270
RICHARD POIRIEl
When does it end! Betrayed by someone in the way he thinks of
how
someone has betrayed him! Having therefore rejected a place on
the
Cross (actually by 1964 so worn a piece of literary furniture as to
be
ready, like
Art
Nouveau, for sentimental revival) he momentarily settles
"down in the mire of post-Renaissance, post-humanistic, post-Cartesian
dissolution, next door
to
the Void." Alas, another neighborhood
roo
fashionable for honest H. The process of correction and mockery by which
these successive placements are given up involves, of course, the wholly
unacceptable assumption that the novel has made Herzog in some
way
suitable for them. Not every hero in modem literature is allowed
uncritically to try on for size so many distinguished roles and then
to
say not that they don't fit but that they are too much in season. By
the
end of the passage Herzog is our culture hero "predictably bucking such
trends," though how, where, with whom and in what sense he does any
"bucking," how he might even ironically call himself "marvelous Herzog,"
the things that happen in the novel and that get said in it, this passage
being a sample, don't and cannot show. Yes, the terms of the passage are
those of an English professor whose book is being stolen from him
as
mysteriously
(if
you think like Herzog) as was his wife. But they are
also
Bellow's terms despite his little ironies, Audenesque in the double take
of
their direction. What is missing is any indication that Bellow is aware
of
the
essential
irrelevance, the
essential
pretension and shabbiness of
the
self-aggrandizing mind at work in, and for, the hero.
To a considerable degree the novel does work as a rather conven–
tional drama of alienation, though this is precisely what Bellow' doesn't
want it to be. It is about the failure of all available terms for interpreta.
tion and summary, about the intellectual junk heap of language by which
Herzog-Bellow propose dignities to the hero's life and then as quickly
watch these proposals dissolve into cliche. A similar process goes on
in
Augie,
against the competition of an anxious and often phony exuberance,
and it was there that Bellow began to fashion a comic prose which could
bear the simultaneous weight of cultural, historical, mythological evoca–
tions and also sustain the exposure of their irrelevance. His comedy
always has in it the penultimate question before the final one, faced
in
Seize the Day,
of life or death-the question of what can be taken
seriously and how seriously it can possibly be taken. The result, however,
is a kind of stalemate achieved simply by not looking beyond the play
of humor into its constituents, at the person from whom it issues, at
the
psychological implications both of anyone's asking such questions and of
the
way
in which he asks them. It seems to me that Bellow cannot
break
the stalemate with alienation implicit in his comedy without surrendering
