Transcript Saul Bellow Herzog. - Dream Speech Turns 50

Saul Bellow
Herzog.
Title: Herzog.
Author: Saul Bellow
Format: Hardcover
Language: German
Pages: 415
Publisher: , 0
ISBN: 3462026275
Format: PDF / Kindle / ePub
Size: 7.2 MB
Download: allowed
Description
Moses Elkanah Herzog ist ein gebildeter Neurotiker und ein manischer Briefeschreiber. Sinn
und Zweck der Briefe: Herzog will sich und seinen Adressaten die Welt erklären. Aber eines
Tages stellt er inmitten eines Papierhaufens fest: er ist gescheitert, die Welt lässt sich nicht
erklären. Mit einem feinen Gespür für die Bruchstellen der amerikanischen Gesellschaft und viel
Galgenhumor hat Saul Bellow einen ramponierten Helden geschaffen, der versucht, mit sich
und seiner Umgebung ins Reine zu kommen.
Insightful reviews
Kemper: Most of us have one big advantage over rich people and fictional characters when it
comes to dealing with our personal issues. For example, look at Moses Herzog in this book.
Herzog goes through an ugly divorce, and his circumstances allow him to wallow in his misery
and behave erratically for months. I’m sure any of us in similar circumstances would like to put
our lives on hold as we picked at our emotional scabs while ignoring our jobs and taking trips
across Europe.
However, most of us don’t get that luxury. Those are usually the times when we can least
afford to screw up so even though all you really want to do is hide under the covers or drink
heavily or eat ice cream or drink heavily while eating ice cream under the covers, we gotta get
up and go to work. And pay the bills. And do the laundry. And get the oil changed in the car.
And that’s to our advantage. Because getting over something like a divorce means moving on,
even if you’re faking it half the time. Eventually, you’re not faking it anymore, you are actually
living your life, and that’s how you finally recover.
Or you just completely lose your shit and end up getting stuck in endless loops inside your own
head as you ping pong from one impulsive thought and whim to another until you’re completely
unable to tell the good ideas from the bad. Like Moses Herzog. If he would have had to get off
his ass and go back to work rather than mooching off his family then he might not have gone
cuckoo for Coco-Puffs and come unglued while writing a series of bizarre letters to family,
friends, celebrities and dead historical figures.
Yes, I know that Saul Bellow was using Herzog to make a statement about how a modern man
viewed his life and society in the ‘60s, and the writing is as good as his reputation. But I just
couldn’t get into it, mainly because I wanted someone to give Moses a brisk slap and tell him to
grow up and get over himself. I didn’t dislike the character, I actually felt bad for him. That just
made me wish even more that Herzog could start pulling his life back together instead of
indulging in his self-involved musings.
James: The intellectual life is a hazardous one. Giving oneself license to question existence
generally implies a purpose or basis for doing so. But the world is stubbornly reluctant to keep
up with fashionable intellectual trends, and what purpose one ascribes to the intellectual life
remains annoyingly subjective. The modern intellectual lives with the legacy of elitism which
once made scholarship and thinking in general the natural preserve of aristocrats and well-off
hobbyists. Hundreds of years ago a humanist education was seen as something befitting a
gentleman. Learning the classics was a way of acquiring the subtle idiom of the upper-classes
which brought one closer to the antechambers of power and influence. These upper classes,
however, spoiled themselves on ingratitude. And one of the central benefits of our modern-day
liberal democratic society is that education is, for the most part, open and free. But this freedom
comes at a cost. People get to decide what is of value in their lives; but this ability to choose is
always in competition with practicality, commercial interests and the juggernaut of the media. To
say we’re free absolutely is nonsense. Freedom requires deliberation and discipline: the
discipline to eliminate choices clandestinely imposed upon oneself from outside and to
formulate and carryout courses of action which avoid passivity and conformism. This is the great
dilemma of modern society: we’re freer but less disciplined on the whole as a consequence,
and so we have a great gift that often looks hollow and useless, especially to intellectuals
who’ve made thinking their profession.
Herzog, the eponymous hero of Bellow’s novel, is an intellectual in the grips of a fiery mid-life
crisis, one that pits himself and his life’s work against a world which seems indifferent to the life
of the mind. The source of Herzog’s mid-life crisis is the breakup of his marriage to Madeleine,
a young and beautiful graduate student with whom he has a daughter. At the start of the novel
she has absconded with Herzog’s friend Gersbach (a married disc-jockey who has absorbed
superficially much of Herzog’s scholastic aura of great ideas) and taken their young daughter
with her. Instead of accepting the break-up Herzog turns this divorce and betrayal into an
opportunity for a full-blown reappraisal of things, both of intellectual history and his own
imperfect life. As you can imagine, there are no answers here. And while Herzog manages to
bring together quite a commentary on the history of ideas in the course of his story, he ends up
looking extremely egotistic and eccentric in the process, while the people he believes to have
most wronged him appear essentially naïve (or simply too two-dimensionally drawn by Bellow).
This leaves him wondering whether you can obtain any objectivity at all in life about your
passions. The life of the mind can be passionate just as a romantic relationship can be. But the
world seems to prize superficial bluff (as Gersbach, for Herzog, seems to exemplify) more than
authentic, dignified cultivation. No one sees this more clearly than Herzog, and he’s
progressively defeated and made more petulant and helpless as a consequence. Seen through
the lens of grand ideas the world is always a little bit silly. And to survive this Herzog is driven
restlessly to analyze all that he knows, looking for resolution.
In the end, confronting his own personal crisis brings him up against the crisis of modernity: and
the solution for both, from the standpoint of the individual, is a kind of radicalized modesty,
which by the end of the novel we can’t be certain Herzog actually achieves.
It is a sad and moving story, and strikes a note of ambiguous defeat and resignation. It is as
though Bellow realizes that the old elitism of ideas has finally been eclipsed by a new
information-saturated world that has the appearance of unsophistication and yet just might be
forging a new and completely different kind of sophistication, one that Herzog can’t grasp.
Stela:
"Pray tell me, Sir, whose dog are you?"
What is the world for the intellectual? The playground of his ideas or the hell of his emotions?
For Moses Hezog, a forty-seven-year old former Professor in a mid-life crisis is certainly both.
Recently gone through a messy divorce and the tragi-comedy of a marital triangle, the hero
looks for the cathartic liberation from this emotional ballast in two ways: by writing letters to
acquaintances and strangers, to the living and the dead, and by remembering the past. The
result? A very exquisite mixture between epistolary and psychological novel intertwined with
cleverly hidden intertextual dialogues, in a perfect narrative structure and a memorable
collection of characters. A masterpiece signed Saul Bellow.
The novel follows Herzog’s quest to make sense of the world either following Tolstoy’s belief –
that freedom is personal and indifferent to historical limitations, or Hegel’s conception – that
freedom begins with the knowledge of death, knowledge fed by history and memory.
Therefore, the letters are not necessarily a way of communication (he never sends nor finishes
them) they are a way of self understanding, Tolstoyan way: “I go after reality with language.”
Thus, he keeps arguing with Spinoza whether the desire to exist is enough to lead to happiness,
he feels like rejecting Nietzsche’s view of any present moment as a crisis, a fall from classical
greatness on the principle that he had a Christian view of the history despite his accusation that
Jesus Christ enslaved the world with his morality, and finally he find a new interpretation of
Kirkegaard’s belief that knowledge can be acquired only through hell by seeing suffering as a
personal choice; not by playing at crisis, alienation, apocalypse and desperation, but as an
antidote to illusion:
…people of powerful imagination, given to dreaming deeply and to raising up marvelous and selfsufficient fictions, turn to suffering sometimes to cut into their bliss, as people pinch themselves
to feel awake.
Together with Samuel Johnson, Herzog discovers that suffering can acquire an almost
hedonistic quality:
Grief, Sir, is a species of idleness.
If the letters are the intellectual dialogues with the world, memories are the emotional ones.
Through personal history, this time in a Hegelian way, Herzog rebuilds his own image, since: “I
am Herzog. I have to be that man. There is no one else to do it.” On these grounds he recalls
all his “reality instructors”: his parents who taught him to love and to lose the loved one, his
women who taught him that “not thinking is not necessarily fatal”, that is he can divorce intellect
from emotion unpunished, his friends who taught him that generosity has sometimes an
unbearable price tag. Two memorable, Dostoyevskian figures emerge in all their contradictory
splendour from this recollection: his second wife, Madeleine, who, according to Herzog, tried to
steal his place in the world and his rival and former best friend Valentine Gersbach, who tried to
become him, emulating his opinions and gestures. The only form of the self preservation,
Herzog discovers, is detachment, so the final lesson the hero is gradually taught is the
acceptance of death, be it physical or emotional:
And you, Gersbach, you’re welcome to Madeleine.
Enjoy her – rejoice in her. You will not reach me through her, however. I know you sought me in
her flesh. But I am no longer there.
However. However. Which is the door to freedom – intellectual or emotional? Tolstoy or Hegel?
For it is sure you cannot go through both at the same time, since they are rather opposite.
Herzog clams up in the end, refusing either word or feeling, or simply refusing to tell. It‘s up to
us to open whichever door we seem fit – for him and for ourselves, in a dignified answer to the
mocking question of Longfellow’s dog at Kew: “Pray tell me, Sir, whose dog are you?”
David: expensive Herzog, expensive Bellow,This e-book 'bout the fellowDown-trodden, turns
out really bleak.His life's performed to Hell, loHis skin's grew to become all yellow,So what's
there for him to seek?Dear Moses, pricey Saul,Where's long gone your wherewithal?It would
appear that you have long past really astray.Lost other halves in all,And your child: a misplaced
doll,Is it actual "every puppy has his day"?Dear lover, expensive debtor,Forgive me this letter,I
imagine i've got really misplaced my marbles!I swear i will get better,Perhaps its the
weatherThat's making my existence all suits and garbles?Dear reader, expensive friend,When
you may have reached the precious endof youth, take my note you'll wonder!About what you
misspendOn a as soon as girl friend,And you will say to your self "what a blunder!"
Ginny_1807: «Io vado alla ricerca della realtà con il linguaggio. Forse vorrei cambiarla tutta in
linguaggio».Nevrotico, tortuoso, ribollente, verboso, magmatico. Un viaggio interiore altalenante tra angoscia ed ironia, tra narcisismo e autolesionismo, tra razionalità e
farneticazione - in keeping with risalire los angeles china dal baratro più profondo dello
squallore, della solitudine, del fallimento di una intera esistenza. Di intellettuale, marito, figlio,
amico, padre e individuo.L'indagine e le argomentazioni sulle personali disavventure di Moses
Herzog si dilatano advert ogni aspetto della realtà sociale, politica, religiosa, etica, esistenziale,
attraverso una serie infinita di lettere - mai spedite - indirizzate advert amici, famigliari,
conoscenti e personaggi celebri, viventi o scomparsi da tempo. Perché il linguaggio è in line
with Herzog l'unico strumento idoneo a penetrare los angeles realtà delle cose e il senso stesso
della vita.Romanzo di idee, quindi, più che di avvenimenti. Anche se l'intera vicenda che ha
originato l. a. crisi viene progressivamente rivelata attraverso una serie di flashback, situazioni,
caratterizzazioni e dialoghi di volta in volta drammatici, intensi, assurdi, burleschi.Così Moses,
armato della sola forza della parola, compie il suo viaggio attraverso il Mar Rosso della
depressione che rasenta l. a. follia, verso l. a. terra promessa di una nuova esistenza. E, forse,
verso l. a. felicità, che non richiede di pronunciare più "nulla. Neppure una parola".Saul Bellow,
attraverso Herzog, dà vita advert un'opera di straordinaria vitalità: estrosa, audace, complessa.
Coltissima, originalissima e ricca di infiniti spunti di riflessione. Geniale sotto ogni aspetto. E tutti
gli aggettivi che ho usato, o potrei usare, non basterebbero a descriverla esaustivamente.
Capolavoro.Grazie, Io.
Noce: Metti che poi perdi le staffeEbbene signori miei, cosa sarebbe successo se Moses
Herzog avesse avuto un blog?Avrebbe sicuramente fatto parte della vecchia scuola, forse
antesignano della piattaforma di Splinder. Lì avrebbe esercitato le sue migliori doti di
grafomane, scrivendo submit tutti i giorni e non di rado più volte al dì; avrebbe intavolato
discussioni, inveito contro destinatari universali, sfogando le sue frustrazioni e intervallando
fiumi di parole irate a poetici sguardi disillusi sul passato. A volte avrebbe risposto ai commenti
con veemenza e partecipazione, a volte avrebbe spiato in silenzio, tutto compreso nel suo
vittimismo, o a seconda, nel suo orgoglio più fiero. in keeping with through del suo vasto history
culturale, avrebbe seminato proseliti senza difficoltà e l’opinione pubblica si sarebbe scissa in
colpevolisti e innocentisti. Poi, con l’avvento dei social community sarebbe passato di moda.
Con fare dinoccolato avrebbe accettato che web rispecchiasse los angeles società qualunquista
di oggi, ma con contegno si sarebbe fatto da parte. Non sarebbe stato uno di quelli che
cancellano l’account. Avrebbe lasciato i suoi scritti lì, come testimoni romantici delle sue cadute
e risalite. Nondimeno il suo nome sarebbe rimasto legato a un certo tipo di antieroismo. Aspè
che vi spiego. Quando da piccola mio padre mi spronava dicendomi che l. a. vita bisogna
cavalcarla, altrimenti lei cavalca te, io coscienziosamente annuivo, ma intimamente giudicavo
quest’approccio decisamente superficiale. los angeles logica mi insegnava che prima di
cavalcare, bisogna salirci a cavallo, e chi l’ha detto che io ne fossi capace? E se avessi messo
il piede in fallo e mancato l. a. staffa? E se una volta sulle staffe le vertigini mi avessero
inchiodato in una goffissima posa scomposta? E se dopo svariati tentativi avessi rinunciato a
salire, chi lo cube che io non avessi comunque voluto fortissimamente riuscirci? Questo è
l’esatto istante in cui Herzog fa capolino, quell’attimo in bilico tra los angeles metaforica
comprensione del nodo gordiano della tua vita appeso alla sella di una cavalcata utopica, e los
angeles rinuncia frustrante a un futuro che da terra manco riesci a vedere, figuriamoci prenderlo
di petto. Herzog è sempre lì quando fai ritorno a casa e una volta chiusa los angeles porta, fai il
più bel discorso della tua vita, quello lucido e tagliente che ti capita di vedere solo nei film, in
bocca a pochi attori eccellenti, o advert oratori con esperienza pluridecennale. E mentre tu dai
fondo alle tue migliori capacità teatrali davanti alla finestra che dà sul cavedio di casa, Herzog lo
fa sul foglio. E scrive, scrive tutto quello che diresti anche tu, rimanendo fedele a se stesso
mentre cerca di combattersi e annullare l. a. parte marcia di sé.Ma c’è un momento in cui si
stacca dal modello in serie di “uomo come tanti” e diventa l’eroe degli antieroi. Quando
raggiunge il fondo di se stesso e non si scotta. E risale, solo una volta scoperto, che in fondo
sta bene e si ama esattamente according to com’è. Con le sue contraddizioni imbarazzanti e l.
a. sua pedante introspezione, che condividiamo perché è quella a cui vorremmo arrivare tutti se
avessimo il coraggio di inoltrarci nelle pieghe più scomode del nostro io. Ed Herzog infatti, È
scomodo oltre ogni ragionevole dubbio. È quell’amico che quando chiama, dobbiamo resistere
alla tentazione di farci negare, ma alla wonderful cediamo e prestiamo orecchio ai suoi soliloqui,
perché in keeping with quanto impegnativo è l’amico più vero che abbiamo. E succede sempre,
che an outstanding serata ci congediamo da lui con los angeles muta speranza che almeno un
po’, ci sia rimasta appiccicata addosso, una piccola parte della sua onestà.
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