Saul Bellow died yesterday. Some people say he was, along with William Faulkner, one of the greatest american writers of the 20th century. I'll leave that to others more qualified than me to argue. What I want to talk about here is the last book he wrote, "Ravelstein."
Bellow was a friend of Allan Bloom, who wrote "The Closing of the American Mind" in 1987. (Bellow wrote the forward) It became a big bestseller, & Bloom went from being an eccentric philosophy professor living beyond his means, to a rich, globe-trotting celebrity, Now his company was courted by politicians like Maggie Thatcher, people for whom his book gave an intellectual backing they never had before.
A friend of mine gave me Blooms' book back then. I remember trying hard to read it. It was impressive in a way, (my friend had really been impressed) lots of interesting thoughts, but I never could quite figure out what he was trying to say, how it all fit togther. Then I got to a chapter on the "sixties." He compared the kids to the Nazis & the Woodstock music festival to the Nuremburgh rallies. Not once in the entire chapter did he mention the Vietnam war. I just stopped reading it.
Fast forward 13 years to 9/11. (my bday btw)
I'm an artist living a couple blocks from the WTC. I saw the planes hit the buildings.
Couldn't sleep for months & did a lot of research into Neoconservatism. Never heard of it before. I was like Rip van Winkle i guess.
Made my own deck of cards. Somewhere i heard about "Ravelstein."
What nobody knew about Bloom was that he was gay. He developed AIDs & would later die of it. Towards the end he asked Bellow to write a book about him & that's what "Ravelstein" is. "Ravelstein" is Bloom.
It's written as a "roman a clef," a "novel with a key." The key is; Bellow is "Chick," Bloom is "Ravelstein,"
Leo Strauss (Blooms' mentor) is "Professor Davaar," Paul Wolfowitz (Blooms' student) is "Gorman" etc. "Ravelstein" came out in 2000.
Same year as the "Rebuilding America's Defenses" paper at the PNAC.
Now, I think Bellow leaves us a great clue in this book, as to the real "hidden teaching" of neoconservatism. It's after Ravelstein (Bloom)has died (as a true philosopher, without fear, but without hope) Bellow (Chick) goes on a vacation to the Caribes somewhere, & he's asked by someone to retrieve some documents pertaining to a lawyers' case that was left down there. He's curious & reads them. What he reads is about a scientist traveling in New Guinea & an experience he had. This passage is so striking ( I can remember the hair standing up all over my body) so seemingly (at first) unrelated to the rest of the story, that I think he's put it here so as to reveal the hidden truth, the "esoteric teaching" of Blooms philosophy, Neoconservatism.
Here is the passage:
"The author of the journal on which the book was based was an American physician who had spent years in the New Guinea rain forest under a research grant from the National Institute of Something-or-other, and spoke the pidgin or island lingo. That he wrote well made his report all the more effective--super memorable at times. He described a cliffside covered with great flowers as a "crimson orchid waterfall." There were many near-purple passages, but you felt he was responding to the purple of nature. He had a firm scientific aim and the entire article was important--humanly binding. He started out by describing the shortage of protein in the diet of the tribes he had studied. He said that in primitive wars, the natives couldn't afford to waste the bodies of their enemies.
Such scientific speculation was not my primary interest. I have several times mentioned that ordinary daily particulars were my specialty. Ravelstein also had several times pointed this out, not the noumena, or "things in themselves"--I left all that kind of thing to the Kants of this world. Black headless bodies in a jungle where crimson orchids stream downward for hundreds of feet would be phenomena, wouldn't they. The men were freshly killed and beheaded. The heads were set aside. The researcher who recorded all this said they were a currency used in wife-purchase, That's why headhunters hunt heads. But this American researcher had been attracted to the streamside ambush not by the struggling fighters but by the smell of roasting meat. "Just like a kitchen smell back home--a wholesome joint in the oven. Or a Thanksgiving turkey. Just as appetizing. Human flesh too, can get you in the salivary glands...the warriors offered me some of their human shish-ke-bab. The victims were tuned on their bellies. The ground was rich in red blood. The victors thought my facial expressions killingly funny. They said, 'why, it's only meat, like any other meat.'" And indeed the writer went on more than was necessary about the appetizing fragrance. The hunters said that if they had been ambushed the other guys would have been cooking and eating them. With us, this might have been a rationalization. With them it was a fact of life."
Well, like I said, I'm an artist, and I have this painting on my easel right now. I turn it away when people come over. I think it's finished & then I'm drawn back to it again. It wasn't long after this that the "beheadings" took place in Iraq. Listening to rightwing radio, I started to notice how many times the phrases, "war of survival," and "kill or be killed," began to be repeated, as if by command--from whom?
Has anyone else read this book? Has anyone else been struck by this passage and wondered what it means? Please, I want to hear from you. I sincerely believe Saul Bellow knew what the essence of the "philosophy" of Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom, Paul Wolfowitz et al is, and left it here, hidden in plain sight at the end of his very last book, for us to see.