Herzog by Saul Bellow
A college reading of the novel Herzog by Saul Bellow left me interested but puzzled. I am not sure I really could comprehend a novel of such complexity at that time, about age 20, though certain passages struck me as insightful and engaging. A roommate told me that this novel by Bellow, acknowledged as important and weighty in literary circles, was easier to understand if you were older, or in his words, "45 and Jewish." Nonetheless, the novel became a favorite of mine over time, and every once in a while a particularly apt passage comes to mind. To some extent, at this point having read and reread it many times, I have internalized it. And the more I read the more I appreciate the brilliance of expression. Also, more keenly I am aware, as time passes, how books draw one into a world that no longer exists--an almost complete immersion in that postwar society. The stasis of the world that book depicts, never changing on each re-read, also helps me give context to life in the modern, current world.
Many reviewers regard the book as a veiled autobiography of Saul Bellow. Similarities between Bellow and Herzog's life are plentiful. In the oft-referenced opening, Herzog pads around his decrepit house, in the Berkshires, where he meant to live with his former wife Madeline. Having spent his father's hard-earned inheritance on what would be his marital home, he now lived there alone, eating bread shared with mice, and plucking raspberries from the bushes outside. It is a picture of desperation and despair, and lost hopes. His career has faltered, his wife has run off with his best friend, the red-haired, peg-legged Giesebrecht, and he has lost contact with his children.
At first read, it seemed Moses Herzog was in a manic
phase. He writes letters to friends and relatives, alive and dead, as well as
to great authors and thinkers of the past. Hypergraphia seemed
in my mind an easy explanation for the character's behavior and that it was not explicitly
noted by the author seemed a concealing, masterful literary touch—refusing the
labels of psychiatry and instead just describing the character.
More recently, I have seen the evident trauma in the
character’s life. Herzog's betrayal by his wife and best friend, his lack of any real support, and his disengaged life in the midst of the divorce are all traumatizing. Herzog also loses contact with his daughter. The double betrayal of best friend
and spouse was to him a mind-bending experience—an unnerving of his view of
life. So, it is not surprising that Herzog is disjointed and discombobulated
emotionally. The appropriate diagnosis, then, for this literary character, is Post-traumatic Stress
Disorder, a diagnosis not yet invented at the time of the writing of the book. This diagnosis will suffice for a few decades until I learn more.
Planes
I started flying regularly in the eighties--when living in the upper midwest and flying home every holiday. People tended to sleep on planes. After all, you had a quiet cabin and a certainty of being
awaken by someone. It was noisy though--particularly on the little puddle hoppers, I used to fly then, with propellors rather than jet propulsion. After a few years, Kindles, books, and laptops reined. Nowadays, people work or text on plane. There is no interruption of their
electronic world. I used to count on flights to catch up on sleep. Now, there
are too many things to do, including the latest movies and chess games at the beginner level.
Allegiance
Freud once opined that obsessive-compulsive practices had
similarities to religious rituals. It was a far reaching comparison that illuminated some aspects of religious beliefs and other ideological systems. He noted that both religion and obsessive-compulsive disorder involved guilty feelings, used the defense mechanism of undoing, were ritualistic, and experienced by believers as necessary and a way to fend off fear.
What people now refer to as tribalism also has similarities--sports, politics, and school identification. There is an impermeable allegiance to one or the other side that does not
change due to developments. To assume, say, that the favorability president
will change because of any new allegation of misfeasance is hopeless. The likelihood of a person changing allegiance
in our highly divided country is about the same as a Yankees fan becoming a Red
Sox fan, because a Red Sox player was shown on videotape to have committed an unpunished balk.
