Herzog

Aldridge, John W. "The Complacency of Herzog." Time to Murder and Create: The Contemporary Novel in Crisis. John W. Aldridge. New York: McKay, 1966. 133–38. Rpt. in Saul Bellow and the Critics. Ed. Irving malin. New York: New York UP, 1967. 207–10; The Devil and the Fire: Retrospective Essays on American Literature and Culture 1951–1971. John W. Aldridge. New York: Harper's Magazine Press, 1972. 231–34; Herzog: Text and Criticism Ed. Irving Howe. Viking Critical Library. New York: Viking, 1976. 440–44.

Sees Herzog's complacency as his badge of sainthood. "Herzog's suffering is right and admirable, and that suffering . . . is the very measure of his significance both as a person and as a dramatic figure."

Postwar fictional heroes, including Bellow's early protagonists, are casualties of a disintegrating world who are often unable to rise above their fates. Many seem to be descendants of the "American Adam," innocents in paradise whose affirmative views have not been bought at a high enough price. Herzog, however, integrates and surpasses the simplicities of Bellow's earlier characters. His root stock is innocence, but onto that innocence has been grafted a full emotional and intellectual awareness of the plight of contemporary man.

Speaks of the modern confessional hero as seeking a state of full perception to make his consciousness less painful. Discusses H in detail from the perspective that "Herzog's perception amounted to nothing, in that it is a simple, quiet decision to stop his confession .... It contains nothing in the form of momentary vision or an affirmation of one special value, but its development includes glimpses of almost everything in man's intellectual repertory."

Perceives H as one of a developing genre of American "college professor novels." Criticizes such novelists for stereotyping their characters as Jews, whites, males and paranoids. Rarely seen at their academic work, the heroes are haunted by parental memories of pogrom and flight, the trauma of transplantation, the rigidity of old world patriarchy, the subversiveness of Jewish mothers, and the amibivalence of wealthier, well-married siblings toward a tribal member who has become learned in gentile ways. Herzog is depicted as preeminent among these neurotics.

The anti-heroic frame into which Saul Bellow places the central figure of Herzog is given its final solidity and effect in the closing setting of the novel, a version of the ritual use of Eden that received its strongest traditional and classical expression in the epic context of Milton's Paradise Lost.

Rereads Bellow's H in an attempt to retell literary history as cultural criticism, and to reconceive the writing that charts the transformation of the city as a semiotics of modern urban life. Discusses Bellow's deployment of theme, situation, and most notably, character from Commedia dell'arte. Suggests that this novel places the Jewish intellectual, city dweller, and citizen at the center of Western culture. It defines him, with his neglected yet abiding Jewish habits and traditions, as an agent in an embattled Western humanism. Concludes that he dances at two weddings, and his irony and humor, like Harlequin's, infuse somber occasions with commedia joy.

Argues that DD deals, in large terms, with the moral decay of Western society. Set alternately in the Bucharest of the Ceausescu regime and the Chicago of the Carter administration, DD places on display the proliferating symptoms of moral decline in the West. In both places, power and resentment have become the driving forces behind the organization of society. The Ceaucescu regime is a gangster-regime and the Carter administration, founded in liberal pieties, is content to let actual gangsterism flourish in America's big cities under the rubric of compassion for the disadvantaged. DD contains several references to Oswald Spengler and features a character named Dewey Spangler, who also figured in an earlier Bellow novel, H. On the basis of these clues it is clear that Bellow, with many reservations of course, has found in the declinist vision of Oswald Spengler a valid diagnosis of the malaise of modernity, so much so that one can legitimately speak of Saul Bellow's "Spenglerian Vision." Not the least part of this vision is Bellow's grasp, prefigured in Spengler's sociology, of the prominence of resentment in modern life.

In H we perceive the fullest development of Bellow's and America's genuinely American style. This is because of its oblique style and generalized expression of American culture.

Places Herzog in a long line of middle-aged heroes extending down through Anglo-American literature from Moses Bloom to Prufrock to Lambert Strether. Sees him as modeled on Bloom and possessing many traits in common with him and with many of the other middle-aged protagonists.

Treats H, along with three other novels, as a work pervaded by an allegorical religious pattern that ultimately raises it above the ordinary level of the literal and the ephemeral. The allegorical pattern is a Puritan-Calvinist one. All four novelists use this mode because they are interested in American tradition and conflict, whether from the WASP standpoint or that of an aspiring minority.

Discusses rupture, revolt and harmony in H under the following headings: 1) Disintegration of the personality, 2) Chronicle of divorce and its consequences, 3) Philosophy of the rupture of the proclamation with the society which surrounds it, 4) Reconciliation of the Self—taking on the human condition, 5) Infancy and harmony.

Describes Abe Ravelstein as a typical Bellovian suffering joker, a source of ideas and serious political wisdom, who is also a figure of clownish excess. Reviews Bellow's status as a degender of liberal humanism writing about the post-humanist world of survivors dwarfed by the cities they live in, by the power of science and the new cosmos. Mostly describes H in this context as he provides an introduction to the April 2001 new edition of H.

Compares William Burrough's The Naked Lunch with Saul Bellow's H, a novel which discusses the same questions and comes up with a much more positive and morally responsible answer. Likens Bellow's approach to Trilling's in his refusal to accept unquestioningly the views of Updike, Roth, Jones, Powers, Burroughs, and Donleavy.

Money has symbolic significance in most Bellow novels, but HRK seems indifferent to it. However, in H money becomes a credit item in a ledger of love. Financial depletion accompanies emotional bankruptcy, but love is generous and can afford to be. This dichotomy shows most clearly in the characters of the women in Herzog's life: Daisy, Sono, Madeleine, and Ramona.

Argues that previous critics have given only a cursory glance at the purpose of Herzog's letter writing. Suggests that the 56 letters are 1) a structural technique, 2) a therapeutic exercise for Herzog, 3) a device to say nay to apocalyptic and nihilistic writers of the postwar period, and 4) an affirmation of the worth of individual man beyond any description anyone can give of him. Concludes that finally Herzog comes to peace as Yeats did in 1939 in his last major poem, "The Circus Animal's Desertion": "Now that my ladder's gone / I must lie down where all the ladder's start; / In the foul rag-and-bone / shop of the heart."

Capon questions whether H is really Hamlet with a happy ending. He also asks the Christian question of just what kind of freedom and repose it is that Herzog has brought himself at the end of the novel. What follows is primarily a discussion of how the Christian churches do and do not deal with the issues Bellow raises in the novel.

While the dominant theme of modern literature has been the search for love, the quest has moved in this latest Bellow novel beyond sentimentalism to a more sophisticated stage of posing a typical hero who does not naively discover love at the climax of his tale of misadventures, but who has known it all along. Finding it more complex and subtle than he has thought, he now he has to struggle to live with it.

Discusses the regional, agrarian, and proletarian impulses in the Depression era and the similarity in the literary work produced by leftist writers which in some ways resembles that written by participants in the Harlem or New Negro Renaissance. Then describes the first existentialist novels of the 1930s, including DM and AAM (1953), as dispirited about the collapse of proletarian fiction, the Left, radical politics, and the status quo. Argues that these novels represent that early moment in Bellow's career in which he had set aside one vision of social life and not yet adapted another.

H is both a traditional novel and a radically experimental one. While Bellow urges a return to romantic values to overcome our contemporary spiritual one, he presents his romantic theme in a new form. This new theme is a radical alteration of the English romantic's early nineteenth-century invention, the discursive meditative mode. H has its roots in the English romantic tradition. In H Bellow recognizes Dostoyevskian evil, and romantic excess, yet uses the resources of romanticism to contend with notions of the eclipse of the individual and romantic apocalypticism. To find an alternative to brutal realism, the sensibility of Wordsworth mutates to serve as a viable force for certain individuals in modern mass society. H was supposed to have produced in his monograph on romanticism a new angle on the modern condition showing how life could be lived by renewing universal connections; overturning the lost of the romantic errors about the uniqueness of the self; revising old Western Faustian ideology; investigating the social meaning of Nothingness. His final achievement is the Wordsworthian understanding that everyday life itself is the highest good.

Suggests that H be considered a vivid illustration of the Hobbesian view of life that would replace the image of man as a romantic humanist with the "mass man" who is self-centered, treacherous, and predatory. Demonstrates the extent to which Bellow's humanist roots lie in the romantic tradition, and the extent to which he fights Hobbesian and nihilist estimates of human existence.

Describes the thirteen 90-minute audio tapes of the unabridged recording of H as being surprisingly well adapted to the audio format. Praises Kandinski's reading performance as clear, well paced, and not excessively dramatized.

Herzog's essential problem, the one that affects him most acutely and exacerbates his intellectual confusion, is his relationship with women. By the end of the novel he understands the inadequacy of his past attitude toward love that has resulted in dominating and being dominated by women.

Discusses this novel in the context of a complex discussion of Jewish historiography.

Sees Herzog as a character who has recognized the great complexity of the world he lives in and its power to constantly transform itself. Therefore he has an urgent need to discover what it truly means to be human and how to live this life. This is the struggle that lies at the heart of his thinking. It is a matter of survival as a member of the human species.

None of the present commentators on H have pointed out how important specifically satiric perspective and satirical portraiture are to the meaning of the novel. Bellow's vision, like that of his nineteenth-century Russian and English predecessors, is ultimately a humane and comic one; but, unlike the authors of Dead Souls and Bleak House, he has frequent recourse to satiric devices.

Compares Prufrock and Herzog as men of sensibility whose antennae and levels of awareness enable them to interpret culture. They are archetypes of the era.

Sees this novel as both a psychological study and a philosophical debate. Concentrates primarily on the affirmative philosophical stance and the development of Herzog's character that goes along with it. Concludes that as a true artist Bellow eschews simplicities and goes on to espouse ambiguities and incongruities in his estimate of human nature.

Asserts that in H Bellow's primary intention was to demonstrate a hero ridding himself of all superfluous modernist ideas. The text is one of the century's major Anglo-American rejections of modernist ideas. Supporting arguments are drawn both from the text and Bellow's interviews and essays. Illustrates the thoroughness of Herzog's and therefore Bellow's analysis of exactly what the effects on the contemporary sense of the Self have been of the works of all the great modernist thinkers.

Davidar, David. "A Peerless Writer." Hindu 13 Aug. 2000. Cited in online Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe. 2 Aug. 2001.

de Rambures, Jean-Louis. "La Fin du Heros Muscle: Herzog de Saul Bellow." Realities Sept. 1966: 99–105. Cited in Abstracts of English Studies, 1969.

Di Giuseppe, Rita. "'Tutto fa Brodo': Bellow's Herzog and Meaning In-the-Making." Quaderni di Lingue e Letterature 13 (1988): 49–70.

Elgin, Don D. "Order Out of Chaos: Bellow's Use of the Picaresque in Herzog." Saul Bellow Journal 3.2 (1984): 1322.

It was not until H that Bellow was able to combine the traditional picaresque elements with the modifications necessary to make the American picaresque a logical alternative to the formlessness and despair of the stream-of-consciousness, experimental and/or historical novels that had previously seemed to be heralding their own imminent demise.

Sees Herzog's search as more clearly focused than his predecessors. Sees him fighting against the entire preoccupation with the ego, which he finds sinister in romantic thought.

Demonstrates the Jewishness of the novel in its depiction of the Jew who becomes a representative American in the depiction of the modern dilemma in Western culture. Hence, all are seen as outcasts pursuing "private intensities" in a state of alienation and exile.

Examines the precise ways which, in a Jewish sense, Herzog is both a victim and a hero. Concentrates largely on the novel's Jewishness and Bellow's use of this means of universalizing his material. Concludes by likening Herzog to one of Andre-Schwartz-Bart's thirty-six "just men," each of whom bears one thirty-sixth of the world's pain in order to redeem mankind.

Franck, Jacques. "Saul Bellow: Herzog." Revue General Belge (Feb. 1967): 113–20. [In French]

Fuchs, Daniel. "Herzog: The Making of a Novel." Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Ed. Stanley Trachtenberg. Critical Essays on American Literature. Boston: Hall, 1979. 101–21. Longer version rpt. in Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision. Daniel Fuchs. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1984. 121–54.

Examines the early drafts of H and traces Bellow's revision process with a view to discovering his methods and art. Demonstrates Bellow's deliberate effort to show Herzog's turning to God as an act of the natural man recognizing the limits of Nature. His quest has brought him to affirm the primacy of moral authority of God."

Argues that despite Bellow's impressive reputation as one of America's greatest living writers and thinkers, there are those who cringe at the mention of his "egghead" novels and who consider the breadth of his work intellectually self-indulgent. H has drawn most of this criticism. In actuality, however, Bellow is poking fun at his protagonist's misdirected intellectual fervor through exhausting himself intellectually in his letters which represent his recovery of balance in the novel. Outlines the general complaints he received for being far too intellectual, and suggests that it is not his intellectual journey that leads him to spiritual fulfillment. His spiritual growth defies such circularity. Nor is it the incessant letter writing, or its cessation. Rather, his memories of his ethnic childhood inspire in Herzog a religious awakening that exposes for him the shortcomings of a straight intellectualism. More specifically it is the Napoleon Street memories of Montreal, the street and city, Bellow introduced in his very first novel, DM. Readers who find the book overly intellectual underestimate this crucial, albeit short section of H in which his eventual catharsis is rooted. In the end Herzog rediscovers his "Herzog heart" along the gritty Napoleon street of his childhood, thereby avoiding the desensitization that allows Shapiro and his cohorts to deny the moral suffering of individuals. Thus, while Shapiro is doomed to a fate of ulcers, Herzog simultaneously finds inner peace by embracing the past. "Hineni," he chants, "here I am God" (310). He now knows one simple religious thing, "Thou movest me" a mandatory starting place in Bellow's vision from whence one may begin to exert a positive influence.

Identifies this novel as one in which Bellow has united two traditions: 1) that of meditative impotent victim, 2) that of comic rebel. Sees Joyce's Ulysses, and Bloom specifically, as the major source of the novel as well as the biblical prophet Moses.

Garcia Ponce, Juan. "A Hero of Our Time." Entry Into Matter: Modern Literature and Reality. Juan Garcia Ponce. Trans. David J. Parent and Bruce Novoa. Illinois Language and Culture Series 2. Normal, IL: Applied Literature Press, 1976. 18–24.

Garrett, George. "To Do Right in a Bad World: Saul Bellow's Herzog." Hollins Critic 2.2 (1965): 1–12. Rpt. in The Sorrows of Fat City: A Selection of Literary Essays and Reviews. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 1992. 152–65.

Primarily attempts to rescue Bellow from accusations of redundancy, Jewishness, urbaneness and mere intellectuality. Above all, praises him for escaping reductive estimates of his parameters and overcoming the "catastrophe of success."

Argues against R. W. B. Lewis's thesis that only nineteenth-century literature could produce an American Adam. Suggests through an examination of H that modern Adamism completely reverses the optimistic tenets of early Adamism. Concludes that Herzog finds the search for paradise futile and ends up adapting to life rather than fleeing from it.

Describes the confusing information given by Bellow and by commentators on the origins of the name Moses Herzog. By giving erroneous information, Bellow has not supported his claims of 'coincidence,' nor has he elucidated the choice of name to his readers.

Discusses the possibility that Ravitch was modeled on Melech Ravitch, playwright, who was primarily famous for his poetry, and who lived in Montreal from 1941 until his death in 1979. Provides detailed in its comparisons between the real and the fictional counterpart.

Provides a detailed account of Bellow's actual use of Hebrew and Yiddish in H with a commentary on the possible reasons for the errors in the text.

Refers to the literature of psychological and sociological divorce studies on grief in order to illuminate the dynamics of Herzog's marriage and the processes of his mourning. Describes Bellow's profound insight into the whole process of personal and national mourning as the key to the major components of Western suffering in a modern historical context. Catalogues the full range of psychological reactions and "mourning work" undertaken by Herzog as a way of illustrating the universality of divorce grief as symbolic of Western cultural dissolution. Concludes that after these complex learning moments Herzog has learned much from having survived his crisis of grief, and that his ability to grieve on this scale is testimony to his power to love deeply.

Comments that this is a book with artistic structure, s structure that is not truly novelistic. Rather, she complains that Bellow's books have become less neat and reviewable, but that H is significant enough fiction to compare with the experience of reading Henry James or James Joyce.

Argues that what Herzog experiences at the end of the novel is the unity of the phenomenal world to which he naturally belongs. Behind this unity he senses a power he calls God. The combination of these two aspects strongly suggest a mystical element as the essence of experience.

Reviews the plot of H. Comments on the flashback narrative technique, reviews the previous Bellow protagonists and comments on the sheer difficulty of the novel. Concludes that the publication of H confirms Bellow's status in a leading figure in American fiction.

Sees the epistolary structure of the novel as a mirror for Herzog's mind which, like his new manuscript, is a voluminous pile of chaotic arguments which never found its focus. Sees Bellow as re-creating environment to mean mental environment as he attempts to avoid Drieserian determinism and merely external environment. Through this manner, the hero is shown to be able to override the violence of nature and select his own course.

Examines the Jewishness of the novel and defends Bellow against charges that he has "exploited" Jewish materials. Sees the book aiming at a variant of the same kind of "fatalistic existentialism" found in SD. In the absence of traditional faith and belief, Bellow shows the neo-Freudian religion of sex as an ultimate value.

Sees Herzog as the reincarnation of the spirit of Robert Cohn. He is merely as a shift from secularized white Protestant to secularized Jewish intellectual. Herzog is Cohn's "descendant and verbalizer." Both are halfs, both rationalize, both have mistresses, and so on.

Hogel, Rolf. "Gegenwart und Vergangenheit: Ihre synchrone Darste!lung in Saul Bellows Roman Herzog." Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 14.2 (1981): 103–15.

Howe, Irving. "Odysseus Flat on His Back." New Republic 19 Sept. 1964: 21–26. Rpt. as "Herzog." The Critic as Artist: Essays on Books 1920–1970. Ed. Gilbert A. Harrison. New York: Liveright, 1972. 181–91; as "Down and Out in New York and Chicago: Saul Bellow, Professor Herzog, and Mr. Sammler." The Critical Point: On Literature and Culture. Ed. Irving Howe. New York: Horizon, 1973. 121–36, and Herzog: Text and Criticism. Ed. Irving Howe. Viking Critical Library. New York: Viking, 1976. 391–400. Rpt. with original title in Saul Bellow. Ed. Harold Bloom. Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea, 1986. 45–51; Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Ed. Stanley Trachtenberg. Critical Essays on American Literature. Boston: Hall, 1979. 30–36.

Praises Bellow as one of the most powerful minds among contemporary American writers and one "who best assimilates his intelligence to creative purpose." However, he has "become increasingly devoted to the idea of the novel as sheer spectacle.'' Howe sees H as Bellow's most remarkable and notably advanced novel in technique. Complains that instead of freeing us from the image of the sick self, we are still caught up with it in this novel. Sees the novel as a remarkably animated performance combining both the despairing and the comic.

Recounts a personal interview with Bellow about the latter's acquaintance with Buddhist thought. Provides some anecdotal experience for Bellow's early interest in Buddhism and claims Bellow confirmed its possible influence upon the novels, especially HRK. Develops this thesis in conjunction with references to the standard texts on Buddhism.

Deals in depth with the themes of historicism, crisis ethics, existentialism, Rousseauistic notions of human possibilities and "potato love." Claims that along with all these themes Bellow is actually writing a book which is an attack on the structuring activity of the mind. Thus the sense of human mystery conveyed by the book.

Kannan examines both the English and American university novel and concludes that H expands the genre thematically with its emphasis on moral and social ideals.

Sees Bellow negotiating some middle territory between the magnified human possibilities posited by the classic writers, and the inevitable American reaction to the failure of such promises—failures that issue a challenge to the self-confidence of the species. Sees Bellow dealing with existential naturalism and cults of death and dread.

Argues that there is no distinction made between Herzog's voice and that of the narrator. Discusses the relationship between Herzog and Bellow, and then between Herzog and Moses Herzog. Applies Bakhtin's five stylistic unities. Describes how Bellow carries on the American poetics of subsuming the narration in the consciousness of a character.

Kermode, Frank. "Books in General: Herzog." New Statesman. 5 Feb. 1965: 20001. Rpt. in Continuities. Frank Kermode. New York: Random, 1968. 222–27; Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Ed. Stanley Trachtenberg. Critical Essays on American Literature. Boston: Hall, 1979. 37–40.

Kerneur, Marie-Pierre. "Herzog et les machiavels." Delta 19 (Oct. 1984): 109–29.

Provides an in-depth treatment on H as a representation of Machiavellian ideology, society, and politics.

Discusses H initially in an absurdist context and then focuses the discussion on Herzog's marginality as a Jewish man, an uncertain stranger in American society, who is only partially assimilated. Sees Herzog as morally weak in some respects, and yet tenacious in his ability to overcome the Wasteland outlook. Recounts much of the plot, the transitions in Herzog's letters, his failed marriages, and ultimately his moral sternness and tenderness, which are the legacy of his Jewish past. Describes the Ludeyville episode in the Berkshires as Herzog's ridiculous affectation as "Graf Pototsky of the Berkshires" where he is in danger of forgetting the long transition from Napoleon Street to the world of scholarship and Madelaine. Concludes with a discussion of Herzog's transcendentalist accommodation to Nature.

Sees H in the great tradition of the novel but is surprised that it is not better than it is.

Describes Herzog as a Jewish intellectual shaped by the tradition of the Talmud and the shtetl. Places him within the Hebraic prophetic tradition as a man with a mission to do intellectual work, to change history, to influence the development of civilization and to fight idolatry in the form of wasteland attitudes. Of all Bellow's heroes, he is the most characteristically prophetic in the tradition of the Hebrews. Traces Bellow's rejection of contemporary literary and philosophical ideas as a chief evidence of his prophetic role.

Sees, in addition to its artistic appeal, that H's appeal for the reading public has largely to do with its curiosity over Bellow's private intellectual and emotional safaris, many of which are revealed in this novel as were Rousseau's in his Confessions.

Sees the pervasive pattern of bird imagery in the novel as supporting symbolically the cyclical patterns of aspiration and loss, yearning and disillusion that characterize the protagonist's alternating vision of human nature.

Argues that Herzog's dilemma concerning the relationship of learning and feeling lies at the heart of this novel. Explores the theme of acting and theatrics in relation to this dualism. The personalities, the authorities and the courtroom in H are all symbolic of a form of social theatre. There is also religious theatre in his stealing Madeleine from the Monsignor. Likewise, Moses' self-controlled role playing has turned his personal life into a circus.

Levy, Paule. "La Vitre, lemrior et le masque: ebauche d'une reflexion sur l'alterite dans le roman Herzog de Saul Bellow." Actes du Colloque, Le Mans, novembre 1991. L'Alterite dans la litterature et la culture du mond anglophone. Le Mans: U du Maine, 1993. 199–206.

Lofroth, Erik. "Herzog's Predicament: Saul Bellow's View of Modern Man." Studia Neophilologica 44.2 (1972): 315–25.

Examines the character of Herzog against the backdrop of certain experiences he claims in the novel: 1) his past experiences, 2) his Jewish background, 3) his American environment, and 4) his studies.

Lucko's article is a response to Dudley Flamm's article in the same journal issue. Arguing from a formalist Marxist position, Lucko criticizes Flamm's concept of Herzog as reductionist and apologetic of capitalism, pointing out that Herzog's experience is not only a subjective minority view of a society distant to him but also a cybernetic model of alienation and passive acceptance within capitalistic American society at large.

Discusses Bellow's examination in H of the notion that we live in a prison house of language where every house or text is made of another text in an endless chain of texts that cuts human beings off from the nonverbal world and the intensity of being. Traces how Herzog lives in just such a prison house of texts hidden in his country house in Ludeyville, writing endlessly to mostly imaginary correspondents who each constitute one of the systems which imprison him-family life, academic life, Jewish life, and Western intellectual life.

Argues that the letters in H are arranged in a seemingly random sequence so that what can be seen is constituting an epistolary road map for a modern-day Moses, whose change outlines a mental as well as an emotional trajectory informed by Kierkegaard's philosophy. The trajectory suggests a tripartite progress, one that parallels the Kierkegaardian paradigm of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. It represents three stages or styles of existence—three distinct ways in which Herzog faces himself and his world. The Kierkegaardian thesis suggests that inwardness is higher than existential delay: by starting to write letters, he takes a leap out from the aesthetic into the ethical, and by ceasing to write them, out from the ethical into the religious.

Calls H an anti-nihilist tract which follows Nietzsche's argument that Christianity exalts suffering and offers a critique in H of Christianity's valorization of the meek, the weak, the feminine, the womanish, the Christlike. Reviews Nietzsche's attitudes to women and argues that in H, Bellow illustrates the societal tension between sentiment and brutality in order to accomplish his critique of suffering as Christian value. Herzog begins his mental journey by critiquing his culture's valorization of pain and ends it by conceding to the value of it. Finally, he recognizes that it is God who enacts the peculiarities of life and that he needs no help from Moses in effecting a grand synthesis. Back in Ludeyville, he makes his own world of hope, optimism, renewal, and—for now—peace.

Mariani, Gigliola Sacerdoti. "'These are the Letters That All Men Refuse': Le 'Lettre' di Herzog." Memoria e tradizione nella cultura ebraico-american. Guido Fink and Gabriella Morisco, eds. Centro Studi Sorelle Clarke de Bagni, Lucca, 1988. Bussola 9. Bologna: Cooperative Libraria U Editrice Bologna, 1990. 205–15.

Masinton, Martha, and Charles G. Masinton. "Second-Class Citizenship: The Status of Women in Contemporary American Fiction." What Manner of Woman: Essays on English and American Life and Literature. Ed. Marlene Springer. NewYork: New York UP, 1977. 297–315.

Maurocordato, Alexandre. Les quatre dimensions du 'Herzog' de Saul Bellow. Les Archives de Lettres Modernes 102. Paris: Minard, 1969.

Mellard, James M. "Consciousness Fills the Void: Herzog, History, and the Hero in the Modern World." Modern Fiction Studies 25.1 (1979): 75–91.

Examines the results of theories of the death of God and of the void as the epistemological basis of H. Hence, the interleaved themes explored in this novel become self and identity, reallty and history. Sees these themes as more crucial in this novel than previously.

Explores the thematic significance of Herzog's profession as an historian, since it is through his examiation of his own past and that of Western civilization that he both escapes and embraces his true Self. Hence, the book may be read as a dialogue between Herzog of the past (including other personages of the past) and the Herzog of the present.

Discusses the confused perceptions in Herzog's mind of image clusters—colors, odors and natural phenomena (mainly floral)—embedded in certain configurations in the novel. These clusters of color images accumulate symbolic value. Accounts for this in terms of Herzog's hypersensitive mental condition.

Argues that Bellow's specific, good intentions in H do not rob his novel of energy. Admires H, describes his characteristics in detail, his parallels with his creator, the technical virtuosity and feeling that went into the book, plus its moral responsibility. Concludes that it is both a powerful and a moral book.

In H Bellow treats history, as well as Herzog the historian, as a study in neurosis. "In its central character the novel directs the reader's attention to the status of history, and in particular to the Freudian view of history." Quotes Rieff on history ("History, the memory of existence in time, is the flaw. Neurosis is the failure to escape the past, the burdens of history"). Proceeds to develop this thesis with regard to H.

Examines the book's chapter lengths in terms of a mathematical graph. The nine chapters, looked at this way, approximate an arch with chapter five forming a keystone in the middle.

Bellow is preoccupied with many of the same intellectual concerns that absorbed Eliot and other "Wastelanders," but demonstrates there is "not much belief in wastelands." Traces Herzog's waverings between "highbrow literature" and mammeloshen, between "Heidegger" and heimisch.

Describes Herzog's loss of innocence and Hamlet-like madness as he encounters evil. Concentrates on his "fall into the quotidian."

Accuses Bellow of being more alienated than he knows. Though in H and MSP he is disparaging the wasteland tradition and testing some kind of "cultural conservatism," Bellow does so with the kind of "self-righteous victimization" that cripples his work. Sees Bellow retaliating against his alienation by "historical pontifications."

Romantic, transcendental, and humanistic, Herzog finally affirms with Rousseau "Je sens mort coeur et je connais les hommes." Skirting the void, he is finally true to the Emersonian text of his high school address and allows his life to be "open to ecstasy or a divine illumination."

Porter, M. Gilbert. "'Weirdly Tranquil' Vision: The Point of View of Moses Herzog." Saul Bellow ]ournal S. 1 (1989): 3–11.

Reviews previous criticism on H and then explores in some detail the actual functioning of narrative technique in the novel as it contributes to the development of Herzog's character. Discusses Herzog's inward and outward contemplation, self-reflections, desire for transcendence, and struggle toward clarity. Concludes that Bellow's strategic shifts in person and time-the special employment of an intricate central-intelligence point of view—embodies particularly well the condition of the protagonist, torn as he is between the realm of thought and the realm of feeling, between the evidence for despair in the world and desire for affirmation in himself, and between the active man and the reflective consciousness.

Quayum, M. A. "Quest for Equilibrium: Transcendental Ideas in Bellow's Herzog." Saul Bellow Journal 14:2 (1996): 43–69.

Examines in detail the Emersonian transcendentalism in H by first comparing the moral philosophy of H to that of Emerson. Takes stock of the process of Herzog's moral purgation by showing how he attains a moment of poise by shedding his dismembered consciousness and all excesses at the end of the novel. Concludes that it is possible to consider Bellow as the latter-day successor to those nineteenth-century transcendental writers.

Rahv, Philip. "Bellow the Brain King." New York Herald Tribune Book Week 20 Sept. 1964: 1, 14, 16. Rpt. in The Myth and the Powerhouse. Philip Rahv. New York: Farrar, 1965. 218–24; Literature and the Sixth Sense. Philip Rahv. Boston: Houghton, 1969. 392–97; Essays on Literature and Politics 1932–1972. Philip Rahv. Boston: Houghton, 1978. 62–64.

Sees H as a great comic novel and the most significant novel since Ulysses. "Herzog has the sense to respond, the emotions to care, and the mind to probe his surroundings, his people, and himself." Praises the book for its vitality and humanity. Concentrates on the picture of modern experience captured in the novel, and also points out Herzog's literary forebears.

Argues that Bellow's chief artistic problem in H was to keep the reader focused on the change in Herzog rather than on the other plot events. The reader must be made to understand the intricate twists in his dealings with others without expecting resolution in the relationships at the end of the novel.

Notes the absence of any letters to Hegel in this novel through Bellow. Occupies himself centrally throughout the novel with many philosophical issues deriving from Hegel.

Points out that in H and HG there are two manifestations of the biblical character, Jeremiah. In H the character of Ravitch is built on this model and takes his contemporary characteristics from Bellow's personal childhood experience with one Jeremiah, a family boarder and friend. In HG the Jeremiah character is Menasha Klinger, a second reincarnation of the same childhood boarder/friend.

Discusses radicalism in several notable British and American modernist novels. Talks about the state of the defensive perimeter about the inner self having both contracted and weakened, and about the nature of the inferiority having changed somewhat. Includes H in this comprehensive treatment because it furnishes a kind of "rounding off" of this paradigm.

Compares H with the flawed Moby Dick in terms of its scope, style and themes. Then discourses generally upon plot and theme.

Sees Herzog's dialogue with himself as a preparation for dialogue with others, making it possible for him finally to accept the otherness he cannot control, cannot impose himself on, and cannot fully comprehend.

Praises the novel for its sane intelligence acting upon and reacting to the imponderabilities of normal human existence in the vivid darknesses of the mid-twentieth-century. Then proceeds to discuss H as a comic novel, and the nature and characteristics of its hero.

Describes H as a story of emotional catharsis through which [the hero] learns to accept and affirm himself as a man and a Jew. Deals also with Herzog's ideas, and with Madeleine's self-rejection as a Jew and as a woman.

Sacerdoti Mariani, Gigliola. "These are the letters that all men refuse: Le 'lettre''di Herzog.'" Memoria e tradizione nella cultura ebraic-america. Ed. Guido Fink and Gabriella Morisco. Bussola 9. Bologna: CLUEB, 1990. Papers presented at the Convegno "Memoria e tradizione nella cultura ebraica," Centro studi sorelle Clarke di Begni di Lucca, June 1988.

Sale, Roger. "Now, and Then." Literary Inheritance. Roger Sale. Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts P, 1984. 203–19.

Sale, Roger. "Provincial Champions and Grandmasters." Hudson Review 17.4 (1964–1965): 608–18.

Acclaims the novel as the least provincial and most contemporary novel on the current literary scene. Criticizes the novel for having run down before the end. Sees H as the largest step taken beyond Lawrence and romanticism, but as a novel which buys this step at the price of fear and loathing of humankind. Concludes, nevertheless, that what Herzog ultimately finds is faith.

Notes Bellow's acknowledgment that the significant theme in H is the imprisonment of the individual in humiliating, impotent privacy, as well as the bondage imposed by his intellectual world. Goes on to argue that in H Bellow is seeking some primal point of balance that will offer him strength in times of grave personal crisis. Sees this being partially charted through the circulation of four elements–earth, air, fire, and water–all of which weave themselves through Herzog's senses. Calls the novel a treasure chest of sensual stimuli: passions percolate, language bubbles, ideas and ideologies erupt, smolder and explode. The four major elements serve to expand the senses, and they recur both separately and together to create patterns that not only define Herzog, but also help to clarify his relationships with other characters. Concludes that these primal elements thrust Herzog toward prehistory, away from his epistollary monologues. Describes him finally as a Renaissance man living in a post-romantic twentieth century whose archaic emotional type belongs to the agricultural or pastoral stages.

Sees H, along with Ulysses, as a major modern study of Jewish assimilation. Compares the two and discusses in narrative form his purported meeting with the real Moses Herzog. Argues that readers frequently fail to realize that this latter material is a spoof.

Scheer-Schaezler, Brigitte. "Short Story and Modern Novel: A Comparative Analysis of Two Texts." Orbis Litterarum 25 (1970): 338–51.

Scheer-Schaezler, Brigitte. A Taste for Metaphors: Die Bildersprache als lnterpretationsgrundlage des modernen Romans dargestellt ausaul Bellows Herzog. Modern Sprachen Schriftenreihe 11. Vienna: Vervand der Osterreichischen Neuphilologen, 1968.911. Schraepen, Edmond. "Herzog: Disconnection and Connection." Saul Bellow and His Work. Ed. Edmond Schraepen. Brussels: Centrum voor Taal-en Literatuurwetenschap, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1978. 119–29. Proceedings of a symposium held at the Free University of Brussels (V.U.B.) on 10–11 Dec. 1977.

Investigates the network of images he finds underlying H in order to trace the structuring process of the novel—a process towards order, towards self-reconstruction, a slow, shedding, purging process.

Schueler, Mary Dudley. "The Figure of Madeleine in Herzog." Notes on Contemporary Literature 1.3 (1971): 5–7.

Sees Madeleine's name (derived from Magdalene) as placing her in the mainstream of two traditions—one beginning with the New Testament and the other beginning with Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. Like the Proust character, Swann, who ate the madeleine, Herzog begins an examination of his own character.

Sharma, Harsh. "Reconstructing a Text: Herzog, History and Nietzsche." Saul Bellow Journal 7.2 (1988): 1–15.

Discusses H as a novel about slum clearing and urban crisis in the inner soul. Shows how this is related to a discussion of the two parallel texts in H: 1) the personal history of Moses E. Herzog, and the unwritten text 2) Herzog's letters, jottings, scribbled ideas, and even random thoughts. Shows how in the form of collage, the latter text constitutes a core text because it corresponds to Herzog's quest for a meaningful existence. Concludes that the clipping, pasting, editing, alluding, revising, explaining, and clarifying all add up to a brilliant archaeology of the history of the Western intellectual.

Focuses on the hero's encounter with the archetype of the feminine with particular regard to its nourishing good, orgiastic emotionality, and stygian depths. Traces Herzog's confrontation with Circe and Calypso as well as his intellectual configurations, universal connections, and social meanings. Shows how his experience with the feminine in its multidimensional propulsion awakens and energizes H, and relies heavily on Jungian concepts such as Self, Ego, Shadow, and Anima. Concludes by showing Herzog's revitalized relationship with nature, stars, flowers, and creatures.

Sees H as demonstrating just how "fully Bellow has mastered his own version of an open style of ideological comedy." Sees the letter device as indicative of Bellow's impulse toward older literary forms. Analyzes in detail the nature and form of Bellow's comedy with specific reference to several novels, but with more detailed treatment of H.

A treatment of Bellow's rejection of the wasteland mentality. Sees H as an attempt to achieve an awareness of the romantic inheritance by comprehension, exploration, and humanity. H illustrates modern man, but pushes this character to the extremes only pointed toward in previous characters. In addition, H wrestles with all the abstract philosophical issues while in the grip of a compulsion to understand, and then live is an inspired condition. His suffering is righteous, not self-pitying. His life is finally evidence of his existential liveliness rather than any systematized truth.

Sees Herzog as a "high class" version of previous Bellow heroes. Reviews major themes, style, and the general reflection of American society contained in the novel.

Argues that Herzog undergoes a downward transcendence during which he leaves an entire set of values behind, including cherished images of himself. Traces the process by which he emerges in possession of his "authentic self."

Traces the phenomenon of monologue in the Bellow novels through a chronological treatment of each protagonist. Concludes that in the ending lies the evidence that each of these characters finally flees from self and monologue into community and communion.

Sees Moses Herzog leading modern man out of the wasteland into the promised land. Likens his progress to that recounted in Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience.

Argues that both MSP and H employ discourses that center around disease, beneath which lies a racialized, specifically black, discourse. Argues that Bellow is not simply a racist writer, but rather one for whom the outside world can only be experienced through his own Holocaust experience. Hence racial blackness in the novel accentuates his introspective tendencies and causes him to be interested in little else. Sammler identifies with black aggressors as victims in a war. Considers the pickpocket's actions self-ironic and fails to empathize with him because of his own myopia. However, the pickpocket ironically becomes the vehicle which returns him to life. In H, Moses too suffers from the disease of the single self. The invisibility of racial blackness in literature does not always denote an absence. Moses carries within himself the power of blackness which threatens to engulf him. Jewishness and blackness carry connotations of disease. As a romantic novel, H is pitting the disease of his Jewish cerebral activity against the healing power of black sexuality. This is playing two stereotypes against each other. Given its proper historical and cultural dimensions, blackness may, after all, cure the disease of the single self.

Traces the thematic implications of the key quotations from and references to Walt Whitman. Sees the whole letter writing habit as attributable to Whitman, who also did it in his waning years.

Provides a formalist and generalized analysis of the letters in H. Concludes that letters are the way Herzog orders reality for himself and discusses how they function in terms of point of view. As the final letters from the Berkshires appear, we see that Herzog is in the final stages of his mental housecleaning process.

Discusses the thematic influence of "The Wasteland" on H, and Bellow's troubled apprehension that the poem had debunked the old idea of self. Then proceeds to point out the irony that Bellow includes Eliotesque devices and images in H, but to reach a different grail. Traces the parallels carefully throughout the text. Suggests that Herzog is an animadversion of "The Wasteland" as interpreted by Bellow in which Herzog proves there really is no less selfhood in the world. Suggests that recognizing its near paradoxical relationship to Eliot's master-poem of the twentieth century will only underline Bellow's droll humor and enhance his humanism.

Sees Bellow, because of his Jewishness, as having achieved a vision beyond absurdity in this novel. Goes on to discuss H in light of Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky.

Provides a generalized exegesis of Herzog's character and of some of the thematic concerns of the novel. Deals briefly with the issue of Herzog as urban Jew and representative modern Everyman.

Provides a loose discussion of the role of intellect in the Bellow novel and the relationship of intellectualism and the human discussion with brief relevance to H.

Weinstein, Norman. "Herzog, Order and Entropy." English Studies 54.4 (1973): 336–46.

Shows H as an attempt to solve some of the same problems Flaubert and Joyce worked on—particularly the problems of order and unity as theme and as aesthetic concern in the novel. Sees the earlier works as highly wrought artistically, and H as needing much critical exegesis before it can be properly assessed.

Werner, Craig Hansen. "The Writer as Craftsman: Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison." Paradoxical Resolutions: American Fiction Since James Joyce. Craig Hansen Werner. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1982. 123–43.

Discusses H and Invisible Man in the wake of the tradition of Ulysses as very major postwar novels. Discusses ironic distance, ambivalence toward individuality, and license with regard to fact. Attempts to create representative characters. Provides much comment on theme, style, character, philosophy and structure. Considers both novels to be encyclopedic in their scope and achievement.

Argues that, like the Invisible Man, Augie and Herzog emerge as incipient postmodern figures, chameleons whose quiddity while conceived in transcendental terms, actually appears more convincingly grounded in the rhetorical success or failure of the stories that he constructs about his life. Traces the social milieu which has shaped both protagonists as prototypical post-war personalities. Then changes direction and argues that both characters are very much "there," but in uncompromisingly postmodern terms. Herzog, for instance, is a compelling version of a contemporary self-creating personality. Sees Augie March in the same terms. Concludes that we can also read Herzog as storiless, centerless, and comprised of many selves. The novel asserts and even declares him as a substantial figure, but subversively and mischievously enacts him as a chameleon.

Reference to Dostoyevsky's character Mitya in The Brother's Karamazov. Suggests an explanation of how Moses Herzog began to recover from his threatened breakdown, an explanation that would reply to a central question posed in existing interpretations of H. Refers to specific scenes in Dostoyevsky's novel for which Bellow provides unmistakeable parallels. It is Mitya's philosophy and strategies that Herzog uses to deal with his own violence and suffering, and to recognize that no one is alone, not the rejected lover, not the father who has lost the custody battle, and not even the tortured child.

Rejects considering the novel on any other terms than its inner structural relations. Admires Bellow's manipulation of his materials and particularly his handling of point of view. Concludes that this novel is Bellow's finest masterpiece.

"The Altered Heart." Newsweek 21 Sept. 1964: 114.

Bailey, James W. Social Education 29.1 (1965): 49, 50, 52.

Barrett, William. "Reader's Choice." Atlantic Nov. 1964: 192, 196.

Boroff, David. "Mr. Bellow Achieves His 'Breakthrough.'" National Observer 5 Oct. 1964: 18.

Brodin, Pierre. "La litterature americaine." Liberte [Montreal] Nov.–Dec. 1964: 480–83.

Burns, Richard K. Library Journal 1 Sept. 1964: 3182.

Curley, Thomas. "Herzog in Front of a Mirror, the Reader Behind Him." Commonweal 2