Extract 2 from Saul Bellow's Herzog

Henri Matisse, Le bonheur de vivre, 1905-06

Extract in English from Saul Bellow's 1964 novel Herzog, chosen by Bora Mici

This second extract that has caught my attention from Saul Bellow's Herzog reminds me of Hannah Arendt's Banality of Evil and about Michel de Certeau's emphasis on the everyday tactics and footprints we leave on the grand strategies that those who make policy and lead institutions would have govern us. Herzog is a character who questions the divide between science and morality in our contemporary world as he considers how his ex-wife, a former Jewish convert to Christianity, betrayed him with his best friend and belittled and crushed him daily in favor of what Herzog deems was her ideological penchant. In a Romantic outpouring of emotion and individual struggle, Herzog writes a flurry of letters to all the different people who have influenced him in his journey, trying to break free from ideology in all its forms and learn to be self-sufficient. His unfinished academic work on Romanticism and Christianity informs the content of his letters and his reflections on his relationships. The banality of everyday evil lies precisely in our reliance on various ideologies to conduct our lives when we should try to unite our values and facts without deluding ourselves that we are called to obey a higher authority. We should question ideologies and become conscious of their effect on our everyday choices.        

"Living amid great ideas and concepts, insufficiently relevant to the present, day-by-day, American conditions. You see, Monsignor, if you stand on television in the ancient albs and surplices of the Roman church there are at least enough Irishmen, Poles, Croatians watching in saloons to understand you... But I, a learned specialist in intellectual history, handicapped by emotional confusion... Resisting the argument that scientific through has put into disorder all considerations based on value... Convinced that the extent of universal space does not destroy human value, that the realm of facts, and that of values are not eternally separated. And the peculiar idea entered my (Jewish) mind that we'd see about this! My life would prove a different point altogether. Very tired of the modern form of historicism which sees in this civilization the defeat of the best hopes of Western religion and thought, what Heidegger calls the second Fall of Man into the quotidian or ordinary. No philosopher knows what the ordinary is, has not fallen into it deeply enough. The question of ordinary human experience is the principal question of these modern centuries, as Montaigne and Pascal, otherwise in disagreement, both clearly saw. -- The strength of a man's virtue or spiritual capacity measured by his ordinary life. 

One way or another the no doubt mad idea entered my mind that my own actions had historic importance, and this (fantasy?) made it appear that people who harmed me were interfering with an important experiment."

Extract 1 from Saul Bellow's Herzog

Yves Klein, Anthropométries, 1960-1962

Extract in English from Saul Bellow's 1964 novel Herzog, chosen by Bora Mici

This extract is about the main character's Western view of history as a fatality rather than as an open path to a joyous life, which is what he seeks. I chose it because the idea of the Christian spirit of sacrifice and unhappiness are inextricably linked in my view and quite perverse at that. Herzog is a monument to a character that learns to extricate himself from this kind of perversity. I wish he would also be a vegetarian.   

"It was enough to make a man pray to God to remove this great, bone-breaking burden of selfhood and self-development, give himself, a failure, back to the species for a primitive cure. But this was becoming the up-to-date and almost conventional way of looking at any single life. In this view the body itself, with its two arms and vertical length, was compared to the Cross, on which you knew the agony of consciousness and separate being. For that matter, he had been taking this primitive cure, administered by Madeleine, Sandor, et cetera; so that his recent misfortunes might be seen as a collective project, himself participating, to destroy his vanity and his pretensions to a personal life so that he might disintegrate and suffer and hate, like so many others, not on anything so distinguished as a cross, but down in the mire of post-Renaissance, post-humanistic, post-Cartesian dissolution, next door to the Void. Everybody was in the act. "History" gave everyone a free ride. The very Himmelsteins, who had never even read a book of metaphysics, were touting the Void as if it were so much salable real estate. This little demon was impregnated with modern ideas, and one in particular excited his terrible little heart: you must sacrifice your poor, squawking, niggardly individuality--which may be nothing anyway (from an analytic viewpoint) but a persistent infantile megalomania, or (from a Marxian point of view) a stinking little bourgeois property--to historical necessity. And to truth. And truth is true only as it brings down more disgrace and dreariness upon human beings, so that if it shows anything except evil it is illusion, and not truth. But of course he, Herzog, predictably bucking such trends, had characteristically, obstinately, defiantly, blindly but without sufficient courage or intelligence tried to be a marvelous Herzog, a Herzog who, perhaps clumsily, tried to live out marvelous qualities vaguely comprehended. Granted he had gone too far, beyond his talents and his powers, but this was the cruel difficulty of a man who had strong impulses, even faith, but lacked clear ideas. What if he failed? Did that mean that there was no faithfulness, no generosity, no sacred quality?" (page 102-103, Penguin Books edition introduced by Philip Roth)