Preface

Nearly ten years ago, when I was a postgraduate in Central South University, I was determined to work out my M.A. thesis for my satisfaction. I went to the library of Hunan University. It was the first time that I saw Saul Bellow's works such as Herzog, Dangling Man, Seize the Day, etc. They lay quietly on the bookshelves and awaited people to enjoy them. The first book I took up and read was Herzog, which brought me much trouble at the very beginning. A lot of new words plus mixed plots made me greatly confused and frustrated. As time went on, with much effort I began to enter his world, analyzing his complicated diction and profound thoughts buried deep in his works. Over the past ten years, I have ever since engaged myself in studying his works. I feel grateful to Saul Bellow, for he guides me into the world of the Jews whose culture, history, religion, customs, values and great contribution to human history are a unique enchanting world and thus worthy of being studied.

In the Jewish history, we can see many celebrities such as Karl Marx (1818-1883), Albert Einstein (1879-1955), John Rockefeller (1839-1937), Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), Christopher Columbus (1451-1506), Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977), Henry Alfred Kissinger (1923- ), Alan Greenspan (1926- ), Bill Gates (1955- ), Warren Buffett (1930- ), etc. It is no exaggeration to say that the Jewish people influence the world more than any other ethnic groups. I can't help wondering what inspired them to make such great contributions to human history. With this doubt in mind, I, an English major, began to approach Saul Bellow, a Jewish man of letters, who builds a magnificent mansion of novels.

Saul Bellow (1915-2005), a Jewish-American novelist, is one of the greatest American novelists after Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. He left behind him a total of eleven novels, a great number of short stories, several novellas, plays and essays. The Nobel Prize for Literature came in 1976 to him for his “humanistic understanding and subtle analysis of the contemporary culture that are combined in his work.” Herzog, which was published by Bellow in 1964, is proclaimed to be his most important work for its realistic and vivid depiction of the vanity and sadness as well as its thorough investigation of American-Jewish intellectuals in the modern American society.

In this book, I intend to make a systematic cultural analysis on Herzog from the critical perspective of Cultural Poetics so as to figure out Bellow's Jewish consciousness. His Jewish consciousness emphasizes the Jewish culture's value and its traditional significance. By depicting in Herzog the personal experience of a Jewish intellectual situated in the dominating cultural context of the United States, Bellow reveals Herzog's Jewishness, a Jewish cultural quality, as marginality, alienation, homeland-quest and self-identification. He chooses Jewish intellectuals as his narrative focus, successfully highlighting the Jewish-Americans' embarrassing living conditions and life experience. This marks the starting-point of the book.

Bellow's Jewish consciousness is largely based on humanism, which is cosmopolitanism-oriented. As a member of Jewish-American immigrants, he zealously advocates constructing a multicultural coexistence between the Jewish culture and the American mainstream culture. By establishing an approximate cultural identification between the two cultures concerning man's meaningful existence, he successfully solves the two vital cultural strains. In the aspect of artistic creation, Bellow is not satisfied with those traditional writers who hold pessimistic attitudes toward human nature and social reality. He encourages all writers to negotiate themselves with the society so as to achieve a mutual exchange and seek the “true impressions” instead of “direct relevance”. In so doing, he hopes to highlight our dignified human nature and put up a slogan of humanism above the civilizational “wasteland”. With this artistic thought in mind, he takes advantage of the anthropocentric concerns of the Jewish heritage and places the ethical and moral questions at the core of his works. Therefore, he is keen on depicting the emotional crisis and spiritual pilgrimage of the Jewish intellectuals he is most familiar with so as to expose the life predicaments and living principles not only for the Jews but also for all humanity. In all, Bellow's Jewish consciousness is characteristic of universal human nature. Not only does it show his concern for the Jewish life and fate in particular, but also manifests the universal reality of human existence. In this view, his Jewish consciousness has transcended the singularity and provincialism of being Jewish only, thus integrating the Jewish traditional value into international cultural heritage. Such informs Herzog as a world-famous masterpiece of contemporary Jewish-American literature, and highlights Saul Bellow as a brilliant writer with humanistic concern and cosmopolitan vision.

Peng Tao