The following, the first part of a two-part series, is excerpted from a talk originally given by Saul Bellow in 1988 and now published here for the first time. Footnotes have been added by the editors.
A few preliminary words on the title of this talk: it deals with aspects of my personal history and with the substantiality of the person behind this history. The idea of a substantial person has been subjected by modernist, postmodernist, and postpostmodernist thinkers to tests which make one think of the rude use of effigies by engineers who simulate car collisions and plane crashes—dummies are dismembered before our eyes or devoured by floods of ignited aviation fuel.
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