If one is to compare Bellow's early experience of the world with that of Bakhtin, one could see that both of them are exposed to a variety of languages and cultures. Saul Bellow was born to a family that had experienced many different cultures. His ancestors were immigrating Russians who first settled in Quebec, Canada, where Saul was born. When he was nine years old, his family moved to Chicago, America. These great immigrations, together with his being a Jew and also having a Russian inheritance made Bellow a "hybrid genius" as M. F. Schulz calls him.
In Herzog , Bellow shows that he is familiar with Yiddish, French, Italian, Latin, and many other languages, and is also familiar with many cultures as diverse as Turkish, Japanese, and, of course, American. The characters of Herzog are from everywhere in the world. Most of the characters are presented as "international." Moses Elkanah Herzog, the title character, is a cosmopolitan figure. His last name is a German word meaning 'duke,' his first and middle names show his Jewish background. Herzog, while in Europe to overcome his mental depression, "made a cultural tour for Narraganset Corporation, lecturing in Copenhagen, Warsaw, Carcow, Berlin, Belgrade, Istanbul and Jerusalem" (13). He is more than familiar with these places; each one of these cities is somehow related to his life: Jerusalem as "the Dwelling of the Multitude" (189), and Berlin with the experience of the Holocaust and of Auschwitz. Madeline, Herzog's ex-wife "came from Buenos Aires. Her background was international -- ish, Russian, Polish, and Jewish" (Herzog 22). For Bellow the world is very much complex and plural, which, in turn, makes his novels polyphonic.
Bellow's artistic interests are in a way related to a group of Chicago naturalists, among whom Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) is regarded as the most influential figure. Malcom Bradbury compares Bellow of Augie March with the naturalism of Dreiser. He believes that "to Dreiser's rather crude environmentalism Bellow adds in the form of a positive conflict a second world of possibility or promise" (91). Bradbury then compares the pessimism of Dreiser with Thomas Hardy (1840-1928):
both of them being Darwinian evolutionaries [were] concerned with the struggle and competition. Hardy's concern was with the rural competition, between the peasant and the machine, and the man with the determined natural order. Dreiser's theme was urban competition between man and man for a place. Bellow goes beyond these positions; he presents the cityscape . . .< . . the struggle in cities. (91-2)
So the approach of Bellow is not the same as the pessimistic naturalism of his predecessors, a naturalism that studies the individual among the anonymous forces of his environment. It is easy to put an individual in a hostile, crude environment of 'Them' and quickly come to a conclusion. Given the recipe of the author, the reader can calculate and predict the conclusion from the very beginning, the way gods are shown as unjust at the end of Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles . Bellow's later novels, in contrast to the naturalist writers and to his own early works, are not the struggles of the individual against the mass of external forces; neither is it "a world of inner struggle" as Bradbury imprecisely concludes his essay. Bradbury's final comment may be correct for Henderson the Rain King , but it does not apply to Herzog . The struggles of the individuals in Herzog are neither purely inner, psychological struggles of a consciousness cut off from other consciousnesses, nor the community and environment are given an irrational, confused and anonymous voice in his fiction to challenge the hero. The voices of the other consciousnesses are as valid and convincing as the voice of the hero.
Bellow's adoption and modification of the naturalist tradition is important. To him the 'struggle of the mind' is the issue, but especially in the case of Herzog , he sees no tragedy in this struggle as the naturalists did. The struggles are rather comic. In an interview, he talks about Herzog as showing "the comic impossibility of arriving at a synthesis that can satisfy modern demands" (Harper 16). To him the struggle is neither rural, nor urban, but civil. Very much like the institutions of a democratic society that are equal and equidistant from law, the different ideas, perspectives, consciousnesses and voices in the later novels of Bellow are equidistant from the source of artistic imagination.
The rural Romantics praised the Idea as manifested in the mind of the artist. Although they have somewhat a naïve respect for 'the other' as love, still, they do not show any inclination toward the community and the city. To them city is the source of all corruption and evil, and hence, is not a genuine subject for their works. To the Romantics, the city cannot serve as a source of artistic imagination. Except for Blake who provided certain images of the city in his works (with whom Bellow has some affinities), the other Romantics narcissistically drew apart from their society. Bellow is angry with this apartheid of artists and the people of the city; he writes:
American writers have often described themselves as loafers, vagabonds, beggars and bums. Thoreau sits apart from the community in idleness beside the Walden Pond. Walt Whitman describes himself as one of the "roughs." . . . . Writers have stood aside from the ordinary duties of their fellow citizens. ("Distractions of a Fiction Writer" 9-10)
Naturalists were interested in the study of the life of an individual in communities. In fact this experimental study formed the base of their artistic creativity. But they too failed to recognize the full, plural nature of reality. Relying on the scientific theories of Darwin, Marx, and Freud in their approach to reality, the naturalists saw the struggle of the individual either with a crude, blind environment, or with his or her own dark psychological forces. Bellow's early fiction, especially Victim and Dangling Man , shows that he has experienced the naturalistic, Dreiserian approach to the reality. The titles of these works show that the individual names of characters are not as important as what environment assigns them; even the name of characters is determined by their environment; the last name of Joseph inDangling Man remains unknown to the reader. The characters of the early novels of Bellow are either victims to the forces beyond their control, or are cut off from the society, with no point of reliance in it. It is only with Augie March that the Bellovian character begins his free adventure in the world of environment. But, still, in the world of Augie March , as free as Augie is in his journeys, the majority of other characters are presented as hostile to Augie, and it is implied that the task of the hero (or anti-hero) is to fight against the society. The voice of Augie is a voice against the other voices not among and beside them. Herzog's voice can also be considered as diametrically opposed to the other voices in the text; often he "deals with ideas in negative fashion" (Harper 17). But as compared with Augie's treatment of the other ideas, Herzog's is more affirmative. He has a 'sideward glance' toward the other ideas, to use a Bakhtinian term. Herzog communicates with everybody who bears some sort of relevance to his situation, quoting the other ideas in his letters.
For writers such as Hardy and Dreiser still a Manichean, binary worldview works. These writers are obsessed with the struggle of the individual against a world of faceless 'Them.' In his early works, Bellow had a similar vision of the world; but in Herzog the relationship between the hero and his world is not based on a tragic, naturalistic, and deterministic worldview. Bellow's vision of the world in his later novels is plural not Manichean and binary. He sees the work of many institutions in the world that are equally valid. Although obsessed with massacres of the twentieth century, which make the world hysteric, Bellow transcends the hysteric mentality of the cold war era. In a world that was divided into two major camps, when Bellow talks about an idea he is very much conscious of the alternatives to that idea and never leaves the opportunity to criticize it.
In the world of Herzog ideas are neither presented as immaculate and perfect as they are to Romantics, nor one idea is chosen as superior to other ideas. Herzog is in struggle with his society and with its dominant ideas, but at the same time he is deeply related to 'Them.' He cannot cut or ignore his ties with the people of the city. He is fighting with society for 'survival' and at the same time his survival depends on his 'occupancy' in a society. Bellow is very well aware of the fact that Blake has demonstrated in his works: city is a source of evil, yet, at the same time Bellow believes that it provides the only site for contesting and wining over the evil. Only the plural environment of a city can provide a criticism of the established ideas.
"Novelists are wrong to put an interpretation of history at the base of their artistic creation?to speak 'the last word,' " says Saul Bellow in an interview with Gordon Harper. "It is better that the novelist should trust his own sense of life. Less ambitious. More likely to tell the truth" (Harper 18). Perhaps this is why Bellow's writings have always been accused as being anti-intellectual. He does not like to present an Idea with an overcapitalized 'I' at the base of his artistic creation. To him European novel "is intellectual in a different sense" than the American literature. "The intellectual hero of a French or a German novel is likely to be a philosophical intellectual, an ideological intellectual" (Harper 16). Most of the contemporary continental writers take an idea as correct, choose it as the idea, and shape the whole identity and ideology of the hero according to that idea-system. Admitting the fluidity of the boundaries in his division between the American and continental novel, Bellow maintains that usually in American literature nobody "expect[s] thought to have results, say, in the moral sphere, or in the political, in quite the way a Frenchman would" (Harper 16). The intellectual literature of the continent is mostly in defense of an idea, "there are few such in Herzog . Perhaps they mean that the thought of a man fighting for sanity and life are not suitable for framing." Possibly answering the prevalent criticism of his works as anti-intellectual he maintains, "when people complain of lack of ideas in novels, they mean that they do not find familiar ideas, fashionable ideas. Ideas outside the 'canon' they don't recognize" (Harper 17).
Indeed, what traditional readers and critics seek in the fiction of Saul Bellow is the one, dominant idea. They are in search of the philosophy of the author in the novels they read, while the writings of Bellow, especially those written after The Adventures of Augie March, are crowded with so many equally valid voices that it is impossible to distinguish the voice of Bellow from the other voices. At times, indeed, the ideas of Saul Bellow are under severe criticism or parody in his own fiction. Now, when a reader who is in the habit of reading Sartre, or Camus, or even the early novels of Saul Bellow himself, which are under the influence of the first two, when such a reader is confronted by a later Bellow novel as Herzog , he or she is shocked by the lack of an intellectual, ideological center of gravity. Reading a novel by Sartre, or by Camus, the reader is either already familiar with the philosophy of the author or is initiated into it through reading the work. Everything in these philosophical novels is at the service of confirming the philosophy of the author. This is the case with many other European and non-European novelists: Goethe, Tolstoy, Zola, Hardy, Hesse, Dreiser, etc. Every writer in this tradition is strongly present behind his or her works, rigorously supporting the central idea of the work, the idea that is usually a canonical idea. But Bellow's later novels, including Herzog, belongs to another group of authors who are aware of the infinite diversity of ideas and of reality, and try to depict the full spectrum of reality in their works: Rabelais, Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Melville, Rilke, Nabokov, and Doctorow, can be mentioned in this group. What these authors are searching for is not the One Absolute Idea, or Interpretation of Reality; they are rather in search of the different possible approaches to reality.
Melville's Moby-Dick may provide the best example for this group. In one reading of this novel, the novel is an attempt to define and 'know' Moby Dick, the white whale. The narrator, Ishmael, shows the different interpretations that the different characters of the novel have of the whale. A variety of different philosophical, religious, poetic, scientific, and practical views of the whale are given in the novel and at the end, quite like the ending of Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King and Herzog , the narrator in the title of the last chapter informs the reader: "I alone am escaped to tell thee;" there is no conclusion, "no message for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word" (Herzog 348).
The discourse in Herzog is the sum total of all the discourses that are present at the American society of the post-war era. Its mixture of discourses and genres is an attack on the monologic interpretations of man and history. The sense of doubt and uncertainty is created in the reader regarding the narrator and ultimately Bellow's sense of self and identity. Through creating a variety of different but equally valid voices, Bellow wants to challenge the tyranny and hegemony of the institutionalized discourses prevalent in his society. In Herzog there are attempts not to present one discourse as superior to the other. The final silence of the story is a strategy to this end.
The comic tone of Bellow in Herzog is another strategy that similarly prevents any idea to find absolute power in the text (see "The Style of Bellow's Comedy" 114-17). Beside the comic and carnivalistic treatment of the discourses and ideas, they are juxtaposed with each other. In the Romantic and naturalistic tradition of narrative if there is any mention of the plurality of ideas, the different ideas develop from one to the other along a historic line as they win over each other through time. They are not present simultaneously. But in a polyphonic work such as Herzog , the ideas are not presented in an evolutionary way. There is no linear succession of ideas in Herzog . The past is as alive and active as the present. All the voices are there simultaneously. Time is not as important as place. The voices of the historical past of the Western culture, of Spinoza, Leibnitz, Hegel, Nietzsche, de Toqueville, Eliot, and Herzog's own past, of his father, and friends coexist in the present time of the novel; the ideas of the past are alive and are juxtaposed with each other and with those of the present. The literary tradition is also present with a vast spectrum of different genres. Herzog can be read as a living museum of the literary traditions: the revenge tragedy, triangle of love, epistolary novel, confessional writing, bildungsroman, the picaresque tradition, nursery rhyme, peeping Tom, Don Quixote, Hamlet, Raskolnikov, all are present inHerzog to make it a hybrid. The final silence of the story suggests the impossibility of coming to a synthesis for all these theses. Neither a genre nor a discourse finds final superiority over the other. Through an artistic arrangement Bellow juxtaposes all these with each other. This is the strategy that Bellow acquired at Dostoevsky's knee who
strives to organize all available meaningful material, all material of reality, in one time-frame, in the form of a dramatic juxtaposition. . . .< . . Dostoevsky attempted to perceive the very stages themselves in their simultaneity, to juxtapose and counterpoise them dramatically, and not stretch them out into an evolving sequence. For him, to get ones bearing on the world meant to conceive all its contents as simultaneous, and to guess at their interrelationship in the cross section of a single moment. (Dostoevsky's Poetics 28)
This statement is exactly true for the author of Herzog . He does not show the historical stages as such, but shows them as the different layers of the present reality that are highly complex and interactive. Reality to Bellow is a hybrid of different voices and images, as literature is a hybrid of many genres, and history a hybrid of many discourses, and man a hybrid of many psychological traits. These different layers of reality are at times contradictory, but they do not cancel out each other dialectically, neither do they merge with each other.
Herzog is a mixture of a variety of genres and discourses. Novel, to Bakhtin, is more than just one genre among the others, "it squeezes some genres and incorporates others into its own peculiar structure, reformulating and reaccentuating them" (Dialogic Imagination 5). In novel the different genres coexist. When simultaneously a variety of different genres are present in one text, and when no superiority is given to one specific genre in it, no genre can claim itself to be hierarchically higher than the other genres. Aristotle's theory of genres "works as much as there is no mention of novel" (Dialogic Imagination 8). The simultaneous existence of lyric poetry, comedy, tragedy, and even epic, the coexistence of a variety of different 'high' and 'low' genres in Herzog, turns this novel into what Bakhtin calls a "hybrid construction," which is "the mixing within a single consciousness, of two or more different consciousnesses" (Dialogic Imagination 429). For example, the journey to underground, which is an epic convention, is inserted into this novel. In his realistic journey to the underground, which happens when he passes an underground metro station at the dead of a night (pp. 183-86), Herzog is very much like the hero of an epic who experiences the subterranean world of Hades. But at the same time other genres are at work to dismantle the possible hegemony or dominance of the genre of the epic. These genres are not official; they are not even considered as genres by official authorities in literary studies. Bakhtin categorizes them under the broad heading of "everyday genre," where "genre" is used as broader than literary genre to include the people's "means of communicating with each other?the private letter, the laundry note" (Dialogic Imagination 428). However, these genres of everyday exist in Herzog abundantly and in the underground section they are present as rudely sexual, humorous, and political graffiti made by people on the walls of the station (184). The insertion of these everyday genres to exist beside a genre as high as epic is intended to challenge the highness and authority of the epic, the fact that is mentioned in the text: "He assumed the unknown artists were adolescents. Taunting authority" (184). Elsewhere in the novel Herzog reads Aleck, a minor character with whom Herzog is acquainted in a court, as telling the judge: "Your authority and my degeneracy are one and the same" (236). This has the effect of dismantling the authority of the established social institutions and giving a marginal voice as that of Aleck a validity equal to that of the canonical voice of the judge: "So this bruised, dyed Aleck also had an idea" (236).
The different discourses that are present in Herzog have some relation with each other the way the genres are related to each other. As in Melville's Moby-Dick , in which the narrator approaches the whale through different discourses, Herzog approaches his problem through different discourses. These discourses are too numerous to list, but, generally, they can be divided into philosophic, religious, scientific, poetic, legal, psychological and political discourses. This division, however, should not blur the fact that within each one of these categories, there exist a different set of discourses; the discourse of Heidegger is different with that of, say, de Toqueville, both being under the category of philosophy. Very much in the same way as a genre is inserted into Herzog , a discourse is inserted into it. The inserted discourse as accepted, canonical, powerful and dominant as it may be in the contemporary culture in which the text is produced, does not have any dominance in the text of the novel.
Bellow makes the central character of his novel an intellectual to make the insertion of a variety of discourses possible. Herzog is a man interested and actually involved with many different discourses. One of these discourses is the discourse of psychoanalysis which was very much in vogue during the America of the 1950's and 60's. Herzog asks one of his psychiatrists to write for him the signs of a paranoid personality:
I took a list of the traits of paranoia from a psychiatrist recently -- I asked him to jot them down for me. It might aid my understanding, I thought. < I put the scribbled paper in my wallet and studied it like the plagues of Egypt. Just like ' text-transform:uppercase'>dom, sfardeya, kinnim ' in the Haggadah. It reads 'Pride, Anger, Excessive "rationality", Homosexual Inclinations, competitiveness, Mistrust of Emotions, Inability to Bear Criticism, Hostile Projections, Delusions'. It's all there -- all! (Herzog 83)
In the mind of Herzog no discourse can exist free from others. He defines man as "a relating animal " (272), who relates everything with everything. Sometimes this business of relating becomes comic, but Bellow is serious about his comedies. Herzog quotes the signs of a paranoid personality and instantly he relates this scientific discourse with another discourse that is religious and is borrowed from Talmudic texts of the Jewish tradition. In addition to these two discourses one can add the discourse of Herzog's own consciousness, his view about an interpretation of history in terms of the discourse of the psychiatrists, which he strongly opposes: ". . . . this Bulgarian, Banowitch, seeing all power struggle in terms of paranoid mentality " Herzog rejects this interpretation of the wars of the twentieth century, "a curious, creeping mind, that one, convinced that madness always rules the world" (Herzog 83).
Herzog subverts every discourse of the contemporary American culture that may have a higher position. He carnivalizes the intellectual scene of the American culture. One of the most dominant institutions of the contemporary American culture is psychoanalysis which is severely attacked by Herzog. This institution indeed was so powerful and canonical at that time that it even became the dominant idea of many contemporary works of art. Herzog subverts this institution through an inversion of the place of analyzer and analyzed. Dr. Edvig, the Herzog's family psychiatrist has been treating both Herzog and Madeline. Analyzing his doctor, Herzog writes in a letter to him that Madeline had actually directed the whole process of analysis and after:
You told me my hostile suspicions of Gersbach were unfounded, even, you hinted, paranoid. Did you know he was Madeline's lover? Did she tell you? No, or you wouldn't have said that. She had good reason to fear to be followed by a private investigator. There was nothing at all neurotic about it. Madeline, your patient, told you what she liked. You knew nothing. You know nothing. She snowed you completely. And you fell in love with her yourself, didn't you? Just as she planned. She wanted you to keep her dump me. She would have done it in any case. She found you, however, a useful instrument. As for me, I was your patient. (Herzog 71)
The juxtaposition of diverse discourses from psychiatry, religion, and history, and subverting the position of a dominant discourse in the text (and the whole culture), make all discourses equal to each other. Even the canonical discourses become just one discourse beside the others. This is one of the most strategic achievements of Herzog . This novel is a place where institutions, discourses, and ideas are carnivalized; its comic tone makes it possible that no idea, those of the author, of the narrator, of the characters, or the canonical ideas of the society could find hegemony in the text over the other ideas. This, in turn, makes the novel neither a genre among the other genres, nor the result of a canonical idea. It is rather a mixture of a carnivalized plurality of genres, discourses, and ideas that exist simultaneously and horizontally in the present moment of the novel.