Herzog (1964). For Discussion or Writing

As Seize the Day does, Herzog focuses on a short time span in the life of a budding failure. Herzog, often viewed as the Bellow’s midcareer tour de force, tells the story of five days in the life of the narcissistic but silver-tongued intellectual Moses Herzog, a Jewish professor and writer of Bellow’s generation and a thinly veiled stand-in for the author himself. After his wife, Madeleine, leaves him for his best friend, the red-haired dandy Valentine Gersbach, Herzog descends into madness.

In Bellow’s hands, however, Herzog remains lucid in his madness. Between visits to the ridiculous Freudian psychoanalyst Edvig, who also has his wife as a patient, Herzog writes letters to figures from Nietzsche to God, decrying the decay of society in a manner that recalls Spengler’s famous The Decline of Western Civilization, an early influence on Bellow.

After having been dispossessed by his wife, Herzog retreats to Ludeyville, where he has a small home in the Berkshire Mountains. Tormented by the filthy and disintegrating house, as well as visions of his wife’s infidelity and his best friend’s betrayal, Moses begins a letter-writing campaign unlike any seen before. While Herzog is primarily a comic novel, it contains many tragic elements and serious meditations on the need for Americans to return to a sense of morality and the social contract.

In this novel, as in his earlier novella Seize the Day, Bellow engages with the sorry fate of the individual within the mass culture of the period. At the same time that Herzog is a story of the death of the subject, however, it is also a tale of the misadventures of a cuckolded husband. Modeled on Bellow’s own breakup with his second wife, Sondra, and his strained relationship with their child, Herzog is a wild satire that leaves none of its characters, least of all Herzog himself, unscathed. Perhaps it is for this reason that Herzog, Bellow’s most ambitious and intellectual work, was also his most popular, going on to become a best seller.

For Discussion or Writing
1. The epistolary style (novel in letter form) is central to Bellow’s construction of Herzog. Why does Bellow choose to evoke so much through the medium of the letter? What does it say that Bellow constructs an imaginary dialogue between his protagonist and a host of other characters to evoke the pain Herzog experiences as he laments the impossibility of true social connection in the alienated age in which he lives?

2. Throughout Bellow’s award-winning novel, the reader is left to question Moses Herzog’s sanity and trustworthiness as a narrator. We see the events of Herzog’s marriage unfold through his eyes alone. Is Moses mad? How is the theme of madness developed in Herzog? How does Bellow’s critique of psychoanalysis structure his 1964 novel?

3. When Herzog retires to his house in the Berk- shires, he obsesses over the events surrounding his wife’s affair with his best friend. As in “Looking for Mr. Green,” Herzog focuses upon the possibility of discerning the truth beneath the world of appearances that composes modernity. Does Herzog ever discover the real details of the affair? How does Herzog’s pursuit of the details of his wife’s affair through interviewing his friends and reviewing his own memories say more about him than about his wife? How does Bellow deal with the theme of realities versus appearances in this novel?

5. Herzog has been described as one of the masterpieces of 20th-century American satire. Look up the definition of satire in a literary encyclopedia or trustworthy Internet source and outline the principles of the genre. What is Bellow attempting to satirize in Herzog? How does he make it clear from the first pages of his novel that he is attempting to parody his characters and themes, even as he develops them? How might the use of satire and parody be Bellow’s attempt to write a novel against the tradition of modernist solemnity that he espoused in his early works?