Books - Ravelstein

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	Books - Ravelstein

Ravelstein is Saul Bellow's final novel. Published in 2000, when Bellow was eighty-five years old, it tells the tale of a friendship between two university professors and the complications that animate their erotic attachments well into old age. The title character is based on Allan Bloom, who taught with Bellow at the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought.

Controversy

The novel was controversial in its frank depiction of Ravelstein as a gossipmonger, frivolous spender, influence peddler, petty complainer, promiscuous panderer, and homosexual dying from AIDS related complications in a relationship with a much younger man. Despite all these faults, Ravelstein remains a valued friend and colleague whose illness and passing is considered a tragic loss to his friends and admirers, but never diminished his own love of life.

Upon publication, Bellow revealed that Bloom, a philosopher and social critic aligned with many American conservative ideas and ambitions, was anything but conservative in his private life. Accordingly, some took the book as a betrayal; however, Bellow vigorously rejected such speculation, citing many conversations between Bloom and himself where the subject urged ‘a warts and all’ tell all about him. Bloom was not a 'closeted' homosexual, for many of his friends, colleagues and former students knew of his sexual orientation; although, he never publicly spoke of it. He was a bachelor and never married or had children. In his most famous book, Closing of the American Mind, he criticizes “the homosexuals” in American universities on an issue relating to his core concern- liberal arts education, or 'Great Books' liberal arts curriculum, making a difference between a politically self-defined group of homosexual activists and homosexuality per se. Although Bloom, in the wake of his literary stardom, at a Harvard University gathering, published in Giants & Dwarfs, said he was not a conservative, he was much admired by right-wing publications, like William F. Buckley's National Review. Bloom expressed respect for many conservative ideals and traditional goals; moreover, he found a natural home in conservative politics for he shared a mistrust of left-wing, liberal ideology sprouting from the 1960s.

The text

Abe Ravelstein is a complicated composite of the serious and mundane, the corporeal and spiritual, the conservative and radical. Thus Bellow attempts to depict his friend in light of these paradoxes. Throughout the narration, there is a kindness and fellow-feeling which "Chick", Bellow's identity in the fiction, expresses towards Ravelstein. The friendship is close and few intellectual or general subjects are taboo. The story follows the physical decline of Ravelstein, a University of Chicago professor, and how his recent literary fame and financial success impacts his life. After Ravelstein's death, a large section of the work deals with the narrator's own illness and hospitalization. This closely parallels Bellow's own illness after a Caribbean vacation.

The text is typical of Bellow's most popular fiction, a crisp mix of dialogue and narration, unfolding drama, and unanswered questions raised by a series of conversations and characters. Thus the story is accessible to casual readers. Bellow's short novel about a father-son relationship surrounding the New York Stock Exchange, Seize the Day, comes to mind as similar in style and content. Easily read, Bellow does not attempt to incorporate Ravelstein's philosophical insight into the story. In fact, 'Chick' makes it clear Ravelstein thinks he is too old to become a philosopher, or even profit from a philosophical education. Thus, a comparison can be made to Xenophon's Socratic works and dialogues, such as Memorabilia , where a non-philosopher describes the outward life of a philosopher. Ravelstein is not aloof or disinterested by the Martin Heidegger-like 'fallen-ness' of everyday life. He is a consumer of goods and gossip, eagerly meeting people where they exist, without constructing artificial barriers based on presumed superiority. His friendships do not solely revolve around his interests and concerns. Many of the thoughts and opinions expressed by Ravelstein are humorous, precisely because they are so 'common' and 'clichéd'. Nevertheless, Bellow presents a unique character, one that is not readily available to current readers of American popular fiction.

Interpretation

Bellow asks via inference in Ravelstein how one is best remembered: for contributions to the general knowledge; for contributions to humanity via one's fellow-treatment of one's friends, intimates, and strangers; or for the rate at which one's notoriety attracts mass attention and thereafter decays. That last theme is poignantly exhibited in two instances. Early on in a chance encounter between Ravelstein and Chick with pop star Michael Jackson and his entourage at Paris' Hotel Crillon, and later when Ravelstein recalls following Elizabeth Taylor through an airport terminal as a sudden and quickly departing obsession. Bellow, in Ravelstein, reveals the cross cuttings of purpose and truth in the trajectories of remembrance. In this pattern of coming and going, Bellow seems to imply, the best recalling of a man, is a complete depiction of complication and chance painted against the higher ambition of shared existence. What is left out of this story- any reckoning with eternity in the face of impending death, or the religious element of human life- is consistent with Bellow’s modernization of the Jewish experience in North American 20th century culture.

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