초록·
키워드
오류제보하기
Saul Bellow's Mr Sammler's Planet is the novel describing how Mr. Sammler is devoted to rationalism of England, how his desire to explain man and the world with it is frustrated, and how in the end he reaches religious mysticism, the solution to his problem. The process that he moves from rationalism to religious mysticism can be summarized as follows:In his youth, Mr. Sammler is interested in rationalistic thought and culture of England under the influence of his mother, a freethinker. As a result, he fall in love with England. In his Gymnasium days he can translate St. Augustine's "The Devil hath established his cities in the North." When he studies at the University of Cracow, he extends his interest even to French novelists, Emile Zola and Balzac. After the graduation, he spends 1920's and 30's as correspondent for Warsaw papers and journals in Great Russell Street and Woburn Square, Bloomsbury, the high intellectual society of London at that time, cultivating intellectual relations with Bloomsbury group, especially H. G. Wells and in the end becoming an complete rationalist and "English man."However, he in this period realizes the limitations of rationalism as a approach to reality and feels strongly that he can find in mysticism the way to overcome the limitations.
World War II and the Holocaust, which he undergoes, makes him awake to the madness of man and the world and life and death, inexplicable with his rationalism. With this, he has mystic experiences in a mausoleum in Mezvinski. In these results, his belief in rationalism begins to be much shaken.
New York, in which after World War II, Mr. Sammler settle down with the help of his nephew Elya Gruna, is the city of chaos and frenzy - madness - money and sex control, making one think about the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world.
In these circumstances, he realizes that with theory, analysis and explanation, the methods of rationalism, one can approach only incessantly changing appearance and not reality, eternal being covered with Maya, that is appearance. In other words, theories give rise to theories, and arguments and explanations are "fiction." In addition, he comprehends that to approach reality is possible only by experiencing "strong impressions of eternity" intuitively, that is "adumbrations" which eternal being sends forth. In the end, he experiences moments of epiphany and believe in God according to the teaching of Meister Eckhardt's religious mysticism.