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“Imaginary Homelands,” Identity: Henderson the Rain King and the Spiritual Quest

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the spiritual quest of Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King enigmatically results in madness.  The identity of the American subject should be investigated in the light of his/her restless search of “Other modes of freedom” and imaginary homelands.  Pondering upon this, the researcher realizes that three fundamental questions need to be addressed: What are the aspects of Henderson's spiritual quest?  As a Jewish hero, how could Henderson be associated with quest, victimization and madness?  Can one think about identity or identities?  To unmask these blind spots, the theme of quest will be investigated, first.  The researcher shall trace Henderson's movement from a material world – New York – to a spiritual and romantic one, Africa.  Second, Henderson's failure to cope with the new world and therefore his failure to (re) – construct the identity of the American character will be examined in details.  This safely allows us to argue for the madness of the hero.  The conclusion to be drawn is that there is no ‘absolute identity’ to the American subject.  Henderson's attempts to re-construct a “new identity” shall be seen in line with poststructuralist premises regarding “difference, multiplicity, other, cultural diversity.” Keywords: Quest, spiritual, madness, wisdom, desert, culture, intellectualism, identity. DOI : 10.7176/RHSS/9-1-02


7
Bellow tells us what madness and oblivion are but never attempts to tell us what identity is.

Identity: the Alienation of Mad Quester(s)
In light of the no place, no subject and no movement, Henderson the Rain King suggests that identity remains a story, a fiction. The storyteller never refers to a sense or a meaning in life. Herzog's celebration of madness and Henderson's utopian world envision the nonsense sense of identity. "The madm[e] n' sense of the sense of [their] stori [es] is contaminated from the outset by [their] sense of the nonsense of stories in general. Stories are lies we tell ourselves about our lives." (Davis 135). Louis Althusser reminds us" not to tell stories for ourselves" (ne pas de raconter d'histoire) lest we consider our stories our identities and we believe them. Being immersed in psychoanalysis, Bellow is aware that this subjects, spaces, movements do not tell a possible meaning as they only refer to chaos and madness announced by Henderson and Herzog from the onset of their stories. The reader, in the end, is satirically left in silence and void.
Recounting a possible story of identity, Henderson is projecting his eyes into another who is supposed to know and aggravate a certain sense to the nonsense of the world. Referring to Deleuze's "difference and multiplicity," Bellow is philosophically reflecting upon identities rather than identity. Henderson records the life of different tribes in Africa and various social categories in America, while Herzog interrogates and undermines major philosophical thoughts. Colin Davis stresses this fusion of selves and others in the loop of storytelling: A story of [identity] cannot be just what a solipsistic subject recounts to itself. It is bound up in history and it implies the existence of a community because it requires agents who act, witnesses who recount, and audiences who listen and recount in their turn. The essential function of the story is to identify human subject who is the agent of the narrated actions and to find in him or her actions a significance that may have not been visible previously. (Davis 133) The other for Henderson are his wives, his money, his habits, his New York, his thoughts, Romilayu, the guide in Africa, the tribes, Africa, the sense, the nonsense of the sense, himself, Henderson. Henderson is other to Henderson. The other for Herzog the man is Madeleine, his wife, philosophers, poetry, Herzog the philosopher.

A Fiction of Identities
Bellow seems to be memorizing the major principles of the postmodernist thought that are unfathomably characterised by the death of man. This gesture celebrates the decentring of the subject and denies human agency and freedom. His fictional heroes provide no basis for an ethics since they do not accept the universality of values. Suggesting the concepts of difference, multiplicity and otherness, Gilles Deleuze, an emblematic theorist of the postmodern thought, is tragically and unexpectedly theorising for an anti-humanist world. Being different from or other to does not enhance the sense of unity or togetherness. Rather, it generates a sphere of doubt and never ending meanings. Henderson sums up Deleuze's theory "So for God's sake make a move, Henderson, […] you will die of this pestilence. Death will annihilate you and nothing will remain" (HRK 33). Again as he bitterly says " Shall I run back into the desert […] and stay there until the devil has passed out of me and I am fit to meet human kind again without driving it into despair" (HRK 45)? The reader is enigmatically involved within this enterprise of ambiguity and then the possibilities of meaning, unity and identity turn to be only a possibility of madness.
One immediate conclusion is that Deleuze's theory of difference and unity is misleading in the Bellovian context. In this, difference is an embodiment of the nonsense sense of the world. Unity, contrary to Spinoza's sense, engenders an illusory hope of identity. Henderson keeps shouting throughout the narrative "I want […] I want […] I was badly upset. I am probably the worst waiter in the world […]" (Bellow 103). Henderson never reconciliates himself with the world, with home in Hegelian sense, as he never reaches any form of unity with the world "Your majesty, move over and I will die beside you. Or else be me and live; I never knew what to do with my life anyway […] I will die any way" (Bellow 262). Death seems to be the last refugee for Henderson. Herzog, echoing Henderson, never reconciliates his conflicts with Madeleine, his wife. His intellectual meditations over philosophical issues are never settled. He begins the narrative as a mad figure, and he ends up telling the story of the story of madness in the world. Tommy Wilhelm in Seize the Day, Harry Fonstein in The Bellarosa Connection, Sammler in Mr. Sammler's Planet seem to face the same fate as they are respectively deterritorialized by marginalization, forgetfulness and the war.

Identity/Knowledge Crisis?
The identity crisis is a crisis of knowledge in a postmodern context to cite J.F. Lyotard. Bellow is aware of the complexity of the world in which he is living as a man, an author and a philosopher. In the light of this, he is deliberately trying to transfer the tension within identity to another tension within knowledge. Henderson the Rain King sums it up through the striking oppositions between the material world of New York and the romantic space of Africa, the urbanized American Society and the rural tribes in Africa, the scientific knowledge here and the spiritual belief there. Herzog's philosophical letters reveal, undermine and finally reject the contradictions and the blind spots in the western philosophical knowledge. Michel Foucault suggests an explanation to the " […] we are at the end of one epistemic configuration and at the beginning of another. We exist in the gap between two épistèmes, one dying, the other not yet born-of which; however, the mad poets and artists of the last century and a half were the heralds" (White 92). These epistemological shifts in knowledge are symmetrically echoed in the despair, alienation and madness of Henderson.
Pondering upon Bellow's novels, one can discover that the madness of the subject is much more like the alienation of the author. This can be proved on the account that Saul Bellow himself has been striving to identify his own way of telling. For this reason, he kept wavering between history, fiction, philosophy, epistolary style, autobiography and sometimes poetry in a Heideggerian manner (Heidegger ch 1). Reading, The Victim and Dangling Man, one can only expect the author to be a historian who is not only interested in recounting the facts but also "in" recounting that he is recounting them, or a novelist who is fictionalizing history, the history of Jewish people. Going through Henderson the Rain King, the audience could not but perceive a storyteller speaking with tenderness and writing poetical words. Reading Herzog, the reader is moved by a philosophical discourse that has always depended for its existence on a sort of a literary discourse to "dramatize" its fundamental issues.
Saul Bellow therefore is regarded as a philosopher in the Hegelian sense, a poet in the Heideggerian manner and a novelist/ philosopher in Derrida's way, once grounding my view on the account of my previous findings. Thereby the author is shifting from questioning the problem of identity, to problematizing the issue of knowledge in a Postmodern era and finally to revealing the function of philosophy as a critical discourse. The assumption behind these shifts, I need to assert, is not the loss of identity, as I argued before, nor is it the alienation or the madness of the storyteller, but the very quality of the hero who is adapting a sceptical strategy to unravel the natural function of the philosopher.

Henderson: Wise Jew, Unrecognised Philosopher?
Can one still think about madness and alienation? Is it logically possible for us, readers, to overemphasize the uprootedness, the no identify of a person who is ceaselessly striving to philosophize the issue of identity, a person who is satirically trying to undermine the ordinary reading, the misreading, or, indeed, the non-reading of the term of identity? Saul Bellow, I need to acknowledge, is aware of his Jewish origins, and yet he is not addressing Jewish people nor is he intending to address a specific social category in the American or even the western society.
The point behind that, I assume, Bellow, being a citizen in the world, wants to bring the world home and to be familiar with it. Doing so, in what sense should I think about Henderson the Rain King as a philosopher? How should I prove it? Is it possible to refer to Foucault's Strategy, in the process of my argumentation, concerning the marginal in its essentiality and the essential in its marginality? It is clear that we are hovering on a tentative sphere that requires a good insight and a high critical thought. Commenting on the very quality of the reader he is addressing, Saul Bellow reasonably says the following "I have in my mind another human being, a philosopher who will understand me. I count on this. Not on perfect understanding […] but on approximate understanding and on a meeting of sympathies, which is human" (Harper 13). Herzog responds by showing his awareness and wisdom "Justice! Look who wants justice! Most of mankind has lived and died without-totallywithout it. People by the billions and for ages sweated, gypped, enslaved, suffocated, bled to death, buried with no more justice" (Bellow 270). Echoing Herzog, Henderson magically typifies his wisdom and identity through the fusion of reason on the one hand and romanticism on the other one: "Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it alerts, it redeems" . Assuming that the power of life and identity in the Bellovian fictional world is endlessly demonstrating that all forms of madness are endeavouring to be infinite wisdom, Sammler in Mr. Sammler's Planet reflects upon the logical and expected shift from madness to wisdom "madness is a masquerade, the project of a deep reason […] madness is a diagnosis or verdict of some of our greatest doctors and geniuses, and of their man-disappointed minds" (Bellow 199).
At this level, the reader is highly invited to think philosophically with the heroes. Robert Stern reminds us that any reader/thinker should: "Step back and apply "himself" reflectively (in a Hegelian manner) and ask how it is the problem has arisen in the first place; once we see that the problem has its source in a set of one-sided assumptions. If we can overcome that one-sidedness then the problem will simply dissolve and we can escape the "Oscillation" between one satisfactory stance and its equally unsatisfactory opposite" (Stern 16-17). The immediate implication of this, therefore, is that Henderson's imaginary journey to Africa, Herzog's philosophical letters, Sammler's meditations on the war and Fonstein's views over memory and forgetfulness are an attempt to understand their "Cognitive Capacities," to understand and identify the world around them, that is, "the scope of their intellectual capacities." The fictional movement in Bellow's novels to establish and consolidate a certain identity is a philosophical movement, in the metaphorical sense of it, to understand the world and to be able to criticize it. Robert Stern again aptly sums up the whole journey: Only at the end of its journey is consciousness ready to understand what has happened to it and why; it is then able to think reflectively and self-consciously about the categorical shifts that have led it forward from one problematic position to the next, to the point at which it gets rid of the semblance of being burdened with something alien (P5: 56), and can at last feel at home in the world. Before such home coming is possible, however, we must follow Hegel as (like Dante's Virgil) he guides us through the journey of the soul, so that it may purify itself for the life of the spirit, and achieve finally through a completed experience of itself, the awareness of what it really is in itself. (Stern 42) One possible reading of this passage suggests double layers of consciousness. The first is self-consciousness. While the second is a consciousness of the world. Throughout his imaginary journey in the romantic space of Africa, Henderson is not only seeking to identify himself, but also to identify the ontology of the world around him. Knowing the other is part of the game of knowing the self. To overcome the "unhappy consciousness or, as the phrase goes, the animal consciousness, to refer to Hegel, Henderson keeps ceaselessly telling us mythical stories about the Arnewi and Wariri tribes, about the king Dahfu and his destroyed Kingdom, about the cultural specificities of other people since they represent the missing part of the consciousness, the knowledge and the identity of the hero. Knowing the self, establishing and consolidating a certain identity is therefore a matter of blurring space and crossing boundaries to think with Habib Ajroud ).
This transition (from self-consciousness to the consciousness of the world) is fundamentally to be understood in Hegelian terms. In this, Henderson's and Herzog that there are truths, worlds and identities and that only a multiperspectivist strategy can give them a sense beyond their individual self-consciousness. Going back to the American continent, or to the first moment of the storytelling, to awakening -since the journey remains a dream -Henderson "Suggests that self-consciousness can not be certain of itself by simply identifying itself with this world of living things, for in that world there appears to be too little room for any notion of individuality. 'Self-consciousness therefore conceives of itself as more than a merely animal consciousness' (Hegel 73). Saul Bellow firmly believed that "each individual is a child of his time and; thus, philosophy, too, is its own time comprehended in thoughts (Hegel 21). Henderson fictionalizes this philosophy stating that the whole matter is a mental journey: "I put my list to my face and looked at the sky, giving a short laugh and thinking, Christ! What a person to meet at this distance from home. Yes travel is advisable. Travel is mental travel " (Bellow 142). Accordingly, the mind has a right to its reasonable doubts to epitomize a certain identity and bring some change to the world. Henderson undermines and rejects the past, projecting his eyes onto the future: "I must not live in the past, it will ruin me […] I was telling the world that it was a pig. I must begin to think how to live "(Bellow 242), echoing Herzog: "Let the enemies of life step down […] Let each man now examine his heart […] Let us lie down, men, women, and children, and cry. Let life continue-we may not deserve it, but let it continue" (Bellow 67). Being moved and haunted by the secrecies of these lines, the reader brings to mind Sioud's definition to the fictional hero as a human figure, a prophet who should have the power to make decision, choose life and have a duty to discharge (Sioud 163-183).
One way of taking the idea further is keeping in mind Saul Bellow's strategies of parody. This is not only carried out through the storyteller's attempts to undermine the alienation and the madness of the world, not only through mocking the historical facts of life, but also through marginalizing the ordinary sense of identity and the consciousness on the one hand and stressing the philosophical sense of identity and the consciousness of the world on the other hand. Henderson consciously satirizes his life in New York. "My parents, my wives, my girls, my children, my farm, my animals, my teeth, my face, my soul" (Bellow 7), believing that only a philosophical consciousness/knowledge of the world would purify and provide him with a sense of identity. Herzog's doubts about the classical trajectory of the western philosophy remind us of his philosophical letters "to every one under the sun," hoping that they might bring the world to home and make us happy in it.

Imaginary Homelands: the Wisdom of the Intellectual
At this level, can we still think of alienation, madness, no-identity and self consciousness? Is it logical for us to claim that Henderson the Rain King in specific and Bellow's fictional word in general are a fine piece of imagination or let us say philosophically a moment of scepticism that enigmatically satirizes the ordinary sense of existence? Henderson, Herzog, Tommy Wilhelm, Augie March, Humboldt, Mr Sammler, Asa Leventhal, Harry Fonstein […], can they be regarded as philosophers each in his own way, philosophers who dream to unmask the blind spots of identity? Is this all that we can understand from the alienation of Henderson in his own homeland? Does Henderson the Rain King, as a farm of writing, substitute Saul Bellow's "imaginary homelands?" Again, reading the narrative philosophically might possibly quench our thirst for an answer.
Questioning the very nature of human being, Herzog "comes to identify the wisdom of the intellect," and thereby to aggravate a sense of consciousness of the world. Pondering over the nature of human beings, he thinks aloud, saying "Those who have confidently described human nature, Hobbes, Freud, etc…, by telling what we are 'intrinsically', are not our great benefactors. This is true for Rousseau. I sympathize with Hume's attack on the introduction by the Romantics of perfection human things […] Modern science achieves its profoundest results through anonymity, recognizing only the brilliant functioning of intellect" (Bellow 161).
Following this claim, could we still think about Herzog and behind him Bellow's heroes mad figures that are incapable of identifying themselves in the world? In what way can we explain Herzog's criticism to great philosophers like Hobbes, Freud and Rousseau? Herzog imaginatively and romantically reconciliates himself with Gold, suggesting implicitly reconciliation with the world: "Thou movest me." Once more, he Platonically speaks to Ramona, his girl friend, about "the flight of truths" as an alternative to "ineffectuality, banishment to personal life [and] confusion" (Bellow 314) which does not only mean the light and the truth of the self but also of the world in general a point that is reinforced in his final letters to God "[God] how my mind has struggled to make a coherent sense. I have not been good at every thing of intensest significance" (Bellow 161). Henderson, stressing Herzog, reminds us that he is a man of dreams, of life, of identity; a man for humanism, for life, for writing; a man of a poetic type. In cultural terms, this means that Henderson as a Jewish figure is a man "in whom all cultures, philosophies, identities and truths melt down and therefore he is unable to envision an individual consciousness which marginalizes the other and rejects him." What remains is not alienation, not even madness, but, in Derrida's words, writing, the text, the world, identities, unity, 'M'an, humanism, "Alkitaab"-Henderson the Rain king and dreams: "We are the first generation to see the clouds from both sides. What a privilege! First people dreamed upward. Now they dream both upward and downward. This is bound to change something, somewhere. For me the entire experience has been similar to a dream" (Bellow 236).

A Spiritual Quest or Political Crisis
In political terms, this means that soul Bellow keeps questioning the very ideas of alienation identity, exile, truth, the function of the political leader on the one hand and "author, authority, authorship, authorization" (Marrouchi 69) on the other hand. The assumption behind this, I need to believe, is that his fictional heroes are not only to be seen as philosophers in search of their identities, but also as political leaders par excellence. One way of proving this argument is Herzog's and Henderson's never ending theorization about the ideal political leader/action. Another way to reinforce this proof is Saul Bellow's personal views over politics in general. In this sense, Saul Bellow, being aware of his Jewish assumption, asserts that the political leader must combine passion and responsibility in order to pursue politics as a vocation, and this very often may involve a compromise." Accordingly, the politician is the person who should have a particular personality, probably a Herzogian or even a Hendersonian personality that assimilates both personal and humanistic concerns with utilitarian purposes. Someone who is able to bring opposite things together, to recon ciliate identities in one unity keeping the inherent differences as a ground to that very unity. Max Weber clarifies the image in saying "The honour of the political leader, of the leading statesman […] lies precisely in an exclusive personal responsibility for what he does, a responsibility he can not and must not reject or transfer" (Weber 95). David Owen depicts the spirit of the political leader and the kind of this responsibility as follows: The distinctive features of the charismatic politician is his capacity to ground certain ultimate "values" and" meanings" of life in his person. In contrast to bureaucratic politics in which decision making is predicated on a utilitarian weighing of material interests, the politician with a calling bases a decision-making on a responsible commitment to ultimate values. (Owen 131) In light of these views, the politician, in the Bellovian sense, "must integrate an ethic of conviction and an ethic of responsibility" which must result in a personal responsibility for the pursuit of "ultimate values." Sammler in Mr. Sammler's Planet reminds us that the actions of politicians should have "a moral worth," to borrow the term from I. Kant. Augie March in The Adventures of Augie March (1953) and Tommy Wilhelm in Seize the Day (1956) urgently reminds us that we should not give or lose faith in the face of our daily struggles let alone in our political responsibilities. Belly rose Bellarosa Connection (1989) translates these theoretical speculations into real actions through his secret rescue operations of Jews in Europe. Saul Bellow insists, as it seems, that one should not retreat or lose faith, rather one should actively engage in the problems of the world. His assumption, following Weber, is that "The successful political action is always the art of the possible […] the possible is often reached only by striving to attain the impossible that lies beyond it" (Gane 87-79).
Saul Bellow, like his heroes, implicitly acknowledges that he is facing a political problem in addition to the philosophical one. He does not choose it, he just encounters it; being a Jewish man. The implication of this, as commonly known, is the necessity of an identity, a homeland where one can live and dream. Bellow, on the account of this, bitterly and pathetically asserts that there is no home to which we can bring the world; there is no world for which we should prepare a home. Therefore, Hegel's views of reconciliation between the world and home remain nonsense theoretical speculations. Saul Bellow is aware of the fact that this political problem closes the road in front of him. Following Weber, Bellow believes that either we move the obstacle or else we end up our engagement, cease philosophizing. The difficulty must be resolved, and the world should be brought back to home again. Self-conscioumess and conscioumess of the world should allow us to bypass the dissonance of the age. Being humanist philosopher in Ricoeur's way can only purify us, re-establish and consolidate a sense of identity. Sartre's account on the humanist philosopher is a good case in the point that is worth quoting at length: The humanist philosopher who bends over his brothers like a wise elder brother who has a sense of responsibilities, the humanist who loves men as they are, the humanist who loves men as they ought to be, the one who wants to save them with their consent and the one who will save them inspite of themselves, […] the one who loves death in man, the one who loves life in man the happy humanist who always has the right word to make people laugh, the sober humanist whom you meet especially at funerals or wakes. (Sartre 154) Saul Bellow, the novelist, the poet, the humanist, the politician, the philosopher, strikingly reflects the Kantian version of hope. In attempting to answer the following question: "What may I hope?" Immanuel Kant nicely says that we need to hope for a moral action that is, we need to act with a reference to a moral law "the maxim" which we might wish it to be a general law of nature through our will (Kant ch 1). Bellow's unconscious aim behind this might be that he wants to give morality, identity and consciousness about the world a firmer foundation and power and therefore radically negates the nonsense of the world. Humanity, for him should continue to exist through our active engagements in the problems of the World. Building upon the Kantian thought, Saul Bellow unconsciously suggests" a moral world [Which should be] in accordance with all moral laws" (Davis 105), a gesture that might possibly bring the world to us and then be happy with it.
What is more striking at this level is that Saul Bellow, while writing, is not aware of philosophy nor is he aware of political theories and criticism. He just writes his texts and lets them in the hands of his readers. He just writes stories of intellects, of madness, of reason, of alienation, and may well have developed a fondness of doing so without giving a lot of consideration to their theoretical implications. The immediate implication of this is that these stories are not only about "the dream of bringing the world to our home," but also about purporting to theorize for us the way a contemporary fiction should be put in the light of other disciplines like philosophy, history, poetry, politics, theory, art[…]

Conclusion
The affinity that I have been attempting to argue for/ demonstrate between the Bellovian fictional world and the Hegelian thought can only be another moving journey added to Henderson's spiritual quest. The dire strive to be "at home" and to feel "satisfaction in the world" might generate other unexpected affinities between Saul Bellow and other figures. The reader, at this moment is no longer to be a Bellovian or Hegelian as he might be "wandering far from view" in new world and new "imaginary" lands. At the story level, Henderson's spiritual quest leads him to imaginary homelands, loss, exile and chaos. Identity turns out to be identities. Over consciousness, or what I would call madness, ends up the wisdom of the intellectual. The Bellovian hero, through Henderson, informs us that the modern American character is not able to identify himself/herself within a society which is characterised by difference, multiplicity and democracy. Its attempt to come out with a certain identity ends up with illusion and fictional journeys to imaginary homelands.