=Book recently read: Herzog by Saul Bellow=

I never read him.

A dead white male who often draws heavily from the American Jewish immigrant tradition.  Born at the beginning of the last century: 1915.

What could Saul Bellow possibly have to say to me?

I don’t know. 

Quite likely nothing, I reckoned. 

So I gave him 1 page to hook me. 

1 page out of the 317 that comprises his novel Herzog. 

If it didn’t happen in 1 page, 

it was back to the library with Bellow

 and his Herzog.

He did the job in half a page.

                        Herzog…a middle-aged mensch,

a bit of a schmuck,

a ladies man whose success at seduction

is invariably his own undoing,

a scholar whose follow-up book

to an earlier well-received study of Romanticism

lies moribund in stacks of yellowing,

insect-nibbled

manuscript pages

doomed to the status of never-to-be finished.

Herzog—trailing the wreckage of ill-advised marriages and bitter ex-wives and, most painfully of all, the much-loved offspring from those marital ruins, children from whose lives he’s been reluctantly and forcibly ejected.

Herzog, who compulsively writes letters

he’ll never send to addressees 

past and present:

lovers, friends, and family,

the living and the dead,

presidents and philosophers.

These letters are the best part of the book:

funny, erudite, despairing, pleading,

triumphant, apologetic—there’s even

one to God.

Herzog, a man who can always see both sides, and so vacillates while the unthinking & headstrong, those

who never for one second doubt themselves, 

stupid, selfish, & cocksure,

run roughshod over him.

Herzog, the victim,

the conscience of the world,

the butt of the joke just begging to be kicked.

Bellow has written a grand, old-fashioned novel that was going out-of-fashion even as he wrote it half-a-century ago.

Bellow knew it himself.

His rage at what he sees as the death of humanism,

the surrender of the search for meaning and order,

the moral relativism of a culture

where there’s any ethical concern at all,

burns low and steady but fiercely

through every page of Herzog.

Bellow saw what was coming.

What had, in fact, already arrived after World War II and would soon become such “aberrations” as the new novel, deconstructionism, post-structuralism, situationism, post-modernism; in short, the shattered, sophisticated albeit barely disguised nihilistic world-view we virtually take for granted today as best representing “reality.”

Bellow saw it coming, like Yeats’s saw the rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem, and he deplored it.  

The thing is, that’s the very worldview I have—and it’s reflection in the kinds of anti-novels I feel most comfortable inhabiting are everything Bellow wrote against.

The anti-Bellow.

And yet I enjoyed Herzog.

 I was moved by it. I dreamt about it—or, to be more accurate, the emotions and memories it stirred up informed my dreams. More accurately, they were nightmares.

Herzog, and for that matter, Bellow, too, along with the world they stubbornly believe in and fight for are not entirely dead, after all. All the more obvious evidence to the contrary.

Even in an age that has declared humanity dead and has already heralded the advent of a new era

—the posthuman and transhumance—

there is still something that answers within us

 when Herzog declares himself finished with “big” ideas, finished with “suffering” as a way to spiritual purification, finished with the “drama” and “disasters” 

that he realizes he has in large part called down upon himself by his own calculated, 

if largely unconscious, 

helplessness.

 There is something within us that quickens

 at the simplicity and humility

with which Herzog seeks to conduct the rest of his determinedly anonymous, unspectacular & quintessentially human life 
at the end of this novel.

There is something beautiful, sweet, & true 

about Herzog that I don’t think 

we’ve quite shaken free of, 

no matter how “post” or “trans” human 

we’ve become.

Whether we will leave Herzog, Bellow, and humanism
behind yet and whether that’s a good thing or bad
is another issue altogether. 

For now, Herzog still breathes: a human being, living quietly, in an inconspicuous place, 
waking in the morning, 
stretching in the sun,
thanking God for his brief,
imperfect existence,
needing no further explanation.