Herzog, Sammler: on the ethics of form and self

TL;DRAbstract

Bellow's widely mobile protagonists have been called questers and picaros, but the comparison is always a stretch, a means merely to launch speculations and ground observations. This brief essay counts as another series of observations based on a similarly evocative but loose comparison between Herzog, Sammler, and the flaneur--tourist, traveler, urban pedestrian. I will suggest that this particular comparison allows us to see Bellow's struggle with an investment in the Wasteland mentality against which he is said to have consistently written. The flaneur, set loose in urban space, is a figure of encounter endowed with an ethical challenge: will he or she remain a tourist, fundamentally an observer, or will he or she truly engage with that which lies without, transforming her sense of self in the process? This transformation of self is a relational and communal dynamic of radical responsibility, in which the individual constitutes herself the other, by taking up of the problems of the

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