Searching For The "Holy Grail"

As a conscious intellectual with strong humanism, Saul Bellow has been devoting himself to settling the spiritual predicament of modern people through his writing. As another American literary master following Earnest Hemingway and William Faulkner, his writing has been focusing on the spiritual yearning of the anti-hero to construct one's own identity in the alienated and dehumanized modern society. Throughout his literary creation career which is over sixty years, one intrinsic theme is "more extensive, flexible, various, well-organized, comprehensive description, which expounds some problems of importance such as who he is, what he lives for, what he is so keenly and interminably yearning for, what his human essence is." As a transitional work in Bellow's literary creation, the publication oiHerzog had ever aroused sensation because of its "high taste", in which the bewilderment, pursuit and quest of the middle class intellectual was presented vividly and thoroughly. As a typical western intellectual, Herzog is caught in the crisis of self-identification or the construction of one's own essence in the modern society which is characterized by the loss of humanism and classical morality. He lost the "foothold in life" and equilibrium of being in the "tottering world", and became a "dangling man" and "outsider". Herzog conducted a series of questing, seemingly crazy and ridiculous, in order to rediscover the dignity of life.My thesis begins with a fundamental motif of literature—wandering-questing, aiming to interpret the existential predicament and identity crisis through the close reading and keen analysis of the text. The textual narrative of Herzog corresponds to the two dimensions of this motif: the motion in physical space and the pilgrimage in metaphysical world. As a typical "spiritual wanderer" and "metaphysical exile", Herzog never abandons his attempt to pursue an idealized and conceptualized "grand synthesis" in his mind by the means of letter-writing. The futility of such questing drives him to turn to external reality; however, Herzog fulfilled Socrates' epigram "Know Thyself and found a new and true self while abandon pure intellectual reasoning and conceptualized self. Meanwhile, the motif is also closely involved with the identification and construction of the subject's identity. As what Edward W. Said puts it, exile means the loss of identity, and the intellectual is "an exile, marginal, amateur and the one speaking truth to power". Therefore, the continuous wandering-questing of Herzog is the very struggle and effort for him to get rid of the existential anxiety and predicament as an individual intellectual. Furthermore, the existential struggle is universal, and Herzog is just the epitome of modern Everyman.