“Odd that mankind’s benefactors should be amusing people.” This is the first line of Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein, a book about the oddities of the human condition, what it might mean to be a benefactor of humanity, and whether human life is rightly defined as tragic or comic. University professor Abe Ravelstein, a character based on Bellow’s close friend and philosopher Allan Bloom, strikes it rich by writing a controversial book called Souls Without Longing, which becomes an unexpected hit. In light of Ravelstein’s impending death, he tasks his friend Chick, a novelist, with “writing him up.”

Ravelstein is the story of Chick’s attempt to write a Life of Ravelstein, which, in the writing, also becomes a Life of Chick. Bellow, in other words, is a modern Plutarch, presenting the parallel lives of two noble Americans for our consideration and edification. But Ravelstein is also the rare novel that succeeds in depicting friendship, and as such is brimming with conversations about the most essential human things—faith and reason, love and friendship, poetry and philosophy—which will also become our topics of conversation in this seminar.

Matthew Dinan on Ravelstein

This course is offered by Humanities at Hertog. It takes place weekly on Thursdays, via Zoom, from 6 PM to 8 PM ET. Fellows will receive a $150 stipend contingent upon participation in the course and completion of a brief response paper. All course materials will be provided.

Faculty

Matthew Dinan

Matthew Dinan is an Associate Professor in the Great Books Program at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. He does research on Ancient Greek, Christian, and 19th and 20th Century Political Philosophy.

Preview the Syllabus by Week/Session

Readings:

  • Saul Bellow, “Foreword,” in The Closing of the American Mind
  • Bellow, Nobel Lecture
  • Allan Bloom, “Introduction: Our Virtue;” “The Clean Slate;” “The Philosophic Experience;” “Liberal Education,” in The Closing of the American Mind
  • Bloom, Epilogue, Love and Friendship

Topics:

  • Who were Bloom and Bellow?
  • Liberal education and democracy
  • The university
  • Love and friendship

Discussion Questions:

  1. What is Bellow’s defense of the novel as an artform for our time and place? Does it still ring true for a post-social media age?
  2. What is the core “philosophic experience” that Bloom thinks universities exist to preserve?
  3. How would you update Bloom’s assessments of the contemporary university for the 21st century?
  4. What is the core difference between love and friendship, according to Bloom? How might love and friendship begin to respond to the pathologies identified in Closing?

Readings:

  • Ravelstein, pp. 1–46
  • Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book IV, Chs. 2 & 3 (Bartlett and Collins translation)

Topics:

  • The virtues of magnificence and greatness of soul
  • Bellow’s “piecemeal” approach in writing Ravelstein
  • Introducing Ravelstein

Discussion Questions:

  1. Why does Ravelstein begin with a “footnote”?
  2. How is Ravelstein initially presented?
  3. Why does Abe take “no stock in kindness?”
  4. What are some examples of the “equipment” of Ravelstein’s life? Why does Bellow dwell on this to such an extent? What is Bellow’s gloss on the virtue of magnificence as it shows up in Ravelstein?

Readings:

  • Ravelstein, pp. 47–93

Topics:

  • Eros and philosophy
  • Politics and modernity

Discussion Questions:

  1. What is the specific appeal of France and the French to Ravelstein?
  2. Bellow writes: “Mixtures of archaism and modernity were especially appealing to Ravelstein, who could not be contained in modernity and overflowed the ages. Oddly enough, he was just like that.” What does he mean?
  3. What do Abe and Nikki seem to see in one another?
  4. Why is Ravelstein’s famous book called Souls Without Longing? How does Ravelstein seem to be in conversation with the thesis of that book?

Readings:

  • Ravelstein, pp. 94–159

Topics:

  • Friendship(s)
  • Metaphysics
  • What it means to “tell the truth”

Discussion Questions:

  1. The second section opens with “A certain amount of documentation might be offered at this point to show what I was to Ravelstein and Ravelstein to me,” suggesting this section deals with friendship. What is the nature of the friendship between Ravelstein and Chick? Are they more alike or different?
  2. What is Chick’s “personal metaphysic”?
  3. What is Chick’s “Balkan fix,” and what does it mean that he is unable to perceive it without Ravelstein’s help?
  4. Are Ravelstein and Chick totally honest with each other, or do they work to spare each other’s feelings? Should friends be totally open?
  5. Are Rakhmiel and Vela both, in strange ways, distorted images or pieces of Ravelstein?
  6. What does Ravelstein see in Morris Herbst and his wife Nehamah?
  7. What is the nature of the advice that Ravelstein gives to his friends, the Battles? Does this advice hold up?

Readings:

  • Ravelstein, pp. 160–214

Topics:

  • Religious faith
  • Athens and Jerusalem
  • Chick’s relationship to Rosamund

Discussion Questions:

  1. Why is Chick having such a hard time writing the Life of Ravelstein? Is Ravelstein the book Chick is writing?
  2. What is Rosamund like? What does it mean that Ravelstein did not see the development of the relationship between Rosamund and Chick? How does Rosamund “save” Chick? Does she know something that neither Chick nor Ravelstein seem to know?
  3. Does Ravelstein turn toward Judaism at the end of his life? Why or why not?

Readings:

  • Ravelstein, pp. 214–33

Topics:

  • The immortality of the soul
  • Is Ravelstein a great book? (What would asking this question even mean?)

Discussion Questions:

  1. What is the final “brief vision for the purposes of orientation?” What are readers being oriented toward, and why?
  2. What does Chick mean when he argues that “nobody can give up the pictures”?
  3. Does Ravelstein ultimately endorse the way of life represented by either Ravelstein or Chick? What does it mean to represent a friendship between these two figures in particular?
  4. What are some of the most original or “sticky” phrases emerging from your reading of Ravelstein? Is there a discernible theoretical orientation behind the way the novel is written?
  5. What would it mean to “give Ravelstein up to death”?

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