A Political Companion to Saul Bellow

8. Biography, Elegy, and the Politics of Modernity in Saul Bellow's Ravelstein

167 8 Biography, Elegy, and the Politics of Modernity in Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein Willis Salomon Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein is a biographical roman à clef, an undisguised fictive account of the life and death of Bellow’s friend Allan Bloom. At the time of his death in 1992 from complications related to HIV/AIDS, Bloom was an infamous University of Chicago political philosopher, classicist, student of Leo Strauss, and cultural provocateur, who had infamously penned The Closing of the American Mind in 1987, for which Bellow had written a foreword. Ravelstein is an elegy for Bloom, a first-person fictive meditation on the significance of Bloom’s life and death, mediated in part by Bellow’s fictionalized account of his own brush with death after a toxic dinner in St. Maarten. It is also, if implicitly, a defense of Bloom and his intellectual and political values, a defense seemingly occasioned by Bellow’s own fraught encounters with the American cultural Left of the 1990s. The intersection of biography and elegy govern the unfolding narrative of Bellow’s novel. The generic interests of biography and elegy complement each other in Ravelstein, especially in Bellow’s construction of character. Character, as even a casual reader of Bellow knows, has theoretical consequence in his novels. Bellow’s characters almost always project a sense of realism, not only because he often bases them on real people, as he so evidently does in Ravelstein, but also because he gives them speaking life in the closely met way that we encounter personal affect. He does so in a way that inverts traditional realism, as speech takes precedence over narrative, and dialogue contains much of a novel’s narrative information. Uniformly, Bellow’s fictive universe bases itself strongly on the observation 168 Willis Salomon of affect, both structurally and thematically. Affect for Bellow amounts to a metonymy for ethical choice, for the energetic hotwires of personhood that give the keen observer a measure of another’s character, as well as of the character of otherness. Such measures of character in turn imply judgments about American culture, and so the biographical basis for Ravelstein serves Bellow’s usual purpose of exploring character as the ground for exploring the excesses and vicissitudes of American life, here most challengingly, perhaps, because of Bellow and Bloom’s intense friendship. Yet the biographical element of Ravelstein also reveals a larger elegiac purpose, one comprised of an implied high-modernist intellectual response to Bloom’s and Bellow’s detractors on the cultural Left, especially during the early 1990s, the period of “political correctness.” Chick, Bellow’s narrator and stand-in, describes their detractors condescendingly as the “campus ‘free spirits,’” whose job “was to make you aware of the bourgeois upbringing from which your education was supposed to free you.”1 With distaste, he refers to the “liberated teachers” who “offered themselves as models, sometimes seeing themselves as revolutionaries” and who “sometimes spoke youth gibberish . . . Ph.D. hippies and swingers” (50). For Bellow, such behavior amounts to a juvenile abuse, in the form of theatricalized self-indulgence that turns away from both philosophical rigor and political prudence, of the moral seriousness of the Left’s historical position. The substance of Bellow’s response to what is for him the noisy, self-congratulatory Left comes in Ravelstein in the form of an elegy to what for Bellow is its opposite : the intense, aestheticized intellectual engagement that, in the novel, Abe ravelstein represents. Bellow thus makes ravelstein’s death signify, not only the end of a very large life, but also the end of an era, one that is here given the philosophical weight of ravelstein’s (and, of course, Bloom’s) Platonic preoccupation with “the purpose of our existence: . . . the correct ordering of the human soul” (44). Of course, this philosophical heft comes with the expected Bellovian irony about anything as serious as death since, after all, “death does sharpen the comic sense,” as Chick says on beginning his story about coming to write a biography of Abe ravelstein (14). The biography that Chick discusses with ravelstein is self-reflexively the biography that we read, but self-reflexivity is very much not Bellow’s theme here. rather, it is only a narrative pretext. Bellow is more concerned with showing ravelstein, and thus Bloom, as a living person, whose otherness confronts the reader with a sense of its truth. Biography, Elegy, and the Politics...