Duke (novel)
The novel Herzog ( 1964 ) is Saul Bellow's main work and describes the orientation crisis of the Jewish literary scholar Moses Herzog from Chicago , who stands between different women and different ideologies . Time magazine ranks the novel among the top 100 English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.
content
The literary scholar Moses Herzog falls into a deep personality crisis: after his marriage to Daisy, with whom he has an adolescent son, his marriage to Madeleine, with whom he has a young daughter, also fails. Madeleine cheats on him with his former best friend Valentine Gersbach, for whom he had secured a good position on the radio in Chicago because of his connections. For Madeleine's sake, Herzog gives up his university career and moves with her to the country for a year on a scientific project. Because of growing conflicts between them, both go back to the city, where he is now lecturing at a community college. Madeleine separates from him and continues her love affair with his best friend, Herzog goes on a trip to Europe with his brother, from which he returns, however, more unstable than before. More and more he has the feeling that he “broke up - broke up”: his lectures get muddled and he becomes strange.
His self-exploration and his justifications drive him to the first notes, which gradually grow into letters to friends, acquaintances, other living and dead writers and finally: Nietzsche and God. In these letters, Herzog takes a critical stance not only on his private concerns, but also on social (poverty, land distribution) and political developments (Cold War) and proves himself to be a left-wing liberal to whom Marxism is no stranger: he can get along with it include when he writes of the "millions of bitter Voltairians" whose souls are filled with angry satire.
After long descriptions of the escalation between Madeleine and Herzog, he reflects on his Japanese girlfriend Sono and his new partner, Ramona, who better than himself recognize his fears of commitment and the importance of his wife (Madeleine), who is distancing herself from him. Finally he travels back to his country house, where he lived with Madeleine, to be close to his son from his first marriage, who is attending a summer camp. On these last pages there are more and more indications of an improvement in his condition, the appearance of serenity and joy over newly perceived sensual impressions of nature.
Narrative
The loose, forward and backward association of the scenes soon dissolves the time structure of the plot. Instead of a linear sequence, a mosaic of memory emerges that gradually deepens and illuminates what is soon described at the beginning: Madeleine's conversion from Judaism to Catholicism, life in the summer house with Madeleine, the growing conflicts between them, Herzog's increasing incapacity for work , her affair with his boyfriend, the breakup, his new girlfriend Ramona ...
The narrative thus becomes a figure of the circular deepening of his perception of reality: Moses Herzog describes his antagonists and also his father as "lecturers of reality" who gradually bring him closer to reality in his reflective work. He is gradually approaching what he had always suspected: With his letters, Moses is "on the trail of things that he only now and only vaguely began to understand."
The sudden change for the better towards the end of the book ("How wonderfully beautiful it is today!") Is difficult to understand and is neither in the character nor in her circumstances. The first sentence of the novel ("If I've lost my mind, that's fine with me, thought Moses Herzog.") Initiates the ordeal - and also stands at the beginning of that lasting improvement in the mood of the end. The madness "somehow" disappears from Herzog's life and despite the persistent external untidiness, recovery, happiness and peace of mind seem possible as a result of a long memory and justification work: "This is how the last week of his letters began."
There is a big difference between excitingly written passages and a lack of form and perspective of the whole, an absence of development and frequent interruption of the narrative by the many notes and letters that are difficult to overcome like obstacles. The impression of disorder in Herzog's life is narrative reinforced by this ornamentation of the novel structure.
Notes on style
The novel shows a wealth of rhetorical forms, which also make an endless mosaic of memories worth reading: entire passages are written ironically and self-ironically; it accumulates attributes as an asyndeton , violates reader expectations with sentence breaks , etc.
The novel continues to offer a surprising variety of character characteristics, which in many dialogue scenes (in conversation with his lawyer Simkin, a former mother-in-law, with a taxi driver, while listening in court) are developed as if en passant . Bellow draws from the bubbling spring of his keen observation and his ability to make interesting representations of people, moods and dialogues. Again and again, the reader encounters refreshing excursions that could stand for themselves like little stories and show Bellows excessive design joy.
Experimental is also the sway of the narration : The most personal ER narrator of the main character is very close (he talks about Duke considerations, his feelings and his perception of other figures), but is not identical with him (the narrator is recaps and explained); the narrator has a sense of humor and is on Herzog's side, but is not a know-it-all. His irony and self-irony seem to arise somewhere between the narrator and the main character. Sometimes the narrator speaks directly to the main character, becoming a you-narrator who dialogues with his alter ego - but when writing the letters (first-person form) the narrator occasionally changes after or before the letters in italics to a first-person narrator - Moses Herzog is beside himself as well as beside himself and sometimes also himself. These narrator changes are perhaps the most important formal indication of the fluctuating identity of the main character, alien to himself, and of his efforts to become himself make sure who he really is: this narrative is part of the message.
Book editions (selection)
English:
- Duke . Viking Press, New York 1964 (first edition).
- Duke . Penguin, New York 2015, ISBN 978-0-14-310767-5 .
German:
- Duke . German by Walter Hasenclever . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1965 (for 4 weeks in 1965 and 1966 at number 1 on the Spiegel bestseller list )
- Duke . Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 2011, ISBN 978-3-596-17870-4 .
literature
- Hubert Zapf : The novel as a medium of reflection: an investigation using the example of three novels by Saul Bellow (Augie March, Herzog, Humboldt's gift) . (University thesis). Lang, Frankfurt am Main, Bern, 1981. ISBN 3-8204-6114-0 .
- Alexandre Maurocordato: Les Quatre dimensions du Herzog de Saul Bellow . Lettres modern, Paris 1969.
- Zachary Leader : The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964 . London: Jonathan Cape, 2015.
- David Mikics: Bellow's people: how Saul Bellow made life into art . WW Norton Company, New York [2016]. ISBN 978-0-393-24687-2 .