A Five-Cent Synthesis
thoughts on keeping an on-line journal

Moses Herzog's* desperate search for clarity, justification, sanity, drives him to keep something like a web log in the days before the web existed. He is driven compulsively to scribble fragments of thoughts he suspects are themselves only symptoms of his disintegration.

Lying on the sofa of the kitchenette apartment he has rented on 17th Street, he sometines imagined he was an industry manufacturing personal history, and saw himself from birth to death. He conceded on a piece of paper,

I cannot justify.

I've always thought Herzog's search for sanity is crystalised in his "pursuit of a grand synthesis". Bellow engages a well-known quip from an otherwise obscure American Vice-President, Thomas Riley Marshall (from my home state of Indiana), who said, in 1917, "What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar." Herzog muses, What this country needs is a good five-cent synthesis (p. 207).

Read Hegel and Marx. The dream is for a resolution of interminable conflict. But of course Herzog is aware that "it's the hysterical individual who allows his life to be polarized

by simple extreme antitheses like strength-weakness, potency-impotency, health-sickness. He feels challenged but unable to struggle. . . A man bursting with unrecognized needs, deep desires for finding resolutions, imperatives, desires for activity, for brotherhood, desperate with longing for reality, for God, could not wait but threw himself wildly upon anything resembling a hope. (p. 208)

Herzog has spent his hours writing letters "to everyone under the sun" and scribbling fragments of off-the-cuff proverbs, in a process that makes the act of writing seem less the construction of meaning than a recording of pain, a symptom of frustration and desperation in the face of meaninglessness. In the brutal, post-humanist absurdity of the world after Auschwitz, Herzog's anxious journeys lead nowhere. The prospect of hope itself is just as absurd as the prospect of a five-cent cigar in the political imagination of a Thomas Riley Marshall. At the end of the novel, the search for a grand synthesis is transcended along with language and writing itself. Achieving a kind of equilibrium if not actual authenticity, Herzog has "no message for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word."

*Saul Bellow, Herzog (1961)