The Real Thing
There’s a scene I particularly like in Bridget Jones’ Diary—the one at the book launch for Kafka’s Motorbike. In surveying a room full of London’s literary worthies, Bridget is obliged to downgrade Kafka’s Motorbike from “the greatest book of our time” to “one of the top thirty books of our time, anyway… at least.” Not only is it a good representation of what it feels like to be a not-totally-charming person pressed into ex tempore public speaking, but it illustrates the difficulty of praising anything on social media at all. Any time you say anything online, you are, in a way, staring at a group of people who might not only have opinions about, but claims to, your praise. This is awkward, but natural enough. People disagree in their evaluations of things like “greatness” and that’s why we express our judgments in the first place.
But being constantly pressed to judge, evaluate, weigh, and discern tires you out. I have taken a break from writing book reviews because my critical sensibility, if it can be called that, is more collaborative than eristic—which is to say, I keep finding things to more or less agree with in the books I review. I even tried to escape this problem by writing my last review without bringing myself into it, as was appropriate to the content of the book, and making an elaborate joke around accordingly not discussing Kierkegaard as a thinker who had much to say about the problem of restlessness, modernity, and Christianity with a usefully different inflection. The alternative, I guess, is to have a point of view one would import to all matters. This is the usual trick of people with successful writing careers—having a real, definite point of view, that is. But do they ever tire of being correct in exactly the same way?
I do not think people identify this judgment fatigue as a sufficiently serious problem. There’s a stand. When constantly judging, it gets too easy to see things as always the same—this is an expedient, but it is also as an act of self-preservation. I understand that people have “brands” or “beats” because otherwise it feels like you become too diffuse. There is simply too much to take in. What’s the alternative? We’re rightfully a little impatient, or even shocked, with Clarissa Dalloway’s love for her roses instead of the plight of the Armenians (or was it Albanians?) There are important matters afoot, and we need to praise Andor, condemn the German monarchist coup attempt, develop an adequately nuanced view on euthanasia in Canada, or, I don’t know, weigh in on whether someone should have opened the beans or thrown out the candy.
The real issue with social media—too much information, too many calls for judgment and too often—is its frenzied, real-time extension of the problem Nietzsche and Kierkegaard saw with the growing historical consciousness of the nineteenth century. Here’s Nietzsche, in one of the Untimely Meditations: “From an infinite horizon he then retreats into himself, into the smallest, egoistic region, and there must wither and dry up: probably he will attain to cleverness: never to wisdom.”
Or take Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus in the Postscript: “By continually being occupied as an observer of the accidental…a person is easily misled into confusing this accessorium with the ethical and easily misled, unhealthily, flirtingly, and cowardly, to being concerned about the accidental, instead of himself existing.” Or, more recently, Princeton historian Matthew Karp in Harper’s : “Today’s historicism… having migrated from the margins of academia to the heart of the liberal establishment [teaches] progress is dead; the future cannot be believed; all we have left is the past, which must therefore be held responsible for the atrocities of the present.” I’d add that we’re now always succumbing to the demand to connect everything, everything, everything that happens to this history in real time, to update our personal historical ledgers, being sure to register our approval or disapproval, doled out piecemeal.This is my roundabout way of approaching Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein: “the greatest book of our time!” Or, at the very least, a top thirty book of our time, and one concerned with greatness.
I just finished teaching Ravelstein. For years, I have been forcing it on everyone I have any influence over at all. One of its delights is the vocabulary it furnishes for daily life. I have, for years, been referring to Leo Strauss as “the great Davarr;” during the first lockdown my wife told me she needed a “humanity bath.” I’ve found myself wondering aloud whether “cornucopia times” were drawing to a close, objecting that “[w]hen I do it, it’s not gossip, it’s social history,” lamenting the “incommunicables” of one’s “personal metaphysics;” or defending my own evasiveness by citing the need to become “familiar with due process” because “[y]ou can’t simply write people off or send them to hell.” My former students send me texts with Ravelstein jokes—what would old Abe have thought of that? And who hasn’t wanted to smoke a cigarette in class, and tell everyone they’d have to choose between their love of ideas and their hatred of tobacco?
Ravelstein is itself like a good friend: you delight in the unique ways familiar experiences are refracted through its lens.Anyway, last year I was delighted with the attention the novel got when Matt and Sam devoted an entire episode of Know Your Enemy to it, discussing it in an appropriately chatty “after dinner” fashion.
Unlike Matt and Sam, though, my interest in the novel is only orthogonally related to Allan Bloom. I think it’s important to note that among the book’s abundant oddities are its peculiar divisions, of which there are three or four, depending on how you count. I’m persuaded by parts of the reading suggested by the brilliant Michael Davis, who shows how, like the Nicomachean Ethics, Ravelstein’s divisions move it from a consideration of moral virtue, to friendship, to philosophy, despite its chatty, ostensibly piecemeal approach. Ravelstein is less about Bloom than an exaggeration of pieces of Bloom to consider the issues that are, by any estimation, his main intellectual concerns. It’s a novel, not a biography.
And just because Chick avoids Ravelstein’s ideas, moreover, doesn’t mean that Bellow avoids Bloom’s. One of my own students has furthermore pointed out that the first two divisions also reflect the concerns of Bloom’s two most popular books: Closing of the American Mind and Love and Friendship (the third moves us into other territory). I’d add that Bloom was notably the translator of Plato’s Republic and Rousseau’s Emile: both books feature exaggerated images—a city and a boy—we come to love while knowing that we are loving images. Both use these images to educate readers in judgment, by comparing chimeras to the real thing, or helping us to see both at the same time. Sometimes exaggeration is the best way to educate—souls utterly without longing would not, to choose just one example, have purchased enough books to make Ravelstein so rich.
The issue in Ravelstein is, it seems to me, “the real thing.” We almost never encounter it, Ravelstein says. For him the “real thing” is true erotic longing. Not necessarily sexual longing—but not not sexual longing, either. For Ravelstein eros is the antinomian passion to be exactly what you are, even in the face of death. It is thus to be anti-bourgeois in the fullest sense. Eros makes you odd. Ravelstein wants us to recover the real thing by figuring out the right language, and doing away with the words that obscure it. Chick puts it this way:
Since we are so often called upon for judgments, we naturally coarsen them by constant use or abuse. Then of course you see nothing original, nothing new; you are, in the end, no longer moved by any face, or any person. Now this was where Ravelstein had come in. He turned your face again toward the original. He forced you to reopen what you had closed.
There is the need, in other words, to cut through the “gray net of abstraction covering the world” to see it anew, and thus to be drawn to it. In one of his many self-contradictions, Ravelstein does this, however, only to impose a new set of abstractions on the world: “The right words would be a great help. But even more, a gift for reading reality—the impulse to put your loving face to it and press your hands against it.” Chick agrees about this issue with Ravelstein, but offers a different prognosis.
For Chick, when we become too familiar with the data of experience, “[o]ur way of of organizing the data which rush by in gestalt style—that is, in increasingly abstract forms—speeds up our experience into a dangerously topsy-turvy fast-forward comedy.” Art, he suggests, is a way of slowing down the “chaotic acceleration” of our experience of the world. Chick therefore preserves the phenomena as “pictures,” and the goal is to express the world with fidelity, even if you know they’re only images.
Chick’s love of these “pictures,” his attempt to grasp the “occult mystery” of the world, keeps him, in Ravelstein’s estimation, “too inward.” He’s like The Moviegoer’s Binx Bolling with the horizontal search, or Mrs. Dalloway: he has an aesthetic appreciation of the interesting, but the particulars risk crowding out what truly matters. He wants to disclose his “personal metaphysics” to his friend, but knows he’ll only be dismissed as predictably Rousseauvian. But Ravelstein does helps Chick understand, for instance, that one of his associates is using him “as cover,” to draw attention away from his shameful association with the Romanian Iron Guard during the war.
In admittedly over-broad terms, Ravelstein specializes in explaining the big picture, while Chick, the writer, focuses on daily particularities. He excels in amusing sketches of people, whom, he avers, are more “esoteric” than any book. This is certainly the case in Ravelstein, if it is indeed his book, where these sketches are profuse. The descriptions sparkle and (I’m sorry) but they bloom. Imagine calling someone a “non-benevolent Santa Claus” who came down the chimney with the aim “to make trouble.”
So Chick and Ravelstein’s friendship is predicated on a shared sense of a problem—this loss of the real thing—and Ravelstein’s more orderly “large-scale intellectual life” helps Chick makes sense of things. Ravelstein’s approach to the problem is eidetic; Chick’s, genetic. The greatness of Ravelstein is not the source of the greatness of Ravelstein: that comes from its attempts to turn our face toward some of the originals, love and friendship, but also beauty and greatness as categories we might be shy to employ. Should this be possible for a novel? Perhaps it could be the case if, as Chick, quoting the real Davarr (without citation) notes, the heart of things is on the surface of things. I think Ravelstein tries to provide a “prescientific experience” (another Davarr-ism) and this it accomplishes through its own abundant oddness.
Part of its oddness is precisely that it is a book about friendship. Fiction about friendship is difficult to pull off. Friendship expresses itself more soberly than erotic love. To write a book about friendship one would have to depict daily life together, amicable conversation between friends, while also holding our interest. Ravelstein succeeds here by blowing up its principal character to world-historical proportions. He is outrageous—judgmental, magnificent, a little cruel. But his “paradoxical oddness,” his self-contradictions, are magnetic. To try to get a handle on someone as out-of-place in the modern world as a parrot in Chicago—indeed, the Hyde Park population that features in Ravelstein have apparently decamped—seems to readers (even Gen Z, I’ve found) a worthy endeavour. It’s an image, minimally, you don’t want to give up easily to death, because, just maybe, this guy is the real thing?
But real friendship is maybe just the break we need from the loss of the appearances we suffer from constant judging. Friendship is, increasingly, real leisure: in the friend we have someone who can judge for us. Friends, as I said above, refract the world to take what we thought we knew and to show it to us as if for the first time, making what we thought we knew strange. So Ravelstein’s search for the real thing leads us right back to its surface.
Congratulations to Nietzsche on the rare grammatically permissible double colon.
Certainly not me: I’m asthmatic. And who could disagree with this sentiment: “For me a clever or a wicked footnote has redeemed many a text.”
I owe this formulation to one of my own good friends.