LIQUID LITERATURE: MOBILITY IN SEIZE THE DAY, BY SAUL BELLOW
Seize the Day; water; mobility; modernity; Saul Bellow; Zygmunt Bauman; Tim Cresswell.
In this dissertation, I analyze and discuss the novel Seize the Day, written by the American writer Saul Bellow, reflecting, based on his fictional representation, upon some of the consequences of the paths taken by the contemporary Western world, specially with regard to the difficulties related to the increase in the number of possibilities with which individuals are confronted on a daily basis. Amongst those consequences, I can mention the fluidization of human relations, such as those regarding marriage and the work environment. I have chosen to bring, with special prominence, the theories by Zygmunt Bauman and Tim Cresswell, due to the fact that both present, under different perspectives, an important affinity with the selected literary text: the resort to symbologies that, to address the tendency to flexibilization which is proper to modernity, allude to water. From the connotations taken on by this element in Seize the Day and in Bauman’s and Cresswell’s theoretical corpus, I outline possible understandings of the ways by which present times can be understood as permeated by a state of fluidity typical of water and other liquids. Finally, I conclude that, because of Bellow’s artistic sensitivity, he is able to predict, in the novel, the mentioned understandings, which would be theoretically disclosed by Bauman and Cresswell only years after the publication of the literary work. Other theorists that compose the totality of my dissertation are, Stuart Hall, Fredric Jameson, Milton Santos and John Urry, amongst others, who were chosen due to their relevance when it comes to the key-concepts employed by me, notably those of mobility, modernity and globalization.