Introduction

Jewry is a very special ethnicity in the aspects of history and religion. Owing to religious and ethnic causes, the Jewish people have been exiled since the pre-historical time. As America had been relatively open to Jews, a lot of European Jewish people immigrated to this new land in the 20th century. It is no secret that they confronted multiculturalism with great ambivalence, trepidation and even hostility. The Jewish-American novelists who participated or have been participating in the multiculturalism vividly depict the cultural changes of the Jewish-American immigrants in their writings. Nowadays Jewish-American literature is becoming a typical cross-cultural literary issue.

Among all the Jewish-American writers, I am attached to Saul Bellow. He was born on June 10, 1915, and died on April 5, 2005. He is a distinguished Jewish-American novelist. His international status in the post-WWII American literature can be compared to that of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. His humor and flexibility in dealing with the Jewish cultural heritage in his works have moved me deeply. Moreover, I feel fascinated by his subtle analysis of modern culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession, interspersed with philosophic conversation with readers and his penetrating insights into the dilemma of the modern age.

Since the publication of his first novel Dangling Man in 1944, Bellow has caught extensive attention from the reading public as well as the critics. Literary scholars have approached his works from such various perspectives as neo-critical, psychological, archetypal, structuralist, feminist and post-modern criticisms.

The Bellow criticism has developed in three “generations.” The first of these, emerging in the later 1960s, identifies in Bellow the writer who breaks with modernist orthodoxy, the tradition dominating the 20th century American literary minds and the critical profession, and the Bellow critics such as Tony Tanner, Keith Opdahl and John J. Clayton investigate the author's response to this tradition; the second generation, largely of the 1970s, broadens the critical spectrum to include investigations of individual issues such as the subject matter, theme, narrative mode and the psychic pattern of fiction. Sarah Blacher, Chirantan Kulshresta and Yuzaburo Shibuya are the typical critics of this generation. Despite new objectives and expanded thematic range, these perspectives do not principally challenge the first generation's assessment of Bellow as an anti-modernist and an affirmative humanist; the third generation covers the period from the 1980s up to now. Canonical issues and diversification of critical theories found ample food in analyzing Bellow and his works. The notable critics such as Malcolm Bradbury, L. H. Goldman, Daniel Fuchs, Michael Glenday, Ellen Pifer, Peter Hyland, Gloria Cronin, Claude Levy and Jonathan Wilson largely adopt such critical approaches as structuralist, deconstructive, neo-critical, psychological, archetypal, feminist and post-modern criticisms to analyze his thematic patterns, characterization, styles, cultural backgrounds, humanistic consciousness, historical contexts, etc.

The research on Bellow's Jewish consciousness mainly started from the 1980s. Regarding Bellow's Jewish consciousness, there are two kinds of opinions. The first denies Bellow's Jewish consciousness, as Malcolm Bradbury, in Saul Bellow (1982), when reassessing Bellow's relationship to the European and American intellectual traditions, repositions Bellow as creating his own historical self to be independent of any of these inherited traditions. The second asserts Bellow's Jewish identity, as L. H. Goldman, in Saul Bellow's Moral Vision: a Critical Study of the Jewish Experience (1983), reveals Bellow's debt to the Judaic tradition, arguing that this debt is more profound and functionally important in Bellow's novels than Bellow could concede. In this book, Herzog is viewed as an in-depth exploration of Jewish culture in two aspects: 1) Bellow's protagonist in Herzog is a parody of the Moses of Exodus in the Hebrew Bible; 2) the intersection of English and Yiddish shows Bellow's indebtedness to Jewish tradition in the level of language. In 1989, Gloria L. Cronin and L. H. Goldman edited Saul Bellow in the 1980s: a Collection of Critical Essays, which includes an article “Saul Bellow and the Philosophy of Judaism” written by the latter editor. This article mainly exposes Bellow's consciousness to keep firm to philosophy of Judaism. In Goldman's opinion, Bellow's perspective is unmistakably Jewish, and he is a religious man. All the critics, as I know, seem to disagree with each other. Some of them deny Bellow's Jewish consciousness, while others definitely affirm his Jewish identity.

According to my understanding, Jewish consciousness is a kind of cultural consciousness. It usually emphasizes the Jewish culture's value and its traditional significance. Bellow, as a Jewish writer, proclaimed to be essentially Jewish, and he always demanded an approximate Jewish understanding of his fiction. Among all his novels, Herzog is the most Jewish. This novel could be regarded as a retrenchment in the direction of realism and high seriousness. It focuses on the Jewish protagonist, Moses Elkanah Herzog, the option available to him, his preferences and judgment, and his capabilities in dealing with his present predicament in the intellectual and social life. Since Bellow transmuted his Jewish life experience into his protagonist, expounded his observation of American Jews' cultural changes in the historical background of the 1960s in the USA, and expressed his deepest concern for the modern Jews, the novel which embodies profound Jewish cultural elements becomes a window for us to examine Bellow's Jewish consciousness.

In this book, I intend to survey Bellow's Jewish consciousness by applying cultural poetics in analyzing Herzog. The cultural poetics surfaced as an identifiable tendency in academic literary and cultural criticism in the 1980s. In 1982, Stephen Greenblatt, professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, was asked by Genre to edit a selection of Renaissance essays. He collected a bunch of essays and then, out of a kind of desperation to get the introduction done, he wrote that the essays represented something he called a “new historicism.” On September 4, 1986, he gave a lecture called Towards a Poetics of Culture at the University of Western Australia. Greenblatt, who is most closely identified with the label “New Historicism” in Renaissance literary studies, and his followers have now abandoned it in favor of “Cultural Poetics,” a term which represents their critical project more accurately.

According to Greenblatt, the cultural poetics should be “situated as a practice—a practice rather than a doctrine” (Greenblatt, 1989: 1). It is a set of themes, preoccupation and attitudes. It is an attempt to restore a historical dimension to literary studies so as to make the literary texts illuminated by the study of their relations to their historical contexts. Louis A. Montrose, another recognized practitioner of the New Historicism, thinks that New Historicism or the cultural poetics represents an effort merely to “refigure the socio-cultural field within which canonical [...] literary and dramatic works were originally produced; upon situating them not only in relationship to other genres and modes of discourse but also in relationship to contemporaneous institutions and non-discursive practices” (Montrose, 1989: 17). In this aspect, the cultural poetics offends a number of orthodoxies of both literary and historical studies such as new criticism, post-structuralism, historian in general and traditional literary scholars.

Though the cultural poetics does not become a systematic doctrine, its epistemological basis lies in the holistic view of culture. Concerning the relations of literature to culture, the holistic view of culture implies the following two basic points.

Firstly, literature is imbued with cultural qualities. As we know, culture is a systematic wholeness in which different components of culture such as religion, philosophy, history, ethics and morality, literature, aesthetics and music function dynamically. Literature as a special component of culture is not isolated, self-contained or non-referential. It is related with other components of culture, and is originally produced in the socio-cultural context. It is undeniable that the viewpoint that literature is closely related with culture and socially produced originated early in human history. Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC) with his Poetics in ancient Greek, М. Бахтин (1895-1975) in Russia and Wang Guowei (1877-1927) in China can be grouped as critics who had used different terms to expound the close relations of literature to culture. Based upon the precedents' achievements in cross-cultural literary field, the critics of the cultural poetics object to isolate literature from the socio-cultural context. That literature is related with culture and is produced within the socio-cultural field implies that literature has cultural qualities.

Secondly, literature has dynamic, not static cultural qualities. Montrose states that the project of cultural poetics “reorients the axis of intertexuality, substituting for the diachronic text of an autonomous literary history the synchronic text of a cultural system” (1989: 17). Hayden White (1928- ), theorist of New Historicism, thinks that what Montrose said above has shifted the interests and grounds of the cultural poetics considerably. Firstly, “it is ‘a cultural system' rather than ‘contemporaneous social institutions and non-discursive practices', to which literary works are to be related” (White, 1989:293). For the cultural poetics, “the socio-cultural context is the ‘cultural system.'” (White, 1989: 294) Secondly, “there is a newer notion of literature as a function of the ‘cultural system.' It is the ‘text' of ‘a cultural system' that is to be substituted for the ‘text' of ‘an autonomous literary history.'” (Ibid) Thirdly, the cultural system and literary works are now to be considered as kind of “texts,” and the relationship between literary texts and the cultural system is conceived to be “intertextual” in nature, one affecting another. The intertextuality between literature and the cultural system shows that literature is granted dynamic cultural qualities, and it can become active and influential in construction of social systems. In all, the holistic view of culture that includes two basic points about the relations of literature to culture becomes the epistemological basis and theoretical starting-point of the cultural poetics.

The object of the cultural poetics in literary studies is to seek the cultural and aesthetic property of literary works, and the cultural poetics is oriented to have both the cultural and aesthetic elaboration.

In my research, I desire to figure out a Jewish writer's cultural consciousness through analyzing one of his books. As we know, most Jewish immigrants including those Jewish writers had experienced or have been experiencing complex cultural changes. Since Jews immigrated to America in the second half of the 19th century, their cultural typology and features have differed in the different periods of American history. The cultural changes in each cultural individual is various. Even in different periods of their lives, their cultural changes are dynamic, not static. Many Jewish-American writers use their artistic forms to represent the Jewish people's cultural changes in their works. As far as Bellow is concerned, on the one hand, he has a profound Jewish life experience; on the other hand, as an intelligent scholar in anthropology and sociology, he becomes a detached observer of the socio-cultural changes in America. Since he openly stated that he disliked the old historians' direct interpretation of history and society, and he desired to seek “true impressions”instead of “direct relevance” in his works, his works cannot be approached from the orthodoxy perspectives such as new criticism and post-structuralism. It is clear that his works are produced in a cultural system, and are desired by him to be productive to the cultural systems. Out of the desire of achieving the intertextuality between his works and the American cultural systems, Bellow plants his dynamic cultural consciousness which he got from his negotiation with the cultural systems in America into his works, therefore his work would have dynamic and active cultural qualities. It is clear that the dynamic cultural qualities embody Bellow's cultural consciousness. By examining Bellow's cultural background in which Jewish culture occupies the most important position, and then describing culture in action in Herzog, finally inspecting how the novel works as a function of the American “cultural systems”, we can figure out the cultural qualities of Herzog so as to clarify Bellow's Jewish consciousness.

A study of Bellow's Jewish consciousness by applying the cultural poetics in analyzing Herzog is important for the following senses:

First, it offers a new light on Bellow's Jewish consciousness from a cultural perspective; second, it can help us clarify Bellow's Jewish consciousness so as to enlarge the field of study of Bellow and better understand his life and works; third, it will help us recognize Bellow's great contribution to Jewish-American literature so as to reveal his value and significance in the history of American literature; fourth, it has a practical and realistic meaning. A lot of modern Jews stand in danger of forfeiting their most precious possession—their faith. Bellow's exploration and clarification of Jewishness in his works would open a window for people to examine their own identity.

This book falls into three chapters. In Chapter 1, I intend to trace the sources and evolution of Bellow's Jewish consciousness. Bellow has rich life experiences—both Jewish and American. On the one hand, his Jewish experience marks him as a firm “carrier” of traditional Jewish cultural heritage, which forms an important part of his Jewish consciousness. On the other hand, his American experience impels him to imbibe American culture, distinguishing him as a special kind of American—a cosmopolitan intellectual with a deep strain of liberal humanism. After experiencing the cultural conflict and cultural adoption in the inter-civilizational setting, Bellow finds the most active elements of the two cultures that can possibly implement each other in American society.

Chapter 2 gives a detailed analysis on the kernel of Bellow's Jewish consciousness artistically represented by his masterpiece Herzog. By investigating relations of Bellow's novel to the traditional Jewish culture, I interpret Herzog's Jewishness to be marginality, alienation, homeland-quest and self-identification, chiefly embodied by his Jewish protagonist, Moses Elkanah Herzog. Herzog's personal experience is related to the Jewish destiny, and it also reflects and affects the fate of the Jewish people. Bellow plants the Jewish cultural qualities and spirits in him. He chooses Herzog, a Jewish-American intellectual, as his spokesman to convey his deep humanistic concern for Jews' life in the modern world.

Chapter 3 makes further analyses on how Bellow successfully integrates the singularity of Herzog's Jewishness with cosmopolitanism so as to show that his Jewish consciousness is actually a universal human consciousness in a special sense, characterized by his humanism-oriented cosmopolitanism, which aims to transcend the provincial experience of the Jewish individuals in achieving a mutual understanding among humankind. Such becomes a distinctive feature of Bellow's Jewish consciousness in his Herzog and highlights Bellow as a great man of letters with humanistic concern and cosmopolitan vision.