Ravelstein, Disgrace, The Human Stain

Ravelstein
Saul Bellow. New York: Viking, 2000, 233 pp.

Disgrace
J. M. Coetzee. New York: Viking, 1999, 220 pp.

The Human Stain
Philip Roth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000, 361 pp.

Reviewed by Stuart M. Kurland

The academic protagonists of the three books under review bear at least a passing resemblance to Dr. Faustus, for they, too, act as if they believe that the rules that govern the lives of ordinary mortals do not pertain to them. True, none strikes a bargain with the devil in anything more than a metaphorical sense, but all, like Faustus, seem powerless to use their superior intellects, and vast learning, to master their passions. And they don't seem to want to try. Arrogant, self-centered, bursting with a sense of their own entitlement, these intriguing but deeply flawed characters are unmistakably, but not always comfortably, products of the academy.

Abe Ravelstein, in Saul Bellow's fictionalized tribute to his deceased friend and colleague, Allan Bloom, is a professor at a prestigious university in Chicago, who has managed, by means of a best-selling screed against the academy, to influence the wider cultural agenda and achieve material comfort to a degree ordinary academics could only dream about. Surprising even himself, Ravelstein becomes an admired (and reviled) public figure, his new-found success allowing him to indulge his extravagant tastes for luxury and dissipation, tendencies leading inexorably (as Bellow tells the story) to decline and death, though not to any regrets.

Coleman Silk, in Philip Roth's novel, is an imperious former classics professor and dean of faculty at a private college in the Berkshires, who is brought down in a different way by his own conduct. Accused of racial insensitivity stemming from a bizarre in-class episode, Silk refuses to apologize-he may be guilty of many things, but not of this-and, in a fit of self-destructive outrage, he precipitately resigns from the college where he has spent his entire career. Having devoted his deanship to enhancing the institution's educational quality and reputation, Silk is stunned to find himself without defenders among the entrenched senior faculty whose complacency he had threatened, or among the silent majority of the faculty whom he expected to stand up and do the right thing. Consumed by outrage, maddened by injustice, he cannot let go until his fury burns itself out in an unpublished book manuscript on his tribulations, and he is freed to find temporary release in a clandestine Viagra-fueled relationship with an illiterate college janitor half his age.

David Lurie, the antihero of J. M. Coetzee's novel, is a former scholar of English Romantic poetry at an urban South African university; when the university is retooled as a technical institute, he is allowed to continue teaching as an adjunct lecturer in communications. He then loses his position after forcing a sexual relationship upon a female student. Her complaint leads to a hearing by a university committee, where he proves unable or unwilling to acknowledge the impropriety of his conduct, claiming he was compelled to act as he did by "Eros." If, by the end of the novel, he seeks out and apologizes to her family, he remains obsessed with his former victim and as aloof and self-absorbed as before this apparent change of heart.

Coetzee is obviously conversant with academic institutions and sensibilities, but his real interest here does not lie in exploring the privileged milieu of the academy. Within sixty pages, Lurie is removed from the comfortable world he has known and placed in the infinitely harsher reality of rural postapartheid South Africa. Terrible things happen at the remote homestead of his lesbian daughter, where Lurie is staying. A more conventional writer might be tempted to allow Lurie to learn from these experiences, and his disgrace, but Coetzee unflinchingly refuses to allow him an easy or unambiguous rehabilitation.

Where Coetzee is interested in the deep, unresolved conflicts of race, sex, and class in broader South African society, Roth focuses more narrowly on issues of sex, race, and class as manifested primarily in the person of his former dean, whose earlier life is reconstructed with forensic care in the course of the book. It is not politics in the national or tribal sense, but cultural politics, political correctness, that brings down Roth's protagonist. The charge of racism is spurious, but, fueled by the indignation of an ambitious young feminist with an agenda, the episode becomes a campus cause célèbre in which Silk's innocence becomes immaterial. Most astounding, the faculty as a whole stands by and allows it to happen.

This shocking situation, implausible as it may be, is not, sadly, unimaginable, at least not to readers of the investigative reports published in this journal-or to this reviewer, who endured a two-and-a-half-year lawsuit while the university and the faculty were unable or unwilling to make a difference.

In Roth's imagined academy, the faculty colleagues who bring down former Dean Silk are opportunistic and indifferent to the truth. They are also myopic, as Silk exclaims, blaming them for his wife's sudden death under the stress of the accusations against him:

Somebody died? Herbert [former protégé] didn't intend for anybody to die. These shenanigans were so much jockeying for power. To gain a bigger say in how the college is run. They were just exploiting a useful situation. . . . God knows nobody was meant to die. Or to resign either.

To tell Silk's story, Roth uses an academic outsider, alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, a novelist pursuing his craft alone in a remote cabin-until approached by the wounded Silk to tell his story, which begins as a casual distraction but becomes an obsession. The result is not just Silk's story but Zuckerman's, too.

Similarly, Saul Bellow utilizes a first-person narrator, Chick, a novelist, who is a prominent character in his own story. Like the Milton of "Lycidas" or the Tennyson of In Memoriam, Bellow is driven not just to memorialize the departed friend but to testify to the friendship-to the deceased's ability to evoke such affection and the writer's capacity to feel it and, willing himself into the role of acolyte, to record it:

Ravelstein's legacy to me was a subject-he thought he was giving me a subject, perhaps the best one I ever had, perhaps the only really important one.

Others saw [Ravelstein] as bizarre, perverse-grinning, smoking, lecturing, overbearing, impatient, but to me he was brilliant and charming.

In his attempt to capture that brilliance and charm, Chick hints at his subject's ideas but deliberately leaves their philosophical content to "the experts." While some readers may be grateful to Bellow for declining to wade into the cultural and intellectual battles his subject relished, one wonders how one can separate the thinker from the thought. Chick records in considerable and often repetitive detail the evidence of Ravelstein's excesses: his energy, his crudity, his extravagance, his passions. To a casual reader, neither the physical descriptions-"He was very tall. He was not particularly graceful. [His kimono] was loosely belted and more than half open. His legs were unusually long, not shapely. His underpants were not securely pulled up"-nor the catalogues of the objects that overfilled his life-"Ravelstein's need for Armani suits or Vuitton luggage, for Cuban cigars, unobtainable in the U.S., for the Dunhill accessories, for solid-gold Mont Blanc pens or Baccarat or Lalique crystal"-succeed in capturing the subject's essence. Unless this was his essence.

The deeper question is, whose essence? Is Ravelstein the historical (or philosophical) Allan Bloom or a fictional construct, based on Bloom to be sure, but fundamentally the product of Saul Bellow's imagination? It may be that Ravelstein captures the character and ideas (if not the fully formed philosophy) of Bloom, his obsessions and table talk, his brilliance and charm, but this hybrid of novel and memoir, not clearly either, risks doing a disservice to both the fictitious character of Ravelstein and the real memory of Bloom.

What Ravelstein shares with Professors Silk and Lurie, and with Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, is an egotistic self-absorption in a world of ideas unbounded by outside constraints, including those of his own personal limitations. Aspiring to reach beyond the ordinary, these academics are drawn back by the limits of their own characters, like Icarus, shuddering to earth.

Stuart Kurland teaches the literature of Marlowe and his contemporaries at Duquesne University.

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