Saul Bellow discusses Herzog and Himself in regard to Multiple Personality

In the course of a 1977 interview (1, pp. 140-160), Bellow discusses the title character of his novel Herzog as suffering from the “complexity” and “chaos” caused by containing so many “personae.”

The character makes “an attempt really to divest himself of all of the personae…He’s decided to go through a process of jettisoning or lightening. That’s how I saw the book when I was writing it…Well, it isn’t that he’s a loser. It’s that he’s so chaotic; no woman can stand so much disorder…it’s the chaos, and the complexity of life which would tire a woman out, just trying to follow it. This complexity is intolerable…”

At another point, the interviewer asks about the way some of his characters, at least superficially, resemble Bellow. As most novelists are about this, Bellow is defensive. But, it is interesting, in denying that any of his characters are a copy of himself, the very words Bellow uses imply that he has thought about multiple personality. “Dissociation of personality” is a phrase that Bellow must have gotten from some book or article about multiple personality:

“I would have to suffer from dissociation of personality to be all these people in the books. I can’t possibly be all of them.”

Well, if they all came from him—and, in another interview, he says that he finds his characters; that he doesn’t create them (1, p. 161)—then by his own logic, he would, indeed, have to have multiple personality.

When, in an interview, authors say that their characters are not them, they are telling the truth, in a disingenuous manner of speaking, because the interviewee is the host personality (see blog glossary), while the character is someone else, an alternate personality. That an alternate personality is not a copy of the host personality is the truth.

1. Gloria L. Cronin and Ben Siegel (Editors). Conversations with Saul Bellow. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1994.