Saul Bellow’s Herzog: Both Madeleine and Herzog Have Multiple Personality; Obvious Evidence Ignored by Standard Literary Criticism

Madeleine

If a person has no medical or neurological condition to better explain it, then amnesia for undeniable behavior is evidence for multiple personality: one personality evidently had amnesia for what another personality did.

Madeleine’s amnesia:

“For a week or two, Field’s delivery truck was bringing jewelry, cigarette boxes, coats and dresses, lamps, carpets, almost daily. Madeleine could not recall making these purchases” (1, p 63).

Amnesia is not something you would lie about, since it says you are so out of control that you literally don’t know what you are doing. You are, in effect, calling yourself crazy. And almost any other excuse would be less humiliating.

Additional evidence relates to the fact that most adults with multiple personality report having had traumatic experiences and memory gaps in childhood. Madeleine reports a history of child abuse, and amnesia for the year that she was fourteen (1, p. 128).

None of this is necessary to character development or plot. Its inclusion in this novel is gratuitous. And when a novel has gratuitous multiple personality, it probably reflects the psychology of the author or of someone the author knew.

Herzog’s Letters

Much of the novel consists of “letters” composed in Herzog’s mind. Why does Herzog consider these “letters” crazy? Because he experiences them as being composed against his will by a person, not himself, inside him (in psychological terms, an alternate personality).

To begin with the novel’s opening line:

“If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog…He had fallen under a spell and was writing letters to everyone under the sun” (1, p. 3)…”He…suspected…that it might be a symptom of disintegration” (1, p. 5)…”He felt he was going to pieces—breaking up” (1, p. 9)…”Two points therefore: He knew his scribbling, his letter-writing, was ridiculous. It was involuntary…There is someone inside me. I am in his grip. When I speak of him I feel him in my head, pounding for order. He will ruin me” (1, p. 14). “…he was aware that his angry spirit had stolen forward again, and that he was about to write letters” (1, p. 31-32).

Superficially, the months of this letter writing could be mistaken for a manic episode, one symptom of which may be that the person is overflowing with ideas. But a person in a manic episode would speak these “letters” out loud or mail them to other people. Another possibility is psychosis; however, from beginning to end, Herzog recognizes his letter writing as “ridiculous” and as originating in his own mind (and not caused by outside forces or a computer chip planted in his brain).

“There is someone inside me.”

Isn’t that psychotic? Only if Herzog meant that the body of another person was physically inside him. But Herzog means only that sometimes there are thoughts in his head that he does not experience as his own, and that these thoughts can be angry and emotional.

Which is the kind of subjective experience that is typical of a person with multiple personality. If Herzog were my patient, I would find—without hypnosis or drugs—that this other personality could temporarily take over, come out, and have a conversation with me. Routine. No problem. (Now that I know what multiple personality looks like, and how it works, from clinical experience.)

Is Herzog’s multiple personality gone at the end?

After all, the “letter writing” stops on the last page of the novel, as though Herzog had been under some temporary spell. But the answer is no, the multiple personality has not gone away. It is just that the alternate personality has gone behind the scenes, where alternate personalities usually reside.

In multiple personality, the regular personality (“host personality”) is usually unaware of the presence of the alternate personalities, except temporarily, during a crisis, or after diagnosis, or if the personalities masquerade as an alter ego, character, editor, or narrative voice.

1. Saul Bellow. Herzog [1964]. Introduction by Philip Roth. Penguin Books, 2003.