Saul Bellow's 1982 novel The Dean's December is a plodding, humorless, self-righteous, and self-serious slog of a book. It's also—I'm sorry to say—a racist book. Which is exactly the kind of criticism that one hesitates to make against a recognized literary classic, under threat of being accused of PC Stalinism. But I read this whole thing through with an open mind—indeed, actively wanting to like it—and I really do not think the charge in this case is misplaced.
At the novel's outset, we think it is going to be about a crime—a murder of a student, specifically, committed under ambiguous circumstances. But like much else in the novel, this never really goes anywhere. There is no mystery to be solved, and we never learn anything more about the crime—which, perhaps, is the point. There is no meaning to it. It's just another day in the whirlwind of the "moronic inferno," as Bellow calls it.
The politics of the novel are deeply frustrating. It's a conservative book that wants to disavow how conservative it is. Bellow wants to hold horrific crimes and brutality under our nose in order to convince us of.... something—but what? The spiritual hollowness of modern liberalism? The vacuum of modern anomie? The decay of society under the auspices of permissive post-Sixties cultural progressivism?
Or is it saying something much worse—namely, that racial stereotypes may be founded in truth?
We'll never know the answer—since Bellow also disavows that he is trying to convince us of anything. He waves this dreck in front of our faces, and we say—well, so, what do you expect this to prove? What are you trying to say?
To which Bellow—speaking through the Dean—says, who, little old me? I'm not trying to convince you of anything. I don't have opinions. I'm just reporting facts. I'm just observing things. I'm just telling you what I see. Let the facts speak for themselves.
But then we are reminded that he is not reporting facts. He's reporting fiction. This is a novel, after all. The horrific Chicago crimes he describes didn't actually happen. I'm sure plenty of other terrible things happened in the urban demimonde in 1980s Chicago. But they aren't the ones recorded in this book.
So the "facts" in the book are not facts, and therefore do not actually speak for themselves.
And so—if Bellow disavows that he is saying anything; disavows that he has a message or is trying to convince us of anything—but, also, we know he's not doing factual reporting or journalism either—then what is the point of all this?
Bellow seems to be hinting at times that his book really is an exercise in anti-Black racism. But he also trusts that his readers will be too afraid of appearing gauche or reductionist to hurl this accusation at him directly. We don't want to seem like the annoying campus radicals and militants in the novel, now do we?
The novel preemptively positions the Dean as a victim—someone who needs to fend off unfair charges of racism; and his eventual downfall is in fact caused by a journalist acquaintance of his quoting an off-color racially-tinged remark of his out of context. Thus, the novel is a study in an early version of "cancel culture"—when the cancellable remarks had to be transmitted by print media, rather than social media, but could bring about the destruction of someone's career nonetheless.
Since the novel is a critique of campus hyper-sensitivity and "wokeness" avant la lettre, then—it seems to anticipate and head off any allegations of being racist itself. It suddenly feels unsophisticated and literal-minded to be like: Umm, Saul Bellow, I think you actually did write kind of a racist book here.
Which is probably why almost no reviewers ever seem to have lodged that accusation against Bellow—at least not in response to this novel. They wanted to show that they were clever enough to appreciate the layers of nuance behind Bellow's apparent meaning.
But what if there actually is less nuance than people pretend?
(This reaction on the critics' part was also indicative, no doubt, of the way racial politics had shifted in this country by the dawn of the 1980s—much as they have shifted again today, in the midst of our own grim cultural Thermidor.)
But I don't know how else—other than racism or something close to it—to interpret weird meandering soliloquies like the following—from the Dean (who is plainly our author stand-in): "You're feeling out my racial views. No serious American can allow himself to be suspected of prejudice. This forces us to set aside the immediate data of experience. Because when we think concretely or preverbally, we do see a black skin or a white one, a broad nose or a thin one [....] These are precepts. They should not be under a taboo."
To which the Dean's interlocutor rather aptly replies: "Well, are they?"
The Dean keeps digging himself in though—he "posts through it," as we would say today: "Yes, we try to stretch the taboo back to cover even these preverbal and concrete observations and simple identifications."
To which we say, again: umm—do we? Is anyone out there saying "don't say that Black people are Black, or white people are white?" And if you agree that no one is actually saying that—then what are you trying to say? What exactly are you implying?
To which the Dean/Bellow again replies, in so many words: who me? Implying things? I'm not implying anything. I don't have opinions. I'm just a little old Dean who describes what he sees.
Bellow seems to know—in short—that the attitudes he is gesturing toward in such passages are retrograde and culturally unacceptable in modern America. But he thinks he has effectively displaced and disavowed them by putting them in the form of half-baked queries and suggestions, mere rumblings and indications, in the mind and mouth of a fictional character. "The Dean said it; not me!" Just as the Dean will, at the time of his final cancellation, protest: "I was quoting my racist brother-in-law! He said it; not me!"
But we shouldn't actually be fooled by these strategies. I think we all know what Bellow is saying.
(The book is full of these kinds of half-hearted and unconvincing psychic displacements and disavowals. Bellow excoriates modern sadism and perversity; but then he dwells on the lurid details of sex crimes. The Dean, when describing the murder that sets off the book's events, makes a point of noting that the victim's wife—over whom he sentimentalizes lugubriously—was wearing her "short summer nightie" at the time of the home invasion. Why "short"? Why did we need that detail, Dean?)
Why, if at all—then—should we read Bellow's book? Is it because Bellow wrote so many other things that were human and enduring—outstanding books like Augie March or The Victim (written when Bellow was a younger man, and still saw the world through the eyes of an underdog or outsider, rather than a feted member of the Establishment)? Or because we need to reckon with the half-submerged, confused, and officially disavowed racism that slumbers in the minds of so many educated Americans—and which Bellow excavated in this novel—because otherwise its more overt and violent forms rear their heads in our politics?
Is it because we are living through yet another period of right-wing whitelash—just as we were when Bellow wrote his book in the 1980s—after a period of short-lived racial progress?
The book is certainly interesting for the light it sheds on the depressingly cyclical nature of cultural politics in the United States. It is indeed troubling to see how many of our futile and repetitive debates over crime and race today already had their counterparts in the 1980s.
Sometime around 2014, after all—I and the rest of the Left became convinced by the empirical evidence showing that the best single explanation of the wave of violent crime that gripped the nation between the 1970s and the end of the century was actually the prevalence of lead fumes in the air—and thus, that the best policy change for crime reduction we ever implemented was to take the lead out of gasoline.
Reading Bellow, one is intrigued to find that this argument was already familiar to people in the 1980s. I thought it was a discovery of empirical sociologists in the Obama era—but a subplot of Bellow's novel involves a chemist, Henry Beech, who is trying to convince the Dean to write up a series of articles exploring the possibility that lead could really serve as the grand monocausal explanation of modern urban decay.
(Like the murder at the outset of the novel, this subplot never goes anywhere either. It's just a chance for Bellow to maunder on for a while—which is not uninteresting, to give him credit.)
The Dean mocks the idea that such a single "physical cause" could account, though, for the spiritual depravity of our era.
But if it's not lead paint or lead fumes—then what is it? How else to explain the fact that Americans—of whatever race—did not kill each other at such high rates prior to the 1970s or after the turn of the millennium? Was there a reset in the spiritual thermometer at the same time?
When I was a college student in Bellow's Chicago in the Obama era, I met more than a few neoconservatives and College Republicans who were happy to supply the missing explanation. They said it had something to do with race; perhaps even innate racial characteristics. At the same time—they would insist that this belief in racial inferiority did not make them "racist" (though, to my mind, it's pretty much the dictionary definition of racism—I'm reminded of a Chicago Tribune article I read at one point that was interviewing people on the question of whether Saul Bellow was racist. They said, in so many words, "I don't think he was racist; I just think he didn't like Black people." In which case, the label of racism has truly lost all meaning in American society).
The belief in heritable racial characteristics linked to crime or low IQ is of course a much weaker explanation of the data than the lead fumes hypothesis. Both may be overly reductionist; both may substitute a "physical cause" for a spiritual one—but at least one of them accounts for why there would be a change in crime rates over time; whereas the racial composition of U.S. society did not change proportionately in the same era.
But that did not stop my right-wing college contemporaries—many of whom cited the later novels of Bellow as inspiration for their conservative worldview. Bellow—along with Charles Murray and others of the time— helped to make the sort of half-disavowed, half-displaced neoconservative flirtation with racist ideology seem intellectually fashionable and pardonable again. He was still serving this role, posthumously, as late as the Obama era.
And these kinds of "hereditarian" racial ideas have only become more popular since then. "Race and IQ" is now a pervasive meme on the online right.
Perhaps this shouldn't surprise us. The United States is not the first society to wish to attribute to nature what is in fact human, all too human. Aristotle in ancient times argued that the lower class in Athens must be slaves because they were simply born with a slave nature. It serves the purpose of a slave society to believe that slaves are slaves because "God, Nature, or somebody made them that way"; to borrow a phrase from Langston Hughes.
Aristotle, as Bellow points out in this novel, was also big in Chicago. Aristotle made his way to the stockyards. As Bellow points out, "Aristotle, believe it or not, became a great influence in certain parts of Chicago. Our great sister institution the University of Chicago revived him." (Bellow's novel is set in a fictional Chicago college, but one that is clearly modeled on Bellow's own dueling alma maters, Northwestern and U of C.)
When I was a student fifteen years ago at that same "sister institution," though—studying the Great Books—I was assigned to read more than just Aristotle. I was assigned to read Thomas Hobbes as well, who expressly mocked the Aristotelians—or "Schoole-men," as he called them—for their belief in a "slave nature" that predestined some unfortunates for a lifetime of servitude.
To the contrary, wrote Hobbes: "Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind; as that though there bee found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind then another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himselfe any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he."
And so, to those "schoole-men" of today—who would like to attribute our social inequities to God or nature, rather than our own society's failings and injustices—we can only respond as Robert Burns did:
If I'm design'd yon lordling's slave,
By Nature's law design'd,
Why was an independent wish
E'er planted in my mind?
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