Herzog - Nov BOTM

[Diane]

Review thread: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

[Diane]

From Penguin Random House

QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

1. From the beginning, Herzog calls into question his own sanity. Throughout the novel he confronts the concerns and accusations of madness from Dr. Edvig, his brother Shura, Mady, Gersbach, and others. Is Herzog insane? Does the novel follow Herzog from mental illness to mental health? Is Herzog’s condition “normal” for an intellectual living at the height of the Cold War?

2. Discuss the “murder” scene. Why does Herzog not carry out the crime? How does this refute immoralism or nihilism? Does it? Does the action, or non-action, constitute heroism?

3. Examining the portrayals of Madeleine, Ramona, Zono, Zipporah, Daisy, and the other women in Herzog’s life, what generalizations, if any, can be made about Bellow’s ideas about women? Are women unknowable to men, as Herzog comes despairingly close to concluding?

4. In addition to the letters, what else has played a decisive role in Herzog’s “cure”? What role, if any, has Ramona played? His brother Shura?

5. Discuss the geography of Herzog, particularly the four main locales—Quebec, New York, Chicago, Ludeyville. If Ludeyville is meant to represent an Emersonian ideal, albeit an impossible one, what do the other settings signify?

6. With the vast amount of epistolary material and the great intimacy the narrator has with the hero, we tend to forget that Herzog is not a first person narrative. Who is the narrator? A removed aspect of Herzog’s personality? A competitor to Herzog? His analyst? Where do the narrator and Herzog part ways?

7. Some of the most moving parts of the book are Herzog’s recollections of his childhood on Napoleon Street. Besides informing the reader about details of his past, how do these sections function in the novel as a whole? How do they assist Herzog during his time of crisis?

8. In his portrait of Dr. Edvig and in the comic “gun” scene with Herzog’s father, Bellow parodies psychiatry and Freudian ideas on the hostility between father and son. However, Herzog’s cure for his emotional problems is essentially a talking cure, a method pioneered by Freud in which the patient gives voice to his/her deepest anxieties. What kind of view of human psychology does Herzog present?

9. Most of Bellow’s fiction dramatizes the struggles specific to Jewish intellectuals in America. What is significant about Herzog’s Jewishness? Is an understanding of his Jewishness indispensable to an understanding of the novel?

10. Herzog is a novel that champions ordinary experience. At one point, Herzog eulogizes his father, an ordinary man, by saying “his I had dignity.” Opposed to the value of ordinariness and the common connections between people are the ideological arguments—marxism, existentialism, nihilism—of the age. Discuss Herzog’s comment at the end of the novel that Mady “brought ideology into my life.” Did she? What role did Gersbach play in perverting Herzog’s faith in ordinary experience? What about his colleague Shapiro?