for a temporary relief from the strain, Herzog takes up an affair with a sexy woman named Ramona, a student of his, who admires him, treats him nicely and wants to marry him. In the end, after he has said what he has to say and what he thinks of being correct, he comes to calm down with his struggle by writing letters and begins to "seriously" consider the proposed marriage with Ramona not for love but for stability.

Throughout the novel, Herzog experiences instances of psychological breakdown and schizophrenia, which are worth careful consideration. Struck by the failure of the second marriage, Herzog takes up a compulsive way of writing letters. Here compulsive writing implies a relief from psychological repression and a fundamental suspicion of the whole cultural tradition because Herzog in letters is very critical of almost all established codes. Focusing on the master code of the western culture, Bellow reveals his intention to demonstrate a hero ridding himself of all "superfluous ideas," as Harper puts it, "that to say Herzog is not motivated in his acts by ideas is entirely false. Any Bildungsroman-and Herzog is a Bildungsroman-concludes with the first step. The first real step. Any man who has rid himself of superfluous ideas in order to take that first step has done something significant (Harper, 193—94).

"Superfluous ideas," the ideas of the past, have witnessed a burden in Herzog's mind. In order to take "the first real step," that is, to seek the truth, Herzog has to get rid of the "superfluous" ones as the first attempt. With this attempt at ridding himself of distracting, erroneous and "superfluous" ideas, Herzog, the scholar, examines modernist philosophical sources to detect the erroneous culture. In his letters, Herzog first assesses the painful process of psychoanalysis he has just suffered with Dr. Evig, who labels his deep attachment to Madelaine as "hysterical dependency" (H, 53), and dissects his personality type as "narcissistic," "masochistic" and "anachronistic" (H, 56). Herzog accuses him of using "the creeping psychoanalysis of everyday life" (H, 25). Besides, he also condemns others like Shapiro and Banowitch who accept psychoanalytical premises, and sees all political power struggles in terms of "paranoid mentality" (H, 99). He observes that in their "curious and creepy" minds, "madness always rules the world" and "mankind resembles a lot of cannibals running around the parks, gibbering, bewailing its own murders, pressing out the living world as dead excrement" (H, 99).

In a mental letter to Edvig, Herzog protests: "I've read your stuff about the psychological realism of Calvin. I hope you don't mind my saying but it reveals a lousy, cringing, grudging conception of human nature. This is how I see your protestant Freudianism" (H, 85). Furthermore, he concludes that Freud and Hobbes have not been "our greatest benefactor," and calls for a "moratorium to be placed on any further academic definitions of human nature" (H, 85).

Herzog also attacks those thinkers like John Dewey, Friedrich W. Nietzsche, and Alfred N. Whitehead, arguing that the individual is essentially unable to find happiness within himself because "mankind distrusts his own nature and tries to find stability beyond or above, in religion or philosophy" (H, 67). Nietzsche, as the representative thinker for his attack on Christianity, is indicted for unleashing the Dionysiac spirit and calling modern cultural history a "fall from classical greatness" (H, 319). Herzog also accuses him of having infected the western mind with a slave mentality. Besides, he suggests that Nietzsche's ideas be "no freer from perversion, nor closer to enlightenment than those with whom he quarrels" (H, 319).

Herzog's quarrel with modernist historians stems from his early youth. When he was an idealistic young Jew, he encounters for the first time Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West. Here, he discovers that he belongs to an "archaic race" for whom all heroic and romantic traditions have collapsed. This makes Herzog "angry," "burned like that furnace" and "[read] more, sick with rage" (H, 286). Then when he "looked away from the dense print and its insidious pedantry," his heart is "infected with ambition and the bacteria of vengeance" (H, 286). Permanently affected by the "bacteria of vengeance," Herzog fights against all who would tell him he is "obsolete" and "anachronistic." So he blames Martin Heidegger for the idea that the human beings have all fallen into the "quotidian" (H, 106), and asks scathingly: "When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it happened?" (H, 49). What's more, Herzog accuses Jean J.Rousseau of his overblown estimates of human potential. He calls Rousseau a "degenerate villain" (H, 160).

Modern physics, with its theory of entropy, also comes under attack, so do genetics, demography, sociology, statistics, and all the other disciplines which Herzog believes to contribute to the destructive idea of "biological or genetic predestination through the logical application of Darwinian theory of the survival of the fittest" (H, 220; 316). Besides, Herzog severely condemns the "wasteland outlook," which was the dominant cultural mentality then. Herzog accuses the "wastelanders" of the "deterioration of language" and the "dehumanization" (H, 76). In Bellow's opinion, metaphors constantly used by the "wastelanders," such as T.S.Eliot, ruin the language and the wasteland theme reveals too many hopeless, lifeless scenes, which strangles people's hope and ideal. Bellow continues:

We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and the rest of it, mere junk from fashionable magazines. Things are grim enough without these shivery games. People frightening one another-a poor sort of moral exercise. But, to get to the main point, the advocacy and praise of suffering take us in the wrong direction and those of us who remain loyal to civilization must not go for it. You have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time. (H, 317)

Here, Bellow points out that the wasteland school has gone too far, changing from its original virtue of awakening people to a mere fashion of frightening each other. So in order to keep the civilization on the right track, mankind should move on, not merely disclosing the horrible scene of the "wasteland" but drawing inspiration from it and seizing the opportunity to change it.

Similar to Henderson, Herzog is characterized as a man with the sensibility of the young despite his middle age. He is unsocialized, or a product of incomplete socialization, or a "substandard" or "defective" subject. In the novel he is often regarded as a youth by other characters. Physically, he has strong desire for sexuality and all his mistresses consider him as an energetic lover. Mentally, Herzog is often considered to be childish and innocent. Sandor, his lawyer and friend in need, observes: "You have about as much practical sense as my ten-year-old, Sheldon" (H, 82). Besides, "there were people, Simkin, for instance, or Himmelstein, or Dr. Edvig, who believed that in a way Herzog was rather simple, that his humane feelings were childish," Bellow describes (H, 231). Thus, there seems to be a consensus among Herzog's friends and acquaintances that he is a typical young outcast.

In addition, Herzog is not a sociable person. As Bellow depicts, "Martinis were poison to Herzog and he couldn't bear small talk" (H, 23). Shallow as they seem, wine and idle conversations are the necessary lubricant in the modern sociality. But Herzog loathes them both. Though he is middle-aged, Herzog is actually an unsocialized "young" man in the gerontic culture. What's more, similar to Henderson's "inner voice," Herzog also has the feeling of something unnamable in him: "Is it simply childishness, expecting to be loved for doing your bidden task?... Eager impulses, love, intensity, passionate dizziness that make a man sick. How can I stand such inner beating?" (H, 231). Like Henderson who is "plagued" by his inner voice, Herzog is "puzzled" by the "inner beating," which is actually the reflection of the youth transgressive power.

As a scholar of Romanticism, Herzog has accomplished the widely acclaimed research of Romanticism and Christianity. Wherever he goes, Herzog is always bringing with him "an old pocket edition of Blake's poems" (H, 80). As is known, English Romanticism had emerged with William Blake's then little-known anti-Enlightenment writings of the 1790s. According to Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms, the chief emphasis of Romanticism is upon the freedom of individual self-expression: sincerity, spontaneity, and originality. It comes to being a literary shift against classicism and neoclassicism, which is calm and restrained in feeling. Besides, love is its most favorable theme. In the light of the aforementioned characterization of Herzog, he, in possession of the sensibility of the young, naturally has got great interest in and a favorable attitude towards the passion and transgressive spirit of Romanticism.

Herzog's favor of Romanticism can be traced back to his childhood experience. In the novel, Herzog recalls that he, as a schoolboy standing before his peers, gives the class orator's speech from the Emersonian text: "The main enterprise of the world, for splendor... is the upbuilding of a man. The private life of one man shall be more illustrious monarchy than any kingdom in history" (H, 198—99). Therefore, it is evident that Emersonian Transcendentalism, the school of the American Romanticism, exerts great influence on Herzog much earlier.

In addition to textual evidence in Herzog, the influence and preference of Emersonian Transcendentalism can be found in Bellow's interest and his stance on culture:

... in a liberal society, where the life of the individual is supposed to be of such great consequence, we have fallen upon evil days, and the life of the individual is not at all thought to be important. There are two strains going through the history of the twentieth century: one reaffirming the significance of the individual, the other that he doesn't mean a damned thing. ... Emerson, being the liberal philosopher of the Americans, was one of to whom I [Saul Bellow] would naturally turn inquiringly when thinking about a thing like this ("The private life of one man shall be more illustrious kingdom than any other monarchy that ever there was"). This is the promise of American life. But in America, and in all civilized countries, the life of a private person has become a sort of shameful or humiliating thing. He thinks of himself as being a fool, that his pettiness is too absurd and that his preoccupation is without any significance. I was trying to investigate that. Why should people feel that their lives are nothing but insignificant and funny, funny in a humiliating sense? (Robinson 1975, 93)

Here, Bellow criticizes the "Wasteland Outlook" of modernism and attaches much significance to Emerson's philosophy of transcendentalism. Thus, it is no wonder that Herzog, as Bellow's autobiographical literary spokesman, has shown great interest in and preference for Emersonian Transcendentalism.

In Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendentalism, nature is more valuable and highly praised, compared with human society. As Emerson says in Nature, "in the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages" (Emerson 1992, 6). Besides, "simplicity" of the nature and the young is empathized: "The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected all the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of the childhood" (Emerson 1992, 5). Transcendentalism thinks a child or youth is not socialized and innocent so that his "inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other" (Emerson 1992, 6). Thus, "the sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of child" (Emerson 1992, 6). It seems to Emerson that the possession of youthfulness is a privilege, and that a youth is not a matter of age but defined as the one who "has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood" (Emerson 1992, 6). Emerson's view of the young is essentially the same as this dissertation's criterion of judging a man of youthfulness. Furthermore, Emersonian transcendentalists should also have the rebellious spirit to "resist the vulgar prosperity" (Emerson 1992, 5), and to take actions "indicative of no custom or authority, but springing spontaneous from the mind's own sense of good and fair" (Emerson 1992, 7). From here, it is obvious that transcendentalism, in essence, identifies with the spirit of youthfulness, that is, simplicity, innocence (anti-socialization) and transgression.

What's more, Bellow's embedment of the typical Emersonian images of "woods" and "stars" into the novel further demonstrates his preference and advocacy of Emersonian Transcendentalism with its emphasis on youthfulness. Emerson believes that "in the woods, is perpetual youth," because "in the woods, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child" (Emerson 1992, 6). Furthermore, "in the woods, we return to reason and faith," as Emerson asserts in Nature (Emerson 1992, 6). Similarly, in the novel, Herzog walks in the woods, listens to the harsh sounds of the crows, witnesses the straggly raspberry vines and looks at his fallen estate with its "many leaves, living and fallen, green and tan, going between rotted stumps, moss, fungus disks... " (H, 396). It is in the woods that he calms down his restless soul. Besides, similar to the adoption of "calm stars" in Henderson the Rain King, Bellow again makes use of the "eloquent stars" in Herzog: "When he [Herzog] opened his eyes in the night, the stars were near like spiritual bodies. Fires, of course; gases-minerals, heat, atoms, but eloquent at five in the morning a man lying in a hammock... " (H, 8). The influence of stars is Emersonian: "the stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are always inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence" (Emerson, Nature, 5).

In this sense, judging from all the clues from Bellow's characterization of Herzog, his adoption of Emersonian scenes, and Bellow's statement on culture, it is very likely that what Herzog, the literary spokesman of Bellow, advocates and pursues is the culture of youthfulness or Ephebism. In this sense, the mainstream culture, including the established philosophies and "Wasteland Outlook," can be categorized correspondingly as the dominant gerontic culture. That Herzog writes to rebuke the mainstream culture just follows the general model of Bellow's poetic strategy in cultural level that the youth rebel against the dominant gerontic.

Despite the technique of letter-writing as a poetic strategy of Herzog's transgression against the gerontocentric culture, Bellow provides the pursuit of love and sexuality as another way for Herzog to get a relief and to vent his youth transgressive power. His first wife Daisy, as aforementioned, is a traditional Jewish wife and represents the traditional culture, which gives him a sense of repression. Thus, Herzog takes sexuality as a relief by picking up affairs in sequence with Wanda - a polish beauty, Zanka, Bibbie, and Sono Oguki - a Japanese girl. As Herzog reflects, "constitutional tension of whatever origin needed sexual relief" (H, 201). The "constitutional tension" here is just the repression caused by the established cultural code that he compulsively writes letters to subvert. Similar to the technique of letter writing, sexuality also provides a relief as well as the access to venting his transgression. When he meets Madeleine, his passion for true love is ignited. Like Augie March, Herzog is also a staunch "love seeker." He makes a great sacrifice to win the heart of his Ms. Right. However, his marriage with Madeleine fails again for Madeleine doesn't truly love him. Under the heavy blow of his failed second marriage, Herzog, apart from his letter writing as a relief as well as a subversive strategy, finds the sexual relief from Ramona, a student in his class. Throughout his life, driven by the incentive to transgress, he is constantly pursuing love and sexuality, which is essentially identified with his fight against the mainstream culture and the relief from the "constitutional tension" of the gerontic culture. Herzog is even feeling the unnamable, elusive Ephebism during the sexuality: "I'm in bed with that very thing and making love to it. As with Madeleine. She seems to have filled a special need... a very special need. I don't know what" (H, 334). Here, what he senses is the elusiveness of Ephebism. Thus, by sexuality, a replacement of the letter-writing technique to vent the transgressive power of Ephebism, Herzog can make the restless mind calm down for a while. But he can't figure out what it really is.

As for the interaction between love and Ephebism, there is a very dramatic scene of great significance, at which Herzog first decides to kill Madeleine and Valentine but finally gives it up. At first, Herzog is very justified and determined to carry the murder, as Bellow depicts his mentality: "It is not everyone who gets the opportunity to kill with a clear conscience. They [Madeleine and Valentine] had opened the way to justifiable murder. They deserved to die" (H, 254). In Herzog's eyes, it is the two that cause all his disorder and suffering. As a victim of their deception, he has the right to execute them. However, when Herzog, with a pistol in his hand, peers through Madeleine's bathroom window and sees his wife's lover bathing his own daughter, he is suddenly struck by the scene and gives up his previous murder plan. "To be or not to be" becomes "a question." This typical Hamlet dilemma suggests a psychological complex of great significance. The hesitation or indecision has been done for an instant. Bellow doesn't give any explicit answer. So it is worth probing into Herzog's deep psyche to see what psychological mechanism has made him determined to do so. For the convenience of explanation, an analogous case is of great help. In the analysis of Hamlet's hesitation to kill his uncle who murdered his father and married his mother, according to the theory of psychoanalysis, Hamlet, in terms of Oedipus complex,[43] identifies with his uncle because in the depth of the unconscious, he is a potential murderer of his father in order to marry his mother. To kill his uncle is unconsciously equal to denying himself a life in Hamlet's mind. The case is quite similar to Herzog's abortion of his murder plan. The scene he has seen triggers him to identify with Gersbach because in his unconscious, Herzog possesses the same potential transgressive power of Ephebism to love and make love. As a matter of fact, he indeed has had several affairs with married women. To murder Gersbach means sort of to commit a symbolic suicide. Analogously, this complex can be called the "Ephebism complex," the psychological structure of the youth.

To a large extent, Freudian psychoanalysis or other modernist discourses, and even the critique of modernist discourses such as Saul Bellow or Herzog's critique or contemporary postmodern critical theorizations, share identical theoretical intention: to search for a universal master code and its structuring psyche to diagnose and relieve or cure the individual frustration or traumatic pains. To Herzog, suffering seems to be the "essence" of life. He takes an extensive exploration of nearly all historical, social, cultural and psychological discourses, in order to find the nature of his personal frustration. The critic John Brenkman once argued that "personal suffering suggests a code of social relations" (Brenkman 1992, 924). If this is true, then Herzog's all personal suffering reveals a whole structure of the social relations in which he is webbed. Moreover, Carl E. Schorske argues that Freud replaces politics by patricide and associates it with the conflicts between father and son (Schorske 1981, 181). That Freud's oedipal story is not a familial story is evident and widely accepted, or Freud employs a familial story to unfold a social story as the human psyche structure. Thus, the tragedy of cultural mechanism is constantly defined by the tension between the centripetal force, represented by the father or the old, and centrifugal force, represented by the son or the young. As the subversive force, the young forever launch a transgression against the "Name-of-the-Father."

To conclude, if one makes a collection of the world-wide wise words and wise quotes about youth, he or she may encounter mountains or oceans of such. For instance, Joseph Joubert's "The passions of the young are vices in the old"; Edmund Burke's "The arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth"; Samuel Erman's "Youth is not a matter of time, it is a state of mind, it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees, it is a matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions, it is the freshness of the deep spring of life"; William Shakespeare's poetic differentiation: "Crabbed age and youth cannot live together/Youth is full of pleasance, age is full of care"; Victor Hugo's "Youth, even in its sorrows, always has a brilliancy of its own"; Mark Twain's "It is better to be a young June-bug than an old bird of paradise"; Pablo Picasso's "Youth has no age"; Samuel Erman's "Nobody grows merely by a number of years, we grow old by deserting our ideas"; Vauvenargues's "The young suffer less from their own errors than from cautiousness of the old," etc. The great number of such is an interesting phenomenon, calling for further anatomy and analysis: Why the world, both of the ancient and modern, and of the West and East, has permanently cherished such a value.

In the above discussion of Bellow's three novels, The Adventure of Augie March is a "bildungsroman" with a picaro as the protagonist and so are the other two. Henderson, the protagonist of Henderson the Rain King, takes a trip to Africa, symbolic of a journey into the collective unconscious, where he finds the living aesthetics of "Ephebism" and learns the "wisdom of life." In Herzog, the title hero, as the cultural picaro, compulsively writes letters to philosophers and other celebrities of the mainstream culture, which is also symbolic of a spiritual voyage in the western culture. Therefore, Herzog as well as Henderson the Rain King can be categorized as a bildungsroman, though their protagonists are both middle-aged.

It seems that Bellow creates his protagonists in an archetypical model that the picaros with disruptive power take real or symbolic journeys as the strategy of transgression against the repressive power. In The Adventure of Augie March, the binary characterization of the young and the gerontic suggests a fundamental tension in the social field, with the latter as the norm and the former as its opposite, leaving forever the counterpart in opposition; in Henderson the Rain King, the universalized Henderson takes a journey to Africa and discovers a Ephebic culture that fascinates him; in Herzog, Herzog, discontented with the contemporary culture, takes a symbolic journey through writing letters to subvert it, the "Name of the Father."

As this archetypal picaro is universal in all literatures, it logically describes a fundamental structure of the human psyche, making up part of the unconscious. According to Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis, the unconscious contains the repressed desires. Its repressed or censored content comprises early memories of the individual and instinctual drives or wishes which recognize no constraint and seek only fulfillment (Brooker, 251). Though Freudian uses of the Oedipus complex come closer enough to the universalized cross-cultural patterns of meaning to invite the term "archetypal," the theory of archetypes is given more direct theoretical justification in Carl Jung's theory of the collective unconscious, the survival of primitive forms of thought in the psyches of the members of developed culture (Hawthorn, 19). In other words, instead of being repressed into early memories of the individual (when referring to the unconscious of the individual), an archetype is of general humanity. Usually the repression or censorship comes from any external and unchallenged source of authority. Accordingly, the archetypal picaro, which is repressed by the external force and bears the disruptive power, ought to make up the collective unconscious. That's why the writers, such as Saul Bellow, like to tell stories about picaros, which are actually the expressions of the collective unconscious, and why readers recognize and appreciate them.

As is revealed that the picaros reflect a certain fundamental structure of human psyche, then what is exactly the structure? What is the essence of the picaro? What is the repressive power over the picaro? To answer these questions, first it is necessary to mention two important terms, the "semiotic" and the "symbolic," introduced by Julia Kristeva, a French feminist. In her feminist literary theorization, Julia Kristeva uses the words "semiotic" and "symbolic" to refer to the two components of the signifying process that constitutes language (Ty 1979, 224—25). For Kristeva, the "semiotic" is characterized by pre-Oedipal drive and energies, by disruption, by contradictions and by heterogeneity while the "symbolic" is the stable, unifying force that allows a subject to speak coherently (Ty 1979, 363). The language of the "semiotic" is potentially subversive because it serves as a means of undermining the "symbolic" order while the "symbolic," dominant in everyday life and conscious activity, represses the "semiotic." Furthermore, she argues that the semiotic is closely linked to femininity and the symbolic is connected with the patriarchy (Ty 1979, 363, 394).

In a sense, the picaro represents the "semiotic" order, which is repressed and looks for channels of subversion. Accordingly, the repressive power over the picaro corresponds to the "symbolic." In this sense, the story of the picaro seems essentially to be that the femininity is repressed by and tries to subvert the patriarchy. However, Kristeva's identification of the "semiotic" with femininity is quite misleading. Transgression transcends the mere gender differences, as is illustrated in the preceding chapters. According to the aforementioned analyses of Bellow's novels, it is not gender but age difference that primarily matters. That is to say, age difference registering both genders is more primary than gender difference. Thus, it is primarily the gerontocentric power or culture not the patriarchy that the picaros are repressed by and try to transgress. In other words, the age difference, the youth versus the gerontic, is the basic thematic tension of Bellow's novels. In The Adventure of Augie March, the opposition between the youth images and the gerontic images concludes that the youth images are generally positively depicted while the gerontic ones are, to a certain degree, demonized; in Henderson the Rain King, Henderson is repressed by the society symbolic of the gerontic power and takes a trip to Africa as his transgressive strategy against it; in Herzog, Herzog is repressed by and tries to subvert the mainstream culture represented by the gerontocentric culture through his letter-writing technique and sexuality. Therefore, it is more proper and essential to conclude that Bellow's novels are centering upon the theme of the age difference rather than the gender difference.

In addition to the textual evidence, there is also some historical origin for the tension between the young and the gerontic. As aforesaid, some anthropologists have found that in prehistoric time, there used to be some tradition of physically abandoning the old, that is, when people grow old they will be abandoned to death due to the limitation of the primitive force of production. As the force of production develops, the human beings become more and more civilized and the embarrassing tradition dies out. However, the shadow of the prehistoric tradition doesn't vanish without any trace but settles down in people's unconscious or the collective unconscious. Under its influence, people often unconsciously manifest the complex of gerontophobia repressed by the conscience, which advocates that the youth should treat the old with respect. That is to say, the youth transgressive power is repressed by the gerontocentric culture. Even today in some primeval tribes in Africa, this kind of tradition still exists. For instance, it is the case with the tribe Wariri[44] in Henderson the Rain King.

Besides, the transgressive nature of the young against the established authority or culture is also suggested in some critics' literary theory. In The Anxiety of Influence (1973), Harold Bloom, an eminent American critic, discusses how "a strong poet" resists the authority of his precursor. A strong poet is the poet who succeeds in this mission, and in his book Bloom restricts himself to the strong poets, those who have the persistence to wrestle with their major precursors, "even to death" (Bloom 1973, 5). For Bloom, the poet always suffers from a sense that he or she has come after important things which have been said. This leads Bloom to his theory of "misreading," in which he argues that most "so-called ‘accurate’ interpretations of poetry are worse than mistakes," and suggests that "perhaps there are only more or less creative or interesting misreadings," because every reading is necessarily a Clinamen-Bloom's term for a poetic misreading (Bloom 1973, 43). Furthermore, he puts forward six defensive strategies: 1) Clinamen, or a poetic misreading. It is the first of the six "revisionist ratios" outlined in The Anxiety of Influence; 2) Tessera, or completion and antithesis: "A poet antithetically ‘completes’ his precursor, by so reading the parent-poem as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough"; 3) Kenosis, or a breaking devise and movement towards discontinuity with the precursor, in which the poet's humbling of himself actually also empties out his precursor; 4) Daemonization, in which the later poet opens himself to what he believes to be a power in the parent-poem that does not belong to the parent proper, but to a range of being just beyond that precursor. He does this, in his poem, by so stationing its relation to the parent-poem as to generalize away the uniqueness of the earlier work; 5) Askesis, or a movement of self-purgation in which the poet yields up part of his own self-endowment so as to separate himself from others, including the precursor; 6) Apophrades, or the return of the dead, in which the poet holds his work so open to that of the precursor that the impression is given that the work of the precursor was actually written by the poet (Hawthorn 2000, 304—05). All the six strategies aim to deal with the relationships between the historically old and young poets, or the new and the established.

What's more, according to the cultural studies and the intertextual analysis of Bellow's novels, the picaros of "youthfulness" represented by Bellow's protagonists can be categorized into a collective identity-the youth subculture. In cultural studies, the subcultural theory has drawn on the Gramscian conception of the Subaltern. The Subaltern, means, literally "of inferior rank," and in Antonio Gramsci's study it serves as a coded way of referring to classes such as the peasantry and the working class - social classes other than the ruling class (Gramsci 1971, 45—55). Thus subcultures are understood as being "subordinate," but more subversive than "subordinate" in their relation to mainstream culture. In this sense, similar to the subordinate classes such as the peasantry and the working class, the youth, as is analyzed in the sections above, can be regarded as a subaltern group against the ruling one of the gerontocentric culture. According to Michael Brake, a cultural studies critic, youth subcultures can be defined as "meaning systems, modes of expression or life styles developed by groups in subordinate structural positions in response to dominant meaning systems, and which reflect their attempt to solve structural contradictions rising from the wider societal context" (Brake 1980, 5). Thus such identity of the youth can be seen as a way of negotiating or resisting the established identities and pathways sanctioned by the conventions of a "parental" society.

Therefore, the present argument proposes that the essence of the archetypal picaro is the youth discourse, or the discourse of Ephebism, rather than the feminine discourse. Accordingly, the repressive power over picaros is the gerontocentric culture instead of the patriarchy. Consequently, our culture, according to the theoretical, textual and intertextual evidence, can be more accurately defined as the gerontocentric discourse, in which the youth culture or subculture is repressed and marginalized, and the youth subculture correspondingly tries to subvert or transgress the gerontocentric culture in opposition.

Furthermore, since age difference is the most fundamental unit of difference system compared with gender, race, class differences, etc., the relationship between the gerontocentric discourse and the discourse of Ephebism can be regarded as the most basic and primary binary structure of power relations. The structure can be abstracted as such a formula: "A is repressed by and tries to transgress B," which demonstrates the general cultural pathology - the marginalization of A by B. Specifically speaking, on the issue of gender, A is replaced by femininity while B patriarchy; if it is about racial differences, A is substituted by the racial minority while B the racial majority. In this structure of power relations, one side is always marginalized by the other. This is the cultural pathology - the marginalization of the inferior or subordinate party on the basis of age, gender, race, class, etc. Here I only focus on one symptom, that is, the marginalization of the young by the gerontic, which reflects such an embarrassment of the cultural transmission that the youth as the progressive force of the history is hindered and even repressed by their precursors.

In the preceding analysis of Bellow's three novels, it is evident that this cultural pathology is exposed vividly, and Bellow takes the discourse of Ephebism as his strategy, that is, his poetics of Ephebism, to subvert what he thinks of the gerontocentric culture. Here, "poetics" refers to the general principles of literature in general with its languages, forms, genres, and modes of composition.[45] Thus, that Bellow's poetics of Ephebism with the emphasis on the transgression of the young, is reflected, as has been analyzed, in terms of his language such as sound, diction, syntax, etc; in the genre that the three novels are bildungsroman with a picaro of youthfulness as the protagonist; and in his narrative strategies, namely characterization, plot and other narrative techniques.

However, our study is quite far from satisfactory. In order to build a much more complete and mature framework of the theorization, a lot more work needs to be done. Thus, this study is just an attempt "towards" the critique of cultural pathology. Fortunately, about the issue of the subversive strategy against the mainstream culture, some other American writers with their works echoed with similar emphasis during the same period of the 1950s, such as Allen Ginsburg with Howl,[46] Jack Kerouac with On the Road[47] and Salinger with The Catcher in the Rye.[48]The discourse of Ephebism seems to be a preferred strategy reflected in their respective works through rebellious young protagonists. What's more, after the two World Wars and under the shadow of the Cold War, the widespread disillusionment produced the youth counterculture movement, one type of youth subcultures, in the 1960s. The core spirit of the movement is the transgression against the mainstream culture through expressions of countercultural lifestyle, such as dress, length of hair, folk and rock music, and dramatic demonstrations of social and political violence. Thus, writers in the 1950s, such as Saul Bellow, Salinger, Allen Ginsberg, etc., with the poetics of Ephebism, must have likely inspired and propelled the youth movement. To address these interlocking complications of youth subculture, further research is expected.