Saul Bellow’s Herzog Part 1

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Why am I talking about books?

Everything around me has become a hashtag?—?a hard identifier or a hard classifier or a hard organizer of the modern day ‘everything’. Feelings, judgements or just ‘#lazy-assery’ (ever wondered how many people have actually written a full grammatically correct sentence or a block of words as a caption for pics in Instagram?—?no one! including yours truly)— everything has found a # tag. In a way, it has also revolutionized discovery of ‘artifacts’ in the ever expanding universe of human creation?—?the social media. These hashtags and many more such things devoured me in the lost world of the Silicon Valley in the last three years. I will expound more on that in another post. Nevertheless, I loved Silicon Valley because of many other reasons as well?—?sheer diverse geography that made walk miles everyday, the weather that I could enjoy almost all days in the whole year, those lovely moments of early love I cherish and the relationships that I cultivated. We really didn’t want to move. Chris and I live with our dog Howie near Dolores Park. Life has never been happier. However, we found a new opportunity to move to NYC. We debated?—?it will be new for both of us to start our married life together and also be good for our nerves to move to another city where everyone and their family I know moves, thinks and talks with a nerve-racking aggression and speed. We have decided to drive cross-country and move here with our lock, stock and barrel. As we unpack and settle down, I decided write about I have been reading. I find this exercise particularly fascinating from my very short but great stint at Amazon where we wrote our ideas and projects into detailed narratives before we start working on them. Writing is a process?—?it can help us understand, introspect and shape our thoughts and hypotheses into meaningful information. Hence, on this month-long break I will write more about my thoughts on what I read and try and express my rejoice and/or disdain of what I read.

What am I reading now?

I have been reading ‘Made In America’ by Bill Bryson (more on that later) and ‘Herzog’ by Saul Bellow. I enjoyed reading Herzog and it wasn’t a very easy read?—?the protagonist is a professor of the ‘Roots of Romanticism’ who is obsessed with the ‘human condition’ and a very depressed and estranged husband and father. The book may be fraught with seemingly long arduous paragraphs of whining and complaining about existence but they are beautifully crafted segues into a surreal stream of thoughts?—?those that meander from reality and enter into a metaphysical world of philosophy, history and deep personal introspection.

Not devoid of sympathy, the policeman’s face also expressed a fatigued skepticism. He was heavy-lidded, and on his silent, thick mouth there was a sort of smile. Sono’s lips had looked a little like this when she questioned him about the other women in his life. Well-the variety of oddities, alibis, inventions, fantasies the police ran into everyday …

This book opens up multiple doors of understanding life; it offered a very sophisticated voyeurism of self pity that is almost addictive (which is a very short and sensational description of what I think about the book); it threw a light on a lot of topics under modern philosophy (including interesting excerpts on German philosophy and it’s obsession with dread) and an empathy towards the human condition; and a very inside view of Jewish upbringing in New York City.

Herzog is an intellectual. He sees himself as a vigilant with a heightened sense of consciousness. Though his perspectives give a very good insight into his worldview, they are weighed down by guilt (of personal and societal) and hopelessness that are a resultant of the heightened consciousness. It somewhat gave me an evidence of the Sad Socrates Effect (as John Stuart Mill wrote, “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied;better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied”) in the suffering of Moses Herzog.

The novel is based on two most common leitmotifs of Saul Bellow?—?ideas (as Saul Bellow puts it “we live among ideas much more than we live in nature”) and his own past (Saul Bellow’s father was a bootlegger too). A significant portion of this book is written in the form of unsent letters by Herzog to people known, unknown, dead and alive. They are an interesting read as most of them are outlets of an individual suffering from his own consciousness and he calls it “self-revenge”.

“Listen, Pulver, he wrote, a marvelous idea for a much-needed essay on the ‘inspired condition’! Do you believe in transcendence downward as well as upward? (The words originate with Jean Wahl.) Shall we concede the impossibility of transcendence? It all involves historical analysis. I would argue that we have fashioned a new utopian history, an idyll, comparing the present to an imaginary past, because we hate the world as it is. The hatred of the present has not been well understood.”

It is only co-incidental that Herzog in Yiddish means ‘Song Of The Heart’.

“…to know truth, to be free, to love another, to consummate existence, to abide with death in the clarity of consciousness-without which, racing and conniving to evade death, the spirit…is no longer a rarefied project.”

In my next post about Herzog, I will try and capture the reason why I read and liked this book.