Foreword

Peng Tao, the author of this book, asked me to write a foreword and provided me with all the necessary materials for the work. I, with great pleasure and interest, accepted the task, for I like this topic, which is interesting and worth studying.

The Jewry is a very special race in such aspects as history, religion, customs, and life style and, with the Jewish-American writers (scientists and businessmen as well) as their representatives, the Jewish people is a very special ethnic group in the United States. The Jewish-American literature—a wonderful flower in the garden of world literature—contributes to American literature with vivid depictions of the cultural inheritance and development of the Jewish immigrants in America, as well as of their living environment in a multicultural context.

Jewish-American literature has made such great contributions to American literature that it has become a spectacular cross-cultural literary phenomenon. This book has good reasons for choosing Saul Bellow's Herzog as its topic of study. Saul Bellow won Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, chiefly for Herzog.

Saul Bellow (1915-2005) is a distinguished Jewish-American novelist in the 20th century. Since the publication of Dangling Man in 1944, which is his first novel, he has caught extensive attention of both the reading public and critics.Others of his important works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift, etc. With his “huge literary influence”, Bellow has been widely regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest authors. So far, literary scholars have approached his works from such various perspectives as neo-critical, psychological, archetypal, structuralist, feminist, post-modern criticisms, etc.

In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, Bellow's writing exhibited “the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age.”

Saul Bellow was first introduced into China after the Reform and Opening Up. The year of 1985 saw the publication of the Chinese version of Herzog, translated by Song Zhaolin (1928-2011), a well-known translator, writer and English literature scholar in China.

Early Chinese critics concerned themselves mainly with offering introductions to Bellow's literary career as well as his modernistic style, in a somewhat generalized way. As time goes on, more specific studies and insightful articles turn up. It is with the help of Liu Hongyi's Toward the Cultural Poetics—Studies in American Jewish Fiction (2002), Zhou Nanyi's Saul Bellow, the 20th-Century Literary Novelist (2003), Liu Wensong's Saul Bellow's Fiction: Power Relation and Female Representation (2004), Wu Lingying's Marginal Protagonists' Journey—a Study on Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison (2005), etc., that the Chinese reading public have access to a more comprehensive picture of Saul Bellow.

The recent years have witnessed the publication of Liu Xiying's On the Consciousness of Suffering and Jewish Ethical Orientation in Saul Bellow's Fiction (2011), Zhang Jun's A Study of the Mentors in Saul Bellow's Bildungsroman (2013) and Qiao Guoqiang's Saul Bellow: a Collection of Criticism (2014), which have brought the Bellow criticism to a new peak.

Herzog is a representative of Saul Bellow's works. In Herzog, Saul Bellow transmutes his own life into the characterization of the protagonist, Moses Elkanah Herzog, a modern parody of the biblical Moses in Exodus of Hebrew Bible. Moses Herzog's indebtedness to the religious, ethical and philosophical estrangement and cultural traditions of Judaism, his experience of exile by force and re-entry by his own will prove Bellow to be essentially Jewish. With the depiction of the crack of Moses' individual history, Saul Bellow also depicts the American history. In other words, Bellow combines the Jewish theme with the open participation in the intellectual life of American, attempting to provide a specific Jewish dimension for the more general discussion of American problems. According to the observation of the author of this book, Bellow succeeds in making full use of his Jewish perspective, Jewish feeling, Jewish experience, his typical dialectical mode of thinking and excellent narrative techniques to expose the emotional and spiritual predicament and reaction strategies of the Jewish intellectuals in the modern world so as to show the universal reality of human existence. With a cosmopolitan vision, Saul Bellow transcends the particularism of the novel's Jewishness and gives expression to the intrinsic cosmopolitanism of his novel's central message—defending man's dignity, saving the human soul from the limitations of reality—Bellow's Jewish theme is a portmanteau and complex one. This is Peng Tao's basic thinking about the topic of this book.

Peng Tao has planned the book in five parts. Part I (Introduction), as a basis for the discussions that follow, gives a general introduction to Saul Bellow's literary career, his literary achievements as well as his thematic pursuit. Part II (Chapter 1) analyzes the formation of Bellow's Jewish consciousness, and differentiates “Jewishness” from “Jewish consciousness”. Part III (Chapter 2), as the main body of the book and aiming at throwing light on Saul Bellow's Jewish consciousness, makes an in-depth study of the Jewishness of Herzog. Part IV (Chapter 3) is centered on Bellow's success in integrating Herzog's Jewishness with cosmopolitanism (universalism), with a purpose of revealing the cosmopolitan vision in Bellow's Jewish consciousness. Part V, the Conclusion, brief as it is, sums the whole thing up with a statement that Bellow's works with strong Jewish color are humanism-oriented in their cosmopolitan themes.

Isaac Newton said, “If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants.” Peng Tao, a teacher in Zhuhai College of Jilin University, basing on what literature she collected, worked this book out, which, I believe, should prove to be a very rewarding effort both for herself and for its intended readers. I hope Peng Tao will carry on her voyage on the vast ocean of Bellow studies.

Wu Jinghui

2016.2

February, 2016