The Resilience of Moses Herzog: Saul Bellow and the Humanist Novel
Jeroen Vanheste
Open University of The Netherlands
jeroen.vanheste@ou.nl
Download a PDF of this article
Abstract: The oeuvre of American writer Saul Bellow (1915-2005) is deeply humanist in its emphasis on human autonomy, growth and meaning. For Bellow, humans are self-interpreting beings with agency and the ability to shape their personalities. Bellow particularly emphasises human resilience: in his novels he shows us resilient individuals who make an effort to take their lives into their own hands, refusing to be passive victims of their circumstances and misfortunes. This view of man is most impressively expressed in Bellow’s best-known novel Herzog (1964). The protagonist Moses Herzog goes through a severe crisis and almost succumbs to his misery, but eventually emerges from his difficulties as a renewed and stronger person after a learning process of self-examination and reorientation. In this article, I discuss Bellow’s humanist ideas, the way they take shape in Herzog, and in particular the role of resilience in them.
Keywords: humanism, resilience, narrative identity, Bellow.
1. The humanist novel under threat
In his acceptance speech on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, Bellow spoke of the development of characters in the novel (Bellow 2015, 291-300). In the age of the realist novel, represented by writers such as Dickens, Jane Austen and Tolstoy, literary characters were usually powerful and sovereign individuals. As such, they can be seen as the expression of a classical-humanist view of man, a view in which personality, autonomy and freedom were still taken for granted. But due to developments in both science and philosophy, this view of man came under increasing pressure from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. After Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, we think differently about human beings. We have become aware that we are at least partly determined by biological traits and unconscious drives, and we recognise the influence of our cultural, social and economic environment. In 20th-century philosophy and science, schools of thought and scientific developments such as structuralism, post-structuralism and neurobiology provided increasingly vehement critiques of the humanist axioms of personality and autonomy. According to most philosophers and scientists (contemporary examples include Daniel Dennett and Patricia Churchland, but these developments were already in full swing in Bellow’s time), there is no human self as a core of who we are, no free will and no autonomy: we are determined by biological, genetic, neurological, social and cultural structures from which we cannot escape.
In his Nobel Prize speech, Bellow argues that as a result of these developments, literature changed as well. While, for example, Pierre Bezukhov (in Tolstoy’s War and Peace), Ivan Karamazov (in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov) and Dorothea Brooks (in George Eliot’s Middlemarch) are strong personalities with considerable insight and control over their lives, later characters such as Leopold Bloom (in Joyce’s Ulysses), Joseph K. (in Kafka’s The Trial) and Antoine Roquentin (in Sartre’s Nausea) are hardly able to make sense of their situation, let alone influence it. The naturalist novel by authors such as Emile Zola and Theodore Dreiser shows another form of human powerlessness: here, a scientific conception of man is expressed, a sense that we are determined by our natural innate characteristics and social environment and thus cannot escape our fate. In short: the era of the individual was over, and with it, that of the humanist novel. Writers introduced new forms of expression that showed a human self that is no longer powerful and autonomous but fragmented and unstable, a self that lives in an absurd, meaningless universe that it cannot control. The literary modernism of writers such as Kafka, Beckett and Camus gave expression to this fragmented and alienated self.
2. Bellow as a humanist against the grain
Bellow, however, firmly rejects the ‘death of the individual’ as preached and propagated by authors such as those mentioned above. ‘Can it be that human beings are at an end?’, he asks in his Nobel Prize speech, ‘Is individuality really so dependent on historical and cultural conditions?’ (Bellow 2015, 294). No, is his answer: our thinking about humans may have been enriched and deepened by the new insights of science and philosophy, but there is certainly no reason to assume that personality and autonomy are mere fictions. Man should not be abolished by fashionable theories, he says, because their truth is at most a partial one: ‘there is much more to us – we all feel it. Our very vices, our mutilations, show how rich we are in thought and culture. How much we know. How much we can feel’ (Bellow 2015, 299). Science and philosophy show us a limited and one-dimensional picture of human beings, while we long for ‘a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, and what this life is for’ (Bellow 2015, 299-300). Bellow criticizes science’s pretense that it alone is capable of understanding human beings and points out that literature and the arts can also teach us a great deal about the human condition. He sees himself as an ‘interpreter of the human heart’ and considers his mission as a writer as exploring ‘what we human beings are, and what this life is for’ (Bellow 2015, 1, 299).
So Bellow wanted to defend the ideas of human personality, autonomy and self-development at a time when these humanist values were increasingly being questioned. He was convinced that we do have a ‘self’, a personality that shapes our humanity. Indeed, science and philosophy have convincingly shown that this ‘self’ is not transparent and in many ways problematic. But the conclusions drawn from this have been far too drastic. There is no reason to declare the death of the individual, for that is a form of misanthropy that removes all depth from our lives (Bellow 2015, 238). It is true that man is no longer what we thought he was, but that insight has not solved the riddle of the human condition. Science and philosophy are unable to have the last word on the most fundamental questions about man, questions that have to do with identity and meaning: ‘He is something. What is he? This question, it seems to me, modern writers have answered poorly […] The mystery increases, it does not grow less’ (Bellow 2015, 195). In fact, Bellow saw it as the writer’s task to revisit this question, which he felt was increasingly unjustly ignored in modern literature. In his work as a writer, he tried to refute the ‘death of the individual’ and revive the humanist view of man and human life.
3. Bellow’s novel Herzog
Bellow was thus deeply interested in the timeless questions about the human condition, human agency and human resilience. The Nobel Prize Committee praised the way he shaped his ideas in his work, referring to both his ‘human understanding’ and his ‘subtle analysis of contemporary culture’ (Atlas 2000, 461). Well-known novels in which he expressed these ideas include The Adventures of Augie March, Mr. Sammler’s Planet and Humboldt’s Gift, but his best-known and most-loved novel is undoubtedly Herzog. Despite its complexity (almost the entire novel is set within Herzog’s head, where memory, imagination, reflection and analysis mingle), it became a crowd favourite and a huge sales success: millions of copies have been sold. Herzog is a fictionalised account of a serious personal crisis, largely based on Bellow’s own experiences: it is a self-portrait in which he does not spare himself. Like Moses Herzog, the novel’s protagonist, Bellow was an egocentric man who was difficult to get along with, a distant and uninvolved father and a half-failed academic. Always preoccupied with books and ideas, not very suited to everyday life. ‘I write from about 8AM until one, then I go out and make my mistakes’, he joked about this (Atlas 2000, 407). By 1964, Bellow, like Herzog, had gone through two divorces and had a child with each of his two ex-wives.
‘If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me’, thus Herzog’s famous opening line (Bellow 2003, 3. Subsequent references to the novel are indicated in brackets in the text). Moses Herzog is 47 years and going through a severe crisis. His second marriage has just broken down. His wife Madeleine had a secret affair with his best friend Valentine and has now kicked him out of the house. Herzog has children he rarely sees with both ex-wives; an academic career that has fallen apart after a promising start; financial problems; a country house with hopelessly overdue maintenance; and so on. Enough to get a man down, and Herzog is having a particularly hard time: ‘His face revealed what a beating he had taken’ (6). He is on the verge of mental collapse or has even already passed that point. His mood is one of deep gloom; his condition is repeatedly described as depressed. He suffers from insomnia and takes pills for it, ‘to preserve himself’ (117). He walks around benumbed, sometimes more like a zombie than a human being: ‘His eyes were swollen and his head asleep, but his anxious heart beat faster than ever’ (117). As a result of his insomnia, Herzog feels wrecked: he is ‘careworn, busted’ (298) and ‘confused […] feverish, damaged’ (38).
In addition, Herzog is incessantly weighed down by heavy feelings of guilt: towards his first wife Daisy, whom he has treated badly; towards his children, for whom he is hardly present; towards his academic vocation, which he neglects; towards his family and friends, whom he tends to forget; towards his girlfriend Ramona, who is very good to him in this difficult period without getting anything in return; and towards himself, because he shrinks from confronting his problems. A characteristic passage in this context is the following:
To his son and his daughter he was a loving but bad father. To his own parents he had been an ungrateful child. To his country, an indifferent citizen. To his brothers and his sister, affectionate but remote. With his friends, an egoist. With love, lazy. With brightness, dull. With power, passive. With his own soul, evasive. (7)
Herzog suffers terribly: ‘his heart is contemptibly aching’, and he would like to give it ‘a shaking, or put it out of his breast’ (182, italics by Bellow). He has ‘an injured heart, and raw gasoline poured on the nerves’ (219) and feels ‘the entire world press upon him’ (219). ‘There is someone inside me’, he thinks, ‘I am in his grip. […] He will ruin me’ (14). He fears ‘falling apart’ (14) and would prefer to ‘creep into hiding, like an animal’ (31). He experiences his condition as torture: ‘I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed.’ (225)
4. Moses Herzog’s struggle
Today, someone in Herzog’s condition is likely to be prescribed tranquillisers or antidepressants. But at the time Bellow’s novel was published, the emphasis in psychiatry was still on a psychoanalytic approach: the causes of a depression were mainly sought in the patient’s personal background and life history. Herzog has conversations with a psychiatrist who works this way, but he is portrayed as a charade figure who is more interested in Herzog’s handsome ex-wife than in his patient. Despite the lack of serious psychiatric or medicinal help, however, Herzog eventually manages to overcome the worst. How does he succeed?
Herzog refuses to wallow in self-pity and disillusionment. Instead, he confronts himself, fighting back in his own way: he obsessively writes letters, ‘to everyone under the sun’ (3). He writes letter after letter, without ever sending one. Initially, many of his letters are rather confused. For instance, he writes strange notes like ‘It has been reported that several teams of Russian Cosmonauts have been lost; disintegrated, we must assume. One was heard calling “SOS – world SOS”’ (14). Many letters are addressed to people in his own immediate circle, providing an outlet for his emotions. For instance, he writes to his ex-wives, his children, mother-in-law, psychiatrist, to himself (‘Dear Moses E. Herzog, Since when have you taken such an interest in social questions, in the external world?’ (75)) and to the dead (‘Dear mama, As to why I haven’t visited your grave in so long…’ (14)). Other letters have a more intellectual content and are addressed to a variety of philosophers and theorists, including Montaigne, Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche (‘I also know you think that deep pain is ennobling […] and there you have me with you’ (347)) and Heidegger (‘I should like to know what you mean by the expression “the fall into the quotidian”. When did this fall occur?’ (55)). A third category of letters has a spiritual character and is addressed to religious thinkers and even to God (‘How my mind has struggled to make coherent sense. […] I have desired to do your unknowable will, taking it, and you, without symbols’ (354)).
At first glance, Herzog’s writing appears to be the ravings of a confused or sometimes even disturbed person, but in essence it is mainly an intensive self-analysis, a Socratic self-examination: ‘Late in spring, Herzog had been overcome by the need to explain, to have it out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify, to make amends’ (4). Using the letters, he tries to organise his thoughts, control his emotions and reinterpret himself and his life into a coherent narrative. The letters, which gradually become less confused, are a form of therapy. While writing, Herzog searches for a direction and tries to reinvent himself: ‘A loving brute – a subtle, spoiled, loving man. Who can make use of him? Where is he needed? Show him the way to make his sacrifice to truth, to order, peace. Oh, that mysterious creature, that Herzog!’ (335). He is suffering, but he has the inner reserves to pull through and is also convinced that it is his duty to do so: ‘He must live. Complete his assignment, whatever that was’ (251).
5. Bellow’s perception of human beings
The view of man that Bellow expresses in his novels, and in particular in Herzog, is a distinctly humanist one: we see characters who are free to take responsibility for their lives and shape themselves; who constantly (re)interpret themselves and the story of their lives; and who are capable of growth and meaning. Human growth in particular is an important theme in Bellow’s novels. Humans have a lifelong obligation to keep developing and striving for a ‘higher consciousness’. One does not become human automatically, says Artur Sammler: ‘It’s not a natural gift at all. Only the capacity is natural’ (Bellow 1970, 304). ‘Awareness was his work; extended consciousness was his line, his business’ (303), we read of Herzog, who elsewhere exclaims: ‘we must improve! Must!’ (173). Bellow’s novels can often be read as Bildungsromans, as stories of human self-development and growth. Already in his debut novel Dangling Man, the protagonist Joseph wonders: ‘How should a good man live; what ought he to do?’ (Bellow 1996, 39). But Joseph fails to take control of his life and is eventually even glad when he is drafted into the army and no longer needs to make his own decisions. The characters in Bellow’s later novels also struggle to find their way in life. At the end of his adventures, Augie March says ‘that I have always tried to become what I am’ (Bellow 1999, 530). In More Die of Heartbreak protagonist Kenneth Trachtenberg says that ‘the making of one’s soul’ is ‘the only project genuinely worth undertaking’ (Bellow 1997, 155).
Bellow’s vision of man is accompanied by a good dose of scepticism towards the scientific and philosophical theories and models that claim to have solved the riddle of the human condition: because ‘human life is much more subtle than all its models’ (295). Related to this is the rejection of any rigid materialism and determinism: although a human being obviously is highly influenced by his biological traits and socio-economic environment, still these can never fully determine him. Man cannot be calculated: he remains ‘the composite, the mystical achievement of natural forces and his own spirit’ (168). Looking up at the stars in the garden of his country house, Herzog reflects that it is man who shapes matter, and not the other way around: ‘When he opened his eyes in the night, the stars were near like spiritual bodies. Fires, of course; gases – minerals, heat, atoms, but eloquent at five in the morning to a man lying in a hammock, wrapped in his overcoat’ (3).
In his novels, Bellow shows us human beings with enough playing room to take charge of their lives. It is our obligation to take care of this freedom, as he already emphasised in his first novel Dangling Man: ‘It is our humanity that we are responsible for it, our dignity, our freedom’ (Bellow 1996, 110). Rather than as powerless victims, Bellow therefore portrayed his characters as fighters. However tough life can be, self-pity or resignation is never an option: ‘I’m not going to be a victim. I hate the victim bit’, Herzog tells his lawyer (90). Human beings have sources of resilience within themselves, sources that Herzog successfully taps, as we will see below.
Bellow was certainly not overly optimistic about human agency and the makeability of life. His view of man had been influenced by modern science and post-war philosophy and had therefore left behind any naivety regarding human autonomy: his characters are strongly coloured by their natural disposition and (social, economic, cultural) environment. But Bellow nevertheless maintained a humanist orientation; Herzog for example always remains a self who exercises direction over his existence, however poorly that often succeeds and although he is by no means a rounded and coherent person in one piece. He himself realises the latter: ‘modern character is inconstant, divided, vacillating, lacking the stonelike certitude of archaic man’ (117). But although Herzog’s individuality is thus problematised, a certain core of his personality remains intact, a core that, as we will now see, can be understood narratively.
6. Narrative identity: life as story
With his portrait of Moses Herzog, Bellow shows man as a self-interpreting being, which illustrates the hermeneutic anthropology put forward by philosophers such as Charles Taylor, Paul Ricoeur and Marya Schechtman. In this view, humans are largely shaped by the way they interpret themselves and their world. This process of interpretation is social and dialogical, embedded in our ‘life world’, that is, in our biographical, social, historical and cultural context.
Essential to this view of man is that it is not so much about what man is (for example: a set of biological, genetic and neurological properties) as about who he is: someone with a particular past, living in a particular social and cultural environment, with particular values, motivations, goals and intentions. A self is not an object in the world, but a perspective on the world; and because a self is not part of the observable empirical reality, it cannot be studied by scientific means. As Taylor writes: ‘What it is to possess a liver or a heart is something I can define quite independently of the space of questions in which I exist for myself, but not what it is to have a self or to be a person’ (Taylor 1985, 4). Ricoeur means the same thing when he notes that the self ‘simply does not belong to the category of events and facts’ (Ricoeur 1991b, 193).
According to Taylor, Ricoeur and other philosophers like Alisdair MacIntyre, there is a natural way in which our self-interpretations can take shape, namely through narratives. Our self can be described through narrative means: we have a ‘narrative identity’. The development of our human self takes place partly through the stories we form about ourselves. One reason stories can play a role in self-interpretations is that stories have a temporal and intentional structure consistent with that of human life. Ricoeur says that stories can express ‘the very structure of human acting and suffering’ and points to ‘the inestimable value of narrative for putting our temporal experience into order’ (Ricoeur 1991a, 28, 31). Our lives consist of stories, MacIntyre says as well, and we interpret both our own lives and the lives of others in a narrative way: ‘we dream in narrative, day-dream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticise, construct, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative’ (MacIntyre 1984, 211-212).
According to Ricoeur, our narrative identity consists not only of a story about ourselves as individuals: there is in fact a web of interconnected stories. Our own story relates to other stories, both ‘real’ (such as biographies and the life stories we hear from others) and fictional (such as the stories in novels and films). Self-interpretation may find support in existing stories, whether these be historical, biographical or fictional. Ricoeur especially emphasises the role of literary narratives in this. ‘What would we know about love and hate without the great works of literature?’ he asks, giving as an example: ‘What about jealousy without Othello?’ (De Boer 1988, 112-113). In his view, our own story is always related to and involved with (the stories of) others.
Very important in relation to the concept of narrative identity is that our self-interpretation, the story of our life, is not only a description that shows our life, but also a construction that constitutes our life. As Taylor emphasizes, ‘language does not only serve to depict ourselves and the world, it also helps constitute our lives’ (Taylor 1989, 10). In composing our story, we make certain choices, transform a number of things, use our imagination, and try new possibilities, as it were, to explore life. The story is both a metaphor for human identity and a means of shaping that identity. We are both the reader and writer of our own life story, or in other words, we do not have a story but shape or are a story. Ricoeur therefore describes human life as an ‘activity and passion in search of a narrative’ (Ricoeur 1991a, 29, italics by Ricoeur). Our existential condition is ‘entangled in stories,’ and interpreting and narrating our lives is a way of answering Socrates’ call to examine our lives (Ricoeur 1991a, 30-31).
Space is lacking here to discuss the idea of narrative identity in more detail. Much has been written on the subject in recent years, both by philosophers building on the pioneering work of Taylor and Ricoeur, such as Marya Schechtmann, and by critics, such as Galen Strawson. The point here is that Bellow’s work, particularly his novel Herzog, provides a very interesting illustration of the view in which man is seen as a self-interpreting being with a narrative identity. This view is clearly a humanist one, as shows from its emphasis on human agency, choice and lifelong growth. The underlying belief is that we are both the interpreters and writers of our life story. ‘I am Herzog. I have to be that man. There is no one else to do it’, Herzog exclaims at one point (74, italics by Bellow). This is what it is all about: man has a lifelong mission, that of shaping his personality and his life, in short, his humanity. Of course, this has everything to do with being resilient: for resilience comes from the ability to judge oneself and one’s life and take control of that life on that basis, in a process that can be understood narratively.
7. Herzog’s recovery
So how does Herzog’s process of self-interpretation, self-development and recovery look like? Essential here is that he shakes off his isolation and solipsism and comes to terms with the social connections that have shaped his life. Early in his crisis, Herzog isolates himself from everything and everyone: he is furious with those who betrayed him and withdraws into books and letter writing. But while this helps him to channel his emotions, it does not in itself offer a solution. In fact, Bellow actually pokes fun at Herzog’s erudition and writing. In an essay he wrote about this: ‘I meant the novel to show how little strength “higher education” had to offer a troubled man. In the end he is aware that he has had no education in the conduct of life’ (Bellow 2015, 355). In an interview for Paris Review, Bellow expressed himself in a similar vein: ‘To me, a significant theme of Herzog is the imprisonment of the individual in a shameful and impotent privacy […] he comes to realize at last that what he considered his intellectual “privilege” has proved to be another form of bondage’ (Bellow 1994, 73).
So Herzog gradually abandons his vanity and complacency. He is, though not unsympathetic, a self-centred man, little involved with his children, family and friends and difficult to get along with. He is demanding, distrustful, hot-tempered, overbearing, gloomy, a worrier, vain, masochistic: not an easy man to live with. He realises this himself and feels he deserves to be punished for this: ‘He was in pain. He should be. Quite right’ (252). More important to Herzog than the books and letters, therefore, is the memory of his childhood in Chicago’s shabby Napoleon Street, where his mother died of cancer when he was 16 years old and his father held one failed job after another. The memories of the bond he had with his parents, brothers and childhood friends and of life in the city and community of the time are an important part in better understanding and then rebuilding himself. For example, one of the things Herzog now comes to realize is that he is ‘still a slave to Papa’s pain’ (163). He slowly begins to understand that his identity is connected to his past and also to the stories of others, and little by little he re-establishes relationships with those around him.
Thanks to this process of remembering and self-reflection, Herzog’s understanding of himself and his faults increases. He even begins to think a little more mildly of Madeleine and Valentine and to see their good sides as well. More generally, he gradually becomes a little less self-absorbed and sees through his earlier self-pity and self-aggrandizement better: ‘Herzog smiled at this avatar of his life, at Herzog the victim […] Herzog the man on whom the world depended for certain intellectual work, to change history, to influence the development of civilization’ (115). Toward the end of the novel, he reconnects with the outside world: with his brother Will, his girlfriend Ramona and some local residents. He realizes how much he loves his two children and understands that ‘a man doesn’t need happiness for himself’ (332, italics by Bellow). He resolves to be a more active father and also seems to find a renewed connection with nature. At the end of the novel, Herzog lies on the couch in his dilapidated country house. He waits for Ramona and realizes that he has finished writing letters. ‘At this time he had no message for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word’ (371). He has begun to break through his solipsism and is returning to the world.
8. Bellow and the humanist novel
Moses Herzog is a strong personality, a self who exercises a degree of direction over his life or at least tries to. But at the same time he is completely different from the protagonists in the traditional realist novel: he is not a rounded and coherent person in one piece, but a complex individual full of doubts and contradictions. Bellow’s view of man is influenced by contemporary science and philosophy, but without drawing its unnecessarily pessimistic and anti-humanist conclusions. Bellow did not jettison the belief in human agency and in the human mission to become as much as possible the author of the story of one’s life, and rejected all conceptions of man that are reductive and deterministic.
Moses Herzog feels the need to reinterpret the story of his life and reinvent himself. It is a difficult task, and he experiences the ‘great, bone-breaking burden of selfhood and self-development’ (102). But there is no escaping his mission: for every human being has his destiny, and Herzog feels that there is ‘something great, something into which his being, and all beings, can go’ (315), a task that must be fulfilled:
My behaviour implies that there is a barrier against which I have been pressing from the first, pressing all my life, with the conviction that it is necessary to press, and that something must come of it. Perhaps that I can eventually pass through. I must always have had such an idea. Is it faith? (251)
Bellow wrote at a time when the humanist conception of man had come under severe pressure, due to the developments in philosophy and science mentioned above. As a result of this changed perception of man, the novel changed as well. The sovereign individual disappeared from it, or at least became the exception. But as we have seen, Bellow rejected both the declaration of the death of the individual and the literature that was an expression of it. ‘According to the latest from Paris and London, there is no person. According to Bertrand Russell, “I” is a grammatical expression. According to Sartre there are no essences, and therefore no human nature,’ said an ironic Herzog in a draft version of the novel (Glenday 1990, 159). Bellow never joined such movements as existentialism, absurdism, aestheticism or postmodernism. Again and again, he rejected the proclamation of the ‘death of the individual,’ for example also in his important essay ‘The Writer as a Moralist’:
Writers of genius in the twentieth century (Paul Valéry, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce among others) have made us question the stability of the experiencing self, have dissolved it in intellect or in instinct, in the common life of the species, in dream and in myth, and all together have made us aware that the sovereign individual, that tight entity whose fortunes, passions and moral problems filled the pages of novels (and of historical studies as well) was simply a fabrication, the product of a multitude of interests and influences and of our ignorance of physics, psychology and our social class divisions (Bellow 2015, 161).
As he did throughout his writing career and does as well in this essay, Bellow criticizes this view and rejects ‘the negative tradition in literature’ (Bellow 2015, 162). Instead, he argues for a revaluation of the autonomous individual in the novel and, relatedly, for the ethical significance of literature: ‘I believe the moral function cannot be divorced from art’ (Bellow 2015, 164). By this moral function, Bellow does not mean giving moral lessons, but the reflection on the meaningful human life: ‘In what form shall life be justified? That is the essence of the moral question’ (Bellow 2015, 165). So instead of joining the chorus of those who proclaim the death of the individual in both life and the novel, Bellow breathes new life into the individual in his novels. He shows us the example of Moses Herzog to illustrate his conception of man as a free, self-interpreting and resilient being. Herzog reinterprets his childhood, his relationships, his work, and his desires and ambitions, thus creating a pathway to escape his misery.
9. Moses Herzog as a resilient ‘mensch’
Bellow’s ideas and the picture he paints of the human condition in his novels, are extremely significant to humanist thought. His view of man is optimistic: through his emphasis on the significance of autonomy, self-examination and growth, he shows us a resilient human being. In doing so, Bellow is critical of a culture that he believes reduces people’s resilience by suggesting that personal autonomy and leeway are little more than fictions since we are determined by our socio-economic circumstances and by our biological, genetic and neurological traits. The very stimulating task that Bellow set himself through his work is that of preserving a particular conception of man and of human life. ‘The kind of life that is represented in the books I read (and perhaps some that I wrote) had been exhausted’, he wrote about this in a letter (Atlas 2000, 439). The view expressed by Bellow stems from a certain belief in man and love for man: ‘this caring or believing or love alone matters’ (Bellow 2015, 91). That is why the Nobel Prize Committee praised him for ‘holding on to the realm of values in which man becomes human’ (Bellow 2015, 461). In his Nobel Prize speech, Bellow used a beautiful metaphor that fits very well with his beliefs: he referred to an unfinished sculpture by Michelangelo in which we see someone struggling to get out of a block of marble. Are we just matter, the question seems to be, or can we break free from this matter? As a humanist, Bellow believed that humans are indeed capable of emerging from the matter from which they are made, and as a writer he expressed that belief.
Paul Ricoeur said that human life is a text, and that our task is to gradually discover that we ourselves are the authors of that text. In this view, human freedom and resilience are understood as the ability to take direction, grow and find personal meaning. Bellow’s work provides an inspiring example of this: just as Moses Herzog finds sources of resilience in himself, so we as readers may find sources of resilience in Bellow’s work. Moses Herzog shows us what it means to be ‘A human being! A mensch!’ (90): it is our lifelong mission to become the author of the story of our lives and thus to emerge from the matter of which we are made.
References
Atlas, James. 2000. Bellow. A Biography. New York: Random House.
Bellow, Saul, Gloria Cronin and Ben Siegel eds. 1994. Conversations with Saul Bellow. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Bellow, Saul. 1996 [1944]. Dangling Man. New York: Penguin.
Bellow, Saul. 1999 [1953]. The Adventures of Augie March. New York: Penguin.
Bellow, Saul. 2003 [1964] Herzog. New York: Penguin.
Bellow, Saul. 1997 [1987]. More Die of Heartbreak. New York: Delta.
Bellow, Saul. 1970. Mr. Sammler’s Planet. New York: The Viking Press.
Bellow, Saul. 2015. There Is Simply too Much to Talk About: Collected Nonfiction. New York: The Viking Press.
De Boer, Theo. 1998. “De hermeneutiek van Ricoeur,” in Hermeneutiek, ed. Theo de Boer. Meppel: Boom, 90-120.
Glenday, Michael. 1990. Saul Bellow and the Decline of Humanism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
MacIntyre, Alisdair. 1984. After Virtue. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1991a. “Life in Quest of Narrative,” in On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, David Wood ed. Londen: Routledge, 20-33.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1991b. “Narrative Identity,” in On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, David Wood ed. Londen: Routledge, 188-199.
Taylor, Charles. 1985. Philosophical Papers, Vol 1: Human Agency and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.