Novel, as shown in the present exploration of Herzog , cannot be defined in the traditional, Aristotelian approach. Certainly it also rejects, the other extreme, its absolute 'uncertainty' and undefinability, the theory that is based on the idea of the impossibility of knowledge. Novel is a genre in the making; it is a genre concerned with the moving moment of the present time. Lyric is photographic; it may be concerned with arresting the present moment, but it cannot produce moving pictures. Epic is nostalgic; it cannot talk realistically about the present time. Novel, however, is sometimes lyrical, sometimes epic; it simultaneously talks about the past and the present, juxtaposing them with each other along a horizontally axial line. As a whole, it is a city of different genres; it lets the other genres enter its territory and act.

Herzog as a novel, presents a variety of different lyrical pictures of its protagonist's state of mind. At the same time it talks about the past of the Western culture. It incorporates a multiple of different genres into its structure, blurring the old system of distinctions between genres. It also blurs the distinction between literary and nonliterary, fact and fiction, and incorporates into its structure nonliterary discourses which, according to Bakhtin, are categorized under the broad heading of the genres of the everyday: the graffiti on the walls of a metro-station, the letter to a contemporary government official, questioning the project of economic reform. At another level of blurring the distinctions between literary and nonliterary, a variety of discourses are incorporated into the structure of the novel that are traditionally defined as nonliterary: most notably, discourses from philosophy, religion, law, science, psychoanalysis as well as discourses which, following Bakhtin, may be called the discourses of everyday : the uninstitutionalized and informal language of the people, in their everyday life.

However, Herzog is the sum of all these discourses and genres. It is a novel in the making and any closed philosophical, theoretical system fails to read it. Only a theory can read this novel that could accept the fluidity of boundaries between the categories that it establishes, a multidimensional and multiperspectival theory. In Aristotle's definition, genres are distinct and absolutely different from each other; had he read a polyphonic novel, he could possibly have to re-arrange his whole philosophical system, or, at least, his systematic theory of genres. Aristotle's definition of genres, according to Bakhtin, "works as much as there is no mention of novel" (Dialogic Imagination 8). This is because novel with its mixing of a great number of formal and informal, or high and low genres presents itself not as a genre among the other genres, but as a location, a city for the contact of many genres.

The twentieth century followers of Aristotle, the Chicago Aristotelian, together with their contemporary school, the New Critics, also failed to read the plurality of themes, discourses, and ideas that are presented in a novel such as Herzog . The New Critics, because of being 'deep readers' excluded novel from their objects of study: because it is too long. Actually the mere length of novel may not be the cause of their rejection; the works of Homer are longer than, say, Herzog ; yet they are a favorite genre for the New Critics. The fault with novel, in the approach of New Critics, is its irreduciblity to one objective reading. Chicago Aristotelians were more plural. They were interested in fiction; they were also "most influential in the study of narrative structure" (Selden 20). They, however, draw lines, distinguishing facts from fiction, reading fiction as fiction and nothing else; therefore, they too failed to recognize novel's inclusiveness of many other things, including facts.

Novel cannot be read objectively, as the experience of the New Critics shows. This brings up the suggestion that it can be read subjectively. The preachers of this idea are Reader Response Theorists. In an almost radical version, the Reader Response Theorists believe in the reader as the only one whose 'ideology' will shape the final structure and meaning of the text. It is true that without a 'narratee' narration cannot happen, but narratee or the reader cannot impose his or her subjective ideology on the text. A variety of other 'subjects' are simultaneously reading the novel: the author, the narrator, the hero and the other characters; the reader is actually one of the readers of the novel whose reading is certainly in juxtaposition with the other readings. If the Reader Response Critics could recognize the fact that the readings of any reader are in a free and unfinalizable dialogue with the other readings that the text (and the context) provides for itself, then they could be relatively good readers of the novel; otherwise, they may end in a kind of atomistic personalism, the possibility of which is rejected in the very first sentence of Herzog . Therefore, novel cannot be read subjectively, any more than objectively; it must be read intersubjectively, at the point of contact of many subjects. The final structure and meaning of the text emerge as a result of contacts and interactions between many intratextual readers (those that are within the text, such as the different characters and narrator) and extratextual readers (those that are outside the text, such as the actual readers and the author); neither of these can impose his or her reading to the text.

A reader of Herzog or any other novel must always modify his or her reading according to the other readings: Saul Bellow has given his reading, his intention in his interview with Gordon Harper and in many other instances; the narrator although not a specific person in the novel, reads the novel in a situated way; the different characters have their own readings: Simkin reads Herzog as a paranoid personality; according to Madeline, Herzog is disintegrated into his primitive elements (Herzog 125). Almost every character of the novel gives his or her interpretation of the protagonist and of the whole story. Herzog himself gives a variety of interpretations of himself, that makes the novel very much complicated and problematic. Now, with such a text, can a reader impose his or her own reading? Any reading of Herzog must be in relation with the other readings of the text.

Mentioning context and its synonyms, society and city, brings the Marxists to the argument. As discussed in chapter two, this group with their reduction of art to a simple manifestation of social struggles, and especially with their kernel concept of dialectic which assumes a final resolution or 'synthesis' to the process of struggles, also fail to recognize the essential diversity of struggling parties in the novel as well as the unfinalizability of this struggle.

At another level, a psychoanalytic view of the text of Herzog is essentially limited to deal with the multiple variety of the text. Simkin provides a psychoanalytic view of Herzog, reading him as having paranoia, the personality trait that Herzog finds in Simkin himself, and finally it is not resolved which one is right. In Herzog , the image of a psychoanalyst is presented who with his bundle of prefabricated labels categorizes everybody; while, as Herzog informs him (and also the reader), his scientific and objective judgments are under the influence of another person: Madeline.

Equally, a Freudian reading does not define the character in the web of ideological relationships that the people have with each other, and instead defines the human subject according to familial relations. There he does not see ideological relationships between the subjects, neither does he see the relations as happening in language. The relations, according to Freud, are sexual and they happen at the level of the body. How comic it would be to read Herzog in the light of the theories of Freud! For example, in a Freudian reading when Herzog says: "we are survivors, in this age" (Herzog 81), more than referring to the mass genocide of the two World Wars, he unconsciously is happy for the fact that he is not castrated.

Herzog certainly had close ties with his parents; even now, long after their death, he thinks about them. Also sexual relationships are important to him; actually they are one of the causes of his sufferings. But, by no means these relations are dominant relations for him; they cannot determine his actions in an absolute way, as Freudians would claim; what makes him act is his ideology (which is located between other ideologies and is in contact and conflict with them) and not his sexual desires. The Freudian approach cannot see the intersubjective relations between the characters and views them only as passive objects that are under the influence of instinctual derives and Oedipal processes.

The other limitation with Freudian reading is that it assumes chronological stages for the growth of a consciousness. To read Herzog chronologically as if he is developing from one stage to the next, as if he is shedding like a snake one of his skins, is to overlook the fact that simultaneously a variety of different Herzogs are present there: "Herzog the victim, Herzog the would-be lover, Herzog the man on whom the world depended for certain intellectual work" (111) and a variety of other Herzogs that coexist in the present moment of the novel.

Very much like the consciousness of Herzog (as well as the text of Herzog ), the Bakhtinian novel is an unstable system of differences. It does not have any closed and finalized structure; it is open, unstable, disunited, and dependent. This view brings in mind the ideas of poststructuralist theorists such as Derrida and Foucault. As discussed in chapter two, while Bakhtin rejects conceptions of text as a stable and closed totality, he also rejects radical poststructuralist theories of indeterminacy that pulverizes the text into radically disconnected fragments. Indeed Bakhtin is against any form of absolutism whether affirmative or negative. To him novel is the product of a democratic discourse that recognizes each idea only in its relation to the other ideas; it is impossible to be without a relation. If man, as it is to Herzog , is a relating animal, then novel is the most humanistic genre, as it is a relating genre . It is a genre that, as manifested in the example of Herzog , while narrating the personal sufferings of an individual, talks about the whole history of the modern era, the different institutions of the society, and the living and active discourses of the era, etc. This presentation is not in a fragmentary and pulverized way. Every idea, every genre, every discourse that is presented in the novel has its specific location in the space that novel provides for it and from that location it addresses the others.

While at one extreme the modern theories with their totolizations and with their instrumental rationality impose their theories on the text and at the other exreme the majority of postmodern theories with their abstractness and with their equally instrumental rejection of rationality are busy reading the text for a justification of their ideas. Therefore, both groups impose a lot on the text; they overhead the text, or to use one favorite expression of one of these theories, they read between the lines.

In contrast, the Bakhtinian theory, as seen, reads the relationship between the lines , not the empty space. Bakhtinian reading is not another removed-from-the-others and absolute theory; it is not a theory that aims to justify its principles at the expense of reducing the vast significance of the text to one systematic meaning. A theory the principles of which are based on dialogue and answerability should itself be dialogic and answerable; when the end is to decapitalize and dialogize the world, it should not be through another theoretical capital. And as shown, Bakhtinian theory, and the novel it describes, is answerable to the other theories and worldview; significantly, it is a theory that is located at the intersection of a vast number of traditional, modern and postmodern theories. Consequently, Bakhtin both incorporates many other ideas to his theories and at the same time makes it possible for his reader to juxtapose and counterpoise all theories with each other, dialogism included.

With the collapse of the old empires such as the communist world and the end of the cold war (which had divided the world into two camps), the suppressed dimensions of world, which were making it plural, reappeared. This made it possible for new artistic forms to emerge the reading of which is not possible according to the old traditional theories. The erosion of the boundary between high and low culture, which previously secured the intellectual a privileged higher place in the interpretation of canonical texts, now made him or her step on the earth and read the text from a concrete situation in time and space. Perhaps this is why Herzog asks Nietzche "a question from the floor" (326). The critic, according to Herzog, is no longer an omniscient or in a hierarchically higher position. As discussed, the poststructuralist theories are also, as totalizing and abstract as those of structuralists and traditional critics. Certainly these types of totalizing, polarizing or fragmentizing theories should be rejected in favor of a more multidimensional and complex literary theory. Only a theory can read the new artistic forms that could accept and recognize the multidimensional and multileveledness of the world and of the text. A traditional, orthodox Marxist approach that insists on a binary interpretation of the world, and equally, a postmodern, Derridaian approach that insists on the radically fragmented nature of the world both are unable to read a novel that dialogizes the world.

Although it is written at the period of the cold war, Herzog is very much ahead of its time. Bellow's vision of the world in Herzog , despite the prevalent ideas of the cold war era, is not only pluralistic but also dialogic. As discussed in chapter four, plurality and dialogicality are closely interrelated. To summarize, it was argued that if a multiple of ideas is not present there how much dialogue may be controlled in favor of the canonical centers of power. It was also discussed that to pluralize and carnivalize the ideas in a formal and purely linguistic way is not enough; formal polyphony leads to a radical form of fragmentation and anarchism. One should not simply celebrate multiplicity or plurality per se since some of the multiplicities may be highly reactionary. Such lassaiz-faire politics and poetics are liberalism at its worst, making ideas autonomous and free from others, renouncing interaction of ideas.

However, the different discourses are juxtaposed in Herzog in a free and democratic way. Aleck the degenerate is given a voice as valid as the overinstitutionalized voice of the magistrate whose "mass of flesh rising from the opening of [his] black cloth, nearly eyeless, or whale-eyed, was, after all, a human head" (Herzog 234). Sometimes, as is the case with treatment of the magistrate in this quotation, some institutions are severely attacked, or it seems that they are fundamentally subverted. But Bellow (and Herzog) only brings the canonical and metainstitutional power of the magistrate down to the earth. No discourse is given a removed-from-the-earth power; everything, including law, the rules of science, and the abstract arguments of the philosophers is humanized. If there is an inversion, it is only to bring the subject down to the level of the human. All the institutions should be arranged in a horizantal, earthly, and humanized way so that they could contact and answer each other. Every institution that has found a socially higher position should be attaked, but not absolutely: just to situate it among the others, among the people. Rousseau and his Romantic followers had worked to fundamentally subvert the institutios, to make the accused a magistrate. Dialogic novel, however, distributes power so that every institution and discourse could find equal access to it. The magistrate is "after all, a human" and so is the accused Aleck.

The heterogeneous and dialogic mind of Herzog while criticizing almost every institution of his society does accept the positive share each may have in the making of the society: "Three thousand million human beings exist, each with some possession, each a microcosmos, each infinitely precious, each with a peculiar treasure" (Herzog 182). As shown in these chapters, Herzog not only recognizes a right for the existence of all people, but also their ideas are important for him; as an instance, he makes them interpret him as well as the whole affairs of his world. As discussed in chapter four, he likes to see his image in the mind of the other people; and at the same time hates to see his image in an actual mirror (Herzog 27), because to him the image shown in a mirror is a monologic picture, therefore not valid.

The theories of Bakhtin as shown, are manifested in the form of the text, in its structure: all ideas are dialogized . From a Bakhtinian perspective, Herzog is an exceptional novel in that its protagonist is a dialogic person. This is not a necessity for the genre, neither is it an innovation, but it certainly increases the degree of plurality and dialogicality of the text.

The strategy that polyphonic novel takes in its treatment of the ideas, while making all ideas confront each other, helps to decrease the nationalistic and ideological tension that has been the cause of many bloody battles of the twentieth century. While at the micro level of the individual, as we saw, it makes all individuals answerable to each other; equally, at the macro level of the society, and of the world affairs, with its recognition of all languages and ideologies of all the people of the world, polyphonic novel makes the nations to recognize each other, and in a free and plural world, without the suppressive control of super-powers, enter a dialogue. It makes all the people of the world the inhabitants of one global city of ideas.