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Alistair Heys The Anatomy of Bloom Harold Bloom and The Study of Influence and Anxiety Bloomsbury A
Alistair Heys The Anatomy of Bloom Harold Bloom and The Study of Influence and Anxiety Bloomsbury A
For Lauren
The Anatomy of Bloom
Alistair Heys
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
“What do you want to know now?” asks the doorkeeper, “you are
insatiable”. “Everyone strives to attain the Law”, answers the man,
“how does it come about, then, that in all these years no one has come
seeking admittance but me?” The doorkeeper perceives that the man is
at the end of his strength and that his hearing is failing, so he bellows in
his ear: “No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since
this door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it”.
Franz Kafka
Then one day I reached those city gates where angels are servants,
where planets and stars are slaves, a garden of roses and pines girded
round with walls of emerald and jasper trees, set in a desert of gold
embroidered silk, its springs sweet as honey, the river of paradise: a city
which only virtue can aspire to reach, a city whose cypresses are like the
sabres of intellect, a city whose sages wear brocaded robes of woven
silk. And here before these gates my reason spoke: “here within these
walls, find what you seek and do not leave without it”. So I approached
the guardian of the gate, and told him of my search. “Rejoice”, he
answered, “your mine has produced a jewel, for beneath this land of
Truth there flows a crystal ocean of precious pearls and pure clear
water. This is the lofty sphere of exalted stars; aye it is paradise itself,
the abode of houris”.
Nasir Khusraw
This book turns on the interlinked gyres of the Jewish and the Gentile that
one discovers in Bloom’s American criticism. Judaism is taken as a religion
that originates in the Near East, while Gentile indicates western and more
particularly Greek in the sense of agonistic, but then Protestant in the senses
of competitive and therefore quintessentially American. I write this because
in the Hebraic tradition, Bloom asserts that one must honor one’s father and
mother, but, in the Greek tradition, the most important quality is to be
agonistic:
Nietzsche remains the best guide I know to the clash of Greek and
Hebrew cultures. In Also Sprach Zarathustra, he ascribed Greek
greatness to the maxim “You shall always be the first and excel all
others: your jealous soul shall love no one, unless it be the friend.”
That certainly describes Achilles in the Iliad. Against this Nietzsche
sets the maxim that he says the Hebrews hung up as a tablet of
overcoming: “To honor father and mother and to follow their will to
the root of one’s soul.”1
But to say that fear of being punished by an Old Testament God equates to
the anxiety of influence is merely to touch the tip of the Bloomian iceberg,
since in “The Covering Cherub or Poetic Influence” essay-draft, we
discover Calvinistic discourse that was elided from his argument in The
Anxiety of Influence; here Bloom writes that “Poetry may or may not work
out its own salvation in a man, but it comes only to those, who are
Reprobate.”6 Reprobates would seem Bloomian shorthand for young poets
trapped in the Blakean hell of rebellion; thus, “the Reprobate” exist in a
binary opposition with “the Elect,” whose poetic universes “are the frame
for the Tyger’s picture, the horizon against which he moves,” though,
Bloom is not interested in the frame but more the Covering Cherub, who is
“Milton . . . the Tyger; the Covering Cherub blocking a new voice from
entering Paradise.”7 The Tyger is a synonym for Leviathan, itself a stand-in
for the power of God; the youthful poet rebels against an Old-Testament
Deity. A study of Bloom’s esoteric Blakean imagery adumbrates the
religious implications of Bloom’s usage of Blakean coinages like Tharmas
or the Pauline natural man: “Before the Fall (which for Blake meant before
the Creation, the two events for him being one and the same) the Covering
Cherub was the pastoral genius Tharmas.”8 The Anxiety of Influence has a
Protestant dimension that is illuminated by Max Weber’s writings on
Puritanism. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Weber
analyzes this quotation from the Westminster Confession that treats of the
natural man fallen into the state of sin: “Man, by his fall into a state of sin,
hath wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying
salvation. So that natural man, being altogether averse from that good, and
dead in sin, is not able, by his own strength, to convert himself, or to
prepare himself thereunto.”9 Weber comments that with the repudiation of
Catholic confession and the Catholic machinery of salvation came the
pressing consciousness of sin from which “only a life guided by constant
thought could achieve conquest over the state of nature. It was this
rationalization which gave the Reformed faith its peculiar ascetic
tendency.”10 Reinhard Bendix helpfully notes that precisely this point of
Weber’s argument infers “a psychological condition—the feeling of
religious anxiety”: “Puritan believers felt deep anxiety because the absolute
certainty of their salvation had become an article of faith, and as a result
they sought to relieve their anxiety by intense and self-disciplined
activity.”11 In The Anxiety of Influence the ascetic temperament is
associated by Bloom with metaphor, Whitman, Stevens, and the
mind/nature dialectics that characterize Wordsworth’s poetry, but as well
the mental struggle to purge away the fripperies of precursive influence
where the rebellious-Orc Wordsworth figuratively quarrels with that mortal
god Milton: “This askesis yields up a Wordsworth who might have been a
greater poet than the one he became, a more externalized maker who would
have had a subject beyond that of his own subjectivity . . . pure isolation is
now Milton’s isolation also, and having overcome Milton, one
(Wordsworth) asserts that one has overcome oneself.”12 Bloom identifies
Wordsworth as the Modern poet proper and because of his innocent affinity
for nature as Adam or the natural man, who is Tharmas in The Anxiety of
Influence. He provides a rather puritanical portrait of Wordsworth as driven
by his election-love to become the prophet of nature in competition with
Milton the prophet of Protestantism.13 In complete contrast, hag-ridden
Coleridge is effectively damned into playing Beelzebub to Wordsworth’s
Satan, such that Wordsworth functions as Bloom’s model of Election.
Bloom’s argument would seem indebted to that of his friend Geoffrey
Hartman’s reading in Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814: “I call this aspect of
Wordsworth’s poetry spiritual because its only real justification . . . was that
it carried the Puritan quest for evidences of election into the most ordinary
emotional contexts.”14 In this Calvinist version of aesthetic sheep and
goats, the elect and the damned are separated according to aesthetic strength
and weakness; the prize is not so much heaven as the eternal life of being
idolized by future poets as an essential part of the canon of secular
scripture.
The canon and election to the canon become the crucial concepts in
Bloom’s literary theories where writers seek to purge themselves of
influence in order to rid themselves of anxieties at the gates of death. It is
my contention that The Anxiety of Influence represents Bloom’s poetic
version of Yale deconstruction or the striving to unmask the creative
processes that poets undergo in the act of writing a poem; Bloom’s first idea
is the reduction of a religious concept to an original poetic formulation. I
argue that Bloom’s Stevensian version of deconstruction reduces his Judaic
background to a first idea in the J-Writer, who philologists believe wrote the
earliest existent part of Genesis and from which source the rest of Judaic
theology and, Bloom claims, all canonical literature ultimately derives. It
could not be more important to note that Bloom argues in The Book of J that
Judaism begins life as poetic tales which are then redacted into religious
forms of worship, and hence Bloom presents what he describes as the
unnerving paradox that “when script becomes Scripture, reading is numbed
by taboo and inhibition.”15 Much the same deconstructive procedure is
repeated in Bloom’s The American Religion and “Introduction to American
Religious Poems,” in which latter Whitman is proposed as the poet of
American spirituality. Such an inquiry necessarily demands a biographical
foundation, since it must rest upon Bloom’s continued existence as a
historical figure living in a largely American Protestant environment;
therefore, my discussion of Jonas is intimately connected to Bloom’s
pronouncements upon his own highly individual sense of cultural allegiance
and how this relates to his role as a Jewish professor at an Ivy League
college. From thence, I trace the expressiveness of Bloom’s early and often
Blakean interest in Gnosticism and British and American Romanticism with
their peculiarly Protestant associations to his more recent publications on
canonical literature, but paying particular attention to those increasingly
profound moments of confession when Bloom reveals his unique Jewish
lusters. Of particular interest are Jonas’s concept of pseudomorphosis and
Bloom’s interest in aesthetic genealogy, which form two of my central
themes because they provide available discourse with which to consider
how Bloom’s expressive Jewish identity manifests itself as Gnostic literary
criticism. So expressive is Bloom’s sense of identity that he prefers Jonas’s
Jewish-existential reading of the Gnostic thinker Valentinus to that of
Bentley Layton, who places Valentinus with Origen: “Doubtless, Layton is
historically accurate, but the experience of reading Valentinus is distinctly
unlike that of reading the Church Fathers,” and, for this reason, I principally
concentrate much less on the eminent scholarship of The Gnostic Scriptures
and far more upon Bloom’s entranced relationship with The Gnostic
Religion.16 Bloom defines “the Yankees of New England” as “once a
religion” but “now a people,” which has great secular significance because
he describes the Jews as “a religion become a people” too.17 However, this
survey is less concerned with society than it is with the crucial concept of
the Bloomian self, a Protestant and sometimes a Jewish sense of inwardness
that must flourish for a writer to enforce themselves upon tradition; a
sundered relationship to outward reception Bloom redefines as being akin
to the tenets of Gnosticism.
This study proposes to distinguish between Bloom’s Jewish cultural
background and the more pervasive American-Protestant culture that he
entered as an academic in order to show how both codes of thought
replicate themselves in Bloom’s sophisticated Gnostic theories and readings
on a multitude of topics, including what he defines as the American
Religion. The two most important ideas are firstly the inescapably Jewish
“thou shalt not” of the Second Commandment, which lurks behind Bloom’s
conception of the anxiety of influence, and secondly, the aloneness of the
Protestant self reading the Bible by its own inner light, a Miltonic procedure
that Bloom identifies as essentially Greek and agonistic. My purpose is to
read Bloom’s literary career for his Jewish and Protestant lusters, but such a
project instantly falls foul of the distinction that Bloom draws between
aesthetic and historical readings of literature. In The Western Canon and
elsewhere, Bloom “repudiates” historicist interpretations of literary works:
“If any standards of judgment at all are to survive our current cultural
reductiveness, then we need to reassert that high literature is exactly that, an
aesthetic achievement.”18 Bloom asserts with equal force that literature
represents, in the case of poetry, an achieved anxiety rather than “the
interests of a state, or of a social class, or of a religion, or of men against
women, whites against blacks, Westerners against Easterners.”19 He
defends aesthetic or cognitive criticism by confessing that his stance is
unique: “I can search out no inner connection between any social group and
the specific ways in which I have spent my life reading.”20 Although
Bloom is here at his outspoken best, I cannot absolutely take him at his
word and wish to contradict him by arguing that instead he tends to identify
with authors drawn from Jewish and Protestant social groups; for instance,
he identifies with obscure non-canonical Jewish Kabbalistic writers like
Isaac Luria and an equally obscure Jewish Gnostic like Valentinus, as well
as American Protestant authors he takes to be Gnostic like Emerson. In
order to call into question Bloom’s assertion that he finds no inner
connection between his own reading practice and any social group, I quote
from Genius, in which a more socially nuanced Bloomian statement occurs:
“with contextualizing or backgrounding a work, no one could quarrel. But
reducing literature or spirituality or ideas by an historicizing over-
determination tells me nothing.”21 Bloom sometimes provides a certain
amount of backgrounding material, for example in Kabbalah and Criticism,
when he distinguishes between historical Jewish anxiety and literary
anxiety: “Their human anxieties, particularly after the Expulsion from
Spain, were those of the endless vicissitudes of the Jewish Galut, the
Diaspora, but their specifically literary anxieties centered upon a genuinely
overwhelming anxiety-of-influence.”22 While this allusion to the literary
influences felt by these speculative Spanish Jews relates to centuries of
prior interpretation of Jewish Scripture, the “anxiety of influence” is
nevertheless a Freudian-sounding phrase that is overdetermined by the
Second Commandment; it sounds Jewish. The competitiveness and the
readerly acquisitiveness of the spirit of Protestant Capitalism are also seen
as central to Bloom’s genius, as is an agonistic reading of the Second
Commandment, such that the injunction not to make graven images
becomes the basic psychological ban that lurks behind the anxiety of
influence. God is a maker, or as Bloom commented in The New Yorker, “an
imageless God had made humankind in His own image, and then had
prohibited human emulation in image-making.”23 But anxiety is also
existentialist; it reminds of angst, dread, and nausea, “the nausea of the
poetic sufferer is indistinguishable from his sublimity,” thus, what might be
termed Bloomian existentialism becomes the main thread since Bloom’s
characteristic posture is that of an avid Jewish scholar and prolific writer
with an almost Protestant work ethic for prose.24 Bloom is required to
complete the work, but unfree to desist from it.
Here we encounter the paradox of Bloom’s twin allegiance to highly
individual definitions of American Protestantism and Jewish Gnosticism
since, as Cynthia Ozick points out, “If Bloom, with Vico, equates the
origins of poetry with pagan divination—i.e., with anti-Judaism—and is
persuaded of the ‘perpetual war’ between poetry and Judaism, then it is
inescapable that Bloom, in choosing poetry, also chooses anti-Judaism.”25
In fact, Bloomian divination in its most Orphic usage also means anti-
Europeanism, since he argues that Emerson committed American poets
after him to an enterprise that British High Romanticism was too repressed
to attempt, that is “divination”: “If we interpret divination in every possible
sense, including the proleptic knowledge of actual experience, and the
fearsome project of god-making, then we have a vision of the outrageous
ambition of the native strain in our poetry.”26 Bloom argues that the
American Christ is the resurrected Christ, “a very solitary and personal
Jesus, who is also the resurrected Jesus,” and that American poets and in
particular Whitman—together with the inventors of genuinely American
strains of Christianity—create Christian idols that implicitly refer to the
start-again spiritual wildness of the American psyche, “Whitman as the
American bardic Christ, self-anointed to strike up the cognitive and spiritual
music of the New World.”27 Ozick’s overview is that in so arguing Bloom
has lost touch with his Jewish roots: “over the last several years, it has come
to me that the phrase ‘Jewish writer’ may be what rhetoricians call an
‘oxymoron’—a pointed contradiction, in which one arm of the phrase
clashes so profoundly with the other as to annihilate it,” and this is because
“the single most serviceable . . . description of a Jew—as defined
‘theologically’—can best be rendered negatively: a Jew is someone who
shuns idols.”28 But Ozick is right to the extent that Bloom rejects the
Judaism of Akiba and the Orthodox Covenant entered into by his parents in
favor of an individualistic form of Jewish Gnosticism: “I myself do not
believe that the Torah is any more or less the revealed Word of God than are
Dante’s Commedia, Shakespeare’s King Lear, or Tolstoy’s novels.”29
Bloom’s Gnosis finds expression in appreciations of poetic tales; he is
found by what he considers to be original poetic voices that add to the
augmenting life of the canon, a word that was initially used to signify a
collection of religious texts, “‘Canon’ as a word goes back to a Greek word
for a measuring rule, which in Latin acquired the additional meaning of
‘model’. . . . The Greek word kanon was of Semitic origin, and it is difficult
to distinguish between its original meanings of ‘reed’ or ‘pipe’, and
‘measuring rod’.”30 Thus, Timothy Parrish elliptically refers to Bloom’s
idiosyncratic version of deconstruction: “Ozick sees in Bloom’s work the
potentially terrible recognition that the artist creates through a kind of
shevirat ha-kelim, the ‘breaking of the vessels’, that does not shatter the
idol but ‘reinvigorate(s) the idol in a new vessel’.”31 Bloom’s reply to
Ozick would seem to be an inversion of Ozick’s anti-poetical attack upon
canonical divination that replaces what she sees as sacred with Bloom’s
Blakean wisdom that theology is ultimately founded upon poetic tales that
are misread as Scripture, “instead of choosing a form of worship from a
poetic tale, you attempt to write another poetic tale that can usurp its
precursor’s space.”32 But Ozick argues that “the secular Jew is a figment;
when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew,” and
consequently asserts that “when I write English, I live in Christendom”;
and, in so doing, accuses Bloom of being a gentile fully immersed in
American Protestant culture.33 The problem is that Bloom himself quotes
Vico to the effect that the true God founded the Jewish religion on the
proscription of the divination on which all the Gentile nations arose, “a
strong poet, for Vico or for us, is precisely like a gentile nation; he must
divine or invent himself.”34 Ozick responds by emphasizing just this
proscription, noting that “The strivings of divination—i.e. of God-
competition—lead away from the Second Commandment, ultimately
contradict it.”35 David Fite writes that Ozick indicts Bloom for being
“engaged in the erection of what can fairly be called an artistic anti-
Judaism” because divination means literary immortality, a place in the
canon of secular scriptures.36 Parrish further helps us to understand Ozick’s
concerns: “Labeling Bloom’s work the ‘erection’ of ‘an artistic anti-
Judaism’, Ozick argues that Bloom’s true heresy is not that he violated any
canonical New Critical dicta, but that he violated Jewish Law in conflating
literary creation with God’s creation.”37 This conflation of contraries is
exactly the nub of the matter, since the anxiety of influence functions in a
remarkably similar way to the “thou shalt not” of the Second
Commandment.
But how can we quantify Bloom’s deconstruction of what I take as the
two main strands of his cultural identity? The answer lies in an examination
of Bloom’s career as a literary critic, which starts with book-length readings
of Shelley in Shelley’s Mythmaking, Blake in Blake’s Apocalypse, six
canonical Romantic poets in The Visionary Company, and which blossoms
into a further major work (Yeats) and those essays on Romanticism, late
Romanticism, and American Romanticism contained in The Ringers in the
Tower. Up until this point in his career Bloom has almost entirely
concentrated upon Protestant figures, but in The Anxiety of Influence he
introduces his readers to the Gnostic theologian Valentinus, and then, in A
Map of Misreading and Kabbalah and Criticism, to Isaac Luria and Jewish
mysticism, which esoterica Bloom was later to claim as fundamentally
Gnostic in character. By the time of The American Religion, Bloom’s
confidence as a Gnostic interpreter is such that he redefines American
Protestantism as a form of Gnosticism. In later books, the Judaic/Protestant
binary emphasized here becomes much less visible—for instance, in The
Western Canon and Shakespeare, both of which (perhaps disingenuously)
Bloom professes to be disinterested books of criticism with no personal
bias. Nevertheless, other belated books like The Book of J and Jesus and
Yahweh effectively re-establish a more overt Christian versus Hebrew
dichotomy. In these latter, Bloom calls attention to the lateness of the New
Testament in comparison to the earliness of the so-called Old Testament; his
thesis is that the Christian Bible shows a demonstrable anxiety of influence
with reference to Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible or the
Pentateuch). All literary anxieties of any description are characterized by
Bloom as essentially Gnostic, but before properly diagnosing this palpable
transformation that takes him from Judaic Orthodoxy to an American
Gnosis, it is first necessary to introduce Jonas and The Gnostic Religion,
which will provide my main definition of Gnostic existentialism.
The centrality of Bloom’s Gnosticism is underlined by the redoubtable
Ozick in the following terms: “Kabbalah is Gnosticism in Jewish dress; still
it is not the Jewish dress that Bloom is more and more attracted by—it is
naked Gnosticism.”38 Gnosticism arose as a way of dealing with the
problem of evil; it conflates the Demiurge or mere craftsman Creator of
Plato’s Timaeus with the Creator God of Genesis and banishes the universal
principle of spiritual goodness beyond the borders of the material world. As
Ozick suggests, Bloom’s Gnostic faith is in some ways the product of his
Jewish upbringing and in others an existential reaction against it; hence, a
potted biographical discussion is necessary in order to highlight the
inevitable continuities and drastic discontinuities that characterize his
intellectual development. Continuity here means a residual attachment to
Judaism, and discontinuity immersion in American civilization; his family’s
escape from the Holocaust. While talking of his mother and father, Bloom
relates that their extended family were butchered in the Holocaust: “He had
been born in Odessa; she, in Ashtetol, long since wiped out by the Nazis,
near Brest-Litovsk.”39 To provide some background for the Harold Bloom
story, we must recall October 1941, when after a siege of two months the
Nazis finally occupied Odessa. Shortly afterwards, an explosion killed four
German officers in the Axis command center, which sparked immediate and
overwhelming reprisals. Orders were initially given for both Jews and
Communists to be hung in Odessa squares, but rather than punishing one or
two people, the reprisals escalated until five thousand civilians were shot.
Their arbitrary fate seems merciful in comparison to that of nineteen-
thousand Odessa Jews who were assembled in a square near the docks and
sprayed with gasoline and then burnt alive.40 Some sixteen thousand more
were marched to the village of Dalnik and summarily shot dead in a ditch;
because this process proved too time-consuming, the remaining survivors
were crammed into near-by warehouses, where they were machine-gunned
through holes in the walls,
I got very wretched, and for almost a year was immersed in acute
melancholia. Colors faded away, I could not read, and scarcely could
look up at the sky. . . . Whatever the immediate cause of my
depression had been, that soon faded away in irrelevance, and I came
to sense that my crisis was spiritual. An enormous vastation had
removed the self, which until then had seemed strong in me.45
Bloom was saved from this vastation by reading The Gnostic Religion:
“What rescued me, back in 1965, was a process that began as reading, and
then became a kind of ‘religious’ conversion that was also an excursion into
a personal literary theory. I had purchased The Gnostic Religion by Hans
Jonas.”46 His preservation finds a curiously antithetical parallel with the
way in which he describes the vastation of Henry James senior in Genius,
since Bloom writes that James was rescued from his profound depression
by reading Swedenborg and consequently believing that “individual
selfhood led to vastation.”47 In contrast, Bloom’s recovery depended upon
the discovery that something in the self was immortal, an idea that links
Jonas to his reading of Romantic and Post-Romantic American poetry.
The conversion experience equating to the historical hub of this book
turns on Bloom’s yoking of Jonas and Emerson: “Jonas’s book had a
delayed impact upon me; it did not kindle until I began to read endlessly in
all of Emerson, throughout 1965–66.”48 In Omens of Millennium, the book
Bloom chose to call a Gnostic version of “Self-Reliance,” he confessed, “At
sixty-five, I find myself uncertain just when my self was born. I cannot
locate it in my earliest memories of childhood, and yet I recall its presence
in certain memories of reading, particularly of the poets William Blake and
Hart Crane, when I was about nine or ten.”49 The act of reading visionary
poetry extended Bloom’s consciousness by tessellating with something
deep within the self that recognized a spiritual need, “a reading that
implicitly was an act of knowing something previously unknown within
me.”50 The important existential element to underline in Bloom’s
confession of second birth is that this inner occult self can be known
“primarily through our own solitude.”51 Bloom often borrows from Stoic
doctrine and in particular from Shelley’s use of fiery imagery in Adonais to
symbolize the immortal part of the self as an Empedoclean spark, hence
Jonas, referring to the Stoics, records a syncretically related interpretation
of fluming sparks,
“This warm and fiery essence is so poured out in all nature that in it
inheres the power of procreation and the cause of becoming”; to them
(the Stoics) it is “rational fire,” “the fiery Mind of the universe,” the
most truly divine element in the cosmos. But what to the Stoics is
thus the bearer of cosmic Reason, to the Valentinians is with the same
omnipresence in all creation the embodiment of Ignorance. Where
Heraclitus speaks of “the ever-living fire,” they speak of fire as
“death and corruption” in all elements.52
The embers of Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode and the fires of the eternal in
Shelley’s Neo-Platonic eulogy to Keats cohere in Bloom’s reading of
Romantic and late Romantic poetry, but akin to the example of his
understanding of Emerson, they are interpreted in an idiosyncratically
Gnostic fashion. In Bloom’s philosophy, these Gnostic embers and their
correlatives symbolize a prior creation, or what Jonas summarizes as “the
awakening of the inner self from the slumber or intoxication of the
world.”53 Bloom encapsulates the Gnostic dilemma in American terms via
the palimpsest of Emerson, who equalizes sparks with what is antithetical to
facticity: “Those men who cannot answer by a superior wisdom these facts
or questions of time, serve them. Facts encumber them, tyrannize over
them, and make the men of routine, the men of sense, in whom a literal
obedience to facts has extinguished every spark of that light by which man
is truly man.”54 Jonas taught Bloom that Gnosticism reminds man of his
heavenly origin, the promise of redemption, and practical instruction as to
man’s salvation that aims at the restoration of the original unity.55 The
Gnostic Religion remains a repository of intriguing formulations, since it is
also possible to demonstrate Bloom’s absorption of Jonas’s identification of
modern existentialist dread with Gnosticism: that while crossing the
shortness of his duration man confronts death, his beatitudes are arbitrary
and can be inverted and are ultimately meaningless.56 Yet, by means of a
via negativa, the Gnostic concept of selfhood furnishes Bloom with the
saving imaginative belief that a benevolent Deity has absented Himself
from this cosmos and dwells elsewhere, perhaps in a time without
boundaries, “exile is an ironic reduction or displacement of the Blessing, a
substitution of wandering in a space without boundaries for coming home to
a time without boundaries.”57
Bloom’s time without boundaries would seem a mystical state akin to
the Gnostic myth of Sophia, or the mythical realm of “good” beyond the
evil labyrinth of the fallen world; these Manichean opposites are termed by
Gnostics the Pleroma and Kenoma, respectively. The Gnostic adept believes
that we have been thrown from the Pleroma by the catastrophe of the
Creation-Fall: “when we crashed down into this world made by the inept
angels, then God crashed also, coming down not with us, but in some
stranger sphere, impossibly remote. . . . In those waste places, God now
wanders, himself an alien, a stranger, an exile, even as we wander here.”58
But Bloom finds traces of the Yahwistic presence in the form of poetic
flourishes that give him the sensation of the reader’s sublime; hence,
Bloom’s mature Gnosis treasures the sublime concept of the Wordsworthian
“something ever more about to be” (1805.VI: 542). For this reason he
counsels us to “confront only the writers who are capable of giving you a
sense of something ever more about to be,” because “to feel that time has
become hastier, even as the interval narrows, is a vertigo . . . that
profoundly works against the spark that can help to hinder our hastening to
a nihilistic consummation.”59 As we have seen, Bloom’s Gnostic selfhood
is often denoted as a spark, or else by the Greek word pneuma, that is
knowledge of the oldest part of your own deepest self, and thus Bloom
interprets this Emersonian statement as Gnostic: “It is God in you that
responds to God without, or affirms his own words trembling on the lips of
another.”60 But do not confuse the banished Gnostic God, Sophia, with the
Creator-God of Genesis, also called the Demiurge, or mere cosmic
craftsman, who created the material world that the Gnostics name the
Kenoma, since as Bloom explains, “Gnosticism first rose among the
Hellenistic Jews, both of Alexandrian Egypt and Syria-Palestine, a full
century or so before Christ. I do not think that it began as a rebellion against
the priestly Creator-God of Genesis 1, though eventually it turned into that,
and it continues to regard the false Creation of Genesis 1 as the true Fall of
men and of women.”61 The Demiurge God, for Bloom, is the God of
natural cycles and repetition, not to mention the ghastliness of human
history, “If you can accept a God who coexists with death camps,
schizophrenia, and AIDS, yet remains all powerful and somehow benign,
then you have faith, and you have accepted the Covenant with Yahweh, or
the Atonement of Christ, or the submission to Islam.”62 Bloom’s mode of
being rejects the Yahweh of the Covenant and yet finds an intrinsically
Jewish answer to the existentialist problem of the death of God by inventing
an American church of one and preaching a religion of Gnosis.
The self-created character of Bloom’s gnosis is well illuminated by this
comparison with the figure of Beatrice in Dante, taken from Genius:
“Modern scholarship mostly errs in emphasizing Dante’s Catholic
orthodoxy since he imposed his own genius upon the traditional faith of
Paul and Augustine.”63 This might on first reading seem an unusual
quotation in a study that mainly charts the triple nexus of Jewish, Gnostic,
and American Protestant inwardness in Bloom’s distinguished career as a
literary critic. The quotation refers to Dante, an idiosyncratic Catholic poet,
and compares him to St Paul and Augustine, who, with the Anglicans, T. S.
Eliot and C. S. Lewis, are more generally the straw men of Bloom’s
characteristic anti-Christian asides. But on second or third perusal the
forcible idea that seizes the imagination is that an expressive and highly
individual mind has imposed itself on whatever received views dominated
within Dante’s medieval socio-political background, and has remade them
very much in his own image insofar as Beatrice is granted a considerably
more important role in Dante’s spiritual hierarchy than in orthodox
conceptions of the Catholic faith in which she has none. Bloom reiterates
exactly the same argument when he writes, “Whatever the future of
American Jewish cultural achievement will be, it will become Jewish only
after it has imposed itself as achievement.”64 The basic assumption here is
that Bloom’s early experiences were passive enough at point of origin as
indeed all human lives are relatively passive in earliest infancy, but only up
to a point, since after this Bloom’s voracious reading and incredibly active
sensibility turned these formative influences on their head; in short, the son
of a garment-maker became a professor at Yale. Like a strong poet initially
over-informed by a precursor, Bloom absorbed the experiences of his
Jewish childhood in the Bronx, including an early immersion in the poetry
of Blake and Crane et al., but then his remarkable intellectual energies
transformed his cultural expectations into something very different: “I
assimilated understanding the poetry to my background in biblical
commentary.”65 Bloom’s prose commentaries radically challenged the
orthodoxy of his teachers, since as John Hollander observes, “he has moved
forward to revise the lessons of his earliest days, those of rabbinic
exegetes.”66 Hollander means not only that Bloom rejected the covenant
with Yahweh that his parents believed in, but also that his genealogical
investigation of the historical transmission of Judaism from the time of
Solomon to the present interferes with the passive acceptance of dogma,
“normative Judaism is an extremely strong misreading of the Hebrew Bible
which was done eighteen hundred years ago to cover the needs of the
Jewish people in Palestine under Roman occupation . . . the notion that it
should in any way bind me as the proper version of the covenant is
ridiculous.”67 One must never forget that Bloom’s cultural background is
Jewish American and that the imposition of one’s self on canonical tradition
amounts to sheer verve and willful aesthetic determination (rather than the
Bloomian bugbear of passive historical over-determination) since, as
Carlyle notes in Sartor Resartus, “only some half of the Man stands in the
Child, or young Boy, namely his Passive endowment, not his Active.”68
Carlyle’s reference to the relative passivity of childhood and the more
actively questioning mind of adulthood draws upon Wordsworth’s gnomic
wisdom that the child is father of the man, as well as Coleridge’s attack on
Newtonian rationalism: “Newton was a mere materialist—Mind in his
system is always passive—a lazy Looker-on on an external World. If the
mind be not passive, if it be indeed made in God’s Image, & that too in the
sublimest sense—the Image of the Creator—there is ground for suspicion,
that any system built on the passiveness of the mind must be false, as a
system.”69 Hollander notes that Bloom has always been an antithetical
critic, and he opposes Bloom’s practice to the primary kind of criticism
championed by the New Critics because much of their literary theory
derived from Coleridge’s philosophy, as does Bloom’s Yeatsian term
“antithetical,” which roughly correlates to the secondary imagination.
Bloom envisages poets as demiurgical makers creating poems that claim to
be self-contained linguistic structures but which in fact betray the influence
of prior poems. My biographical point is that Bloom’s historical
background was, at its earliest and most tender, that of a second-generation
orthodox Jewish immigrant living in a district where Yiddish was still the
primary language of the streets. By questioning those misreadings of the
Hebrew Bible that facticity imposes upon him, Bloom existentially chooses
a Gnostic sense of religious identity very different from that of his received
rabbinical education. Indeed, his obstinate questionings lead him to
dismantle Judaism and instead invent his own personalized understanding
of the religion of his fathers, although a complete break with Judaism
proved psychologically impossible.
Before exploring the intricacies of Bloom’s decades-long relationship
with the intertwined fields of Gnosticism and Jewish mysticism; it is of
some relevance to weigh up Norma Rosen’s hypothesis that although
American Jews were safe from the Holocaust, “since then, in imagination,
we are seldom anywhere else.”70 This assertion is easily demonstrable with
recourse to Bloom’s thoughts upon Ezekiel: “The shadow of the Holocaust
still and always falls upon Judaism. How could it not? What would we
think of a Hebraic prophet who rose up now to say that the martyrs of the
Shoah were abandoned by Yahweh because of their sins against him?”71
Bloom does not entirely start anew on a fresh American canvas with the
gusto of a Henry Church, rather, he remembers the past because of a
nightmare that he cannot forget. The prime evidence for this assertion is
provided by Bloom’s thoughts on Isaac Babel and Paul Celan. Both these
twain are Jewish writers ambivalently estranged from tradition and yet
capable of transcending their victimization by Russian Communists and
German Nazis, respectively. Bloom notes that the Jews were “tormented as
if in hell” in Russia and ends his piece by quoting Babel’s down-to-earth
apotheosis of the Jews of Odessa: “the stout and jovial Jews of the South,
bubbling like cheap wine.”72 Bloom translated his own version of a lyric
called “Psalm” by Celan that Bloom calls a “hymn of the Holocaust,” a
poem in which no one, including Yahweh, “utters no word about his
slaughtered people, who are No one’s rose.”73 Bloom styles himself the
enemy of historicism, but I want to argue that his work does not exist in a
historical vacuum; that the Holocaust is just one major example of the
impingement of history upon his ideas. The historical context for Bloom’s
Gnostic quest is America, but his cultural origins are Jewish and therefore
encompass the condition of exile from Zion; the sullied conditions of
Davidic culture and Diaspora often resolve themselves into numerous
pogroms. In what follows, I engage with some of Bloom’s more outstanding
critics, including David Fite, Graham Allen, Norman Finkelstein, and Frank
Lentricchia in order to suggest that ideas associated with Protestantism and
Judaism are frequently combined in Bloom’s oeuvre in the form of his own
brand of Gnosticism. Fite’s outline of Bloom’s reading of Jonas is very
quotable because of the word crisis: “Jonas compares the world of
Gnosticism to modern nihilism and to the existentialism of the early
Heidegger, showing the affinities of Gnostic knowledge, which effaces the
present before the eschatological momentum of the past and future, to the
‘radical temporality’ of Heidegger in Being and Time, for whom ‘the
present is nothing but the moment of crisis between past and future’.”74
Bloom has written that he awoke from a bad dream, here interpreted as his
personal biographical vision of Jewish history, to write that severe prose
poem, The Anxiety of Influence. My surmise is that Bloom was responding
to the distant background melancholia of the Holocaust, a creative
resolution that Jonas anachronistically describes as the Gnostic’s “death-
begotten resolve . . . balanced on the razor’s edge of decision which thrusts
ahead.”75 Bloom’s sense of historical crisis was shared by Jonas, who
dramatically returned to Germany in 1945 as part of the conquering British
army; indeed, he had vowed not to do so otherwise.76 Jonas states that
Gnosis has many parallels with modern nihilism and “our twentieth-century
Being” because war-torn humanity was here in an abject crisis.77 Bloom
was moved by the Gnostic existential statement of this German Jew, as he is
similarly moved by the writings of Celan, precisely because Bloom’s belief
in the orthodox Jewish covenant was severely undermined by the notion
that such a Deity could allow the death camps to happen. Jonas writes that
to be “a good citizen of the cosmos, a cosmopolites, is the moral end of
man; and his title to this citizenship is his possession of logos, or reason,
and nothing else—that is, the principle that distinguishes him as man and
puts him into immediate relationship to the same principle governing the
universe.”78 Angus Fletcher gives me a hint as to how to connect the
cosmic obscene to poetic breath, when, in his discussion of allegory, he
quotes C. N. Cochrane: “the Aeneid has in addition the character of a
national epic . . . Aeneas is . . . the pilgrim father of antiquity . . . the
Graeco-Roman counterpart to the New England Kingdom of the Saints.”79
He continues (in a manner reminiscent of the providential reception of
Humboldt’s Kosmos in nineteenth-century America) that Burnett thought
kosmos meant “originally the discipline of an army, and next the
constitution of a state.”80 I would underline that at John 8:23 Jesus
gainsays his opponents by claiming “you are of this world” but “I am not of
this world,” which means the material world of darkness is a divinely
created “cosmos” and the kingdom of heaven is symbolized by mystical
light, a love within but from without this fallen world. Whitman (Bloom’s
American Adam) describes himself as a cosmos in Song of Myself; thus,
this cosmic dualism inspired the identification of Jewish mysticism and
Whitman’s poetry of the self, in the mind of Bloom, when he establishes a
Kabbalistic connection between poetic being-in-the-world and that world as
created by a departed Being. From Bloom’s stark perspective, Yahweh is
acosmic; he also admits to being himself “alogos, averse to philosophy”
since first falling “in love with the poetry of William Blake” and bitterly
complains against Plato’s banishment of Homer from his utopian
republic.81 In an essay on Jewish tradition in the contemporary moment,
Norman Finkelstein notes that Bloom prefers the Hebrew notion “davhar”
to “logos,” for in contrast to the Greek sense of order and linguistic context
in “logos,” “davhar emphasizes linguistic acts of the self that establish the
priority of personal being.”82 This preference for the assertive irrational in
poetry as opposed to the logic of philosophy later became a crucial
distinction in Bloom’s many arguments and struggles with Heideggerian
deconstructionists but, for now, I merely underline Bloom’s theological
preference for the Judaic word for speech, act, and breath, over its
philosophical Greek cousin. Because Bloom’s impish Yahweh breathed the
life force into Adam, the tentative conclusion one comes to is that Bloom’s
conception of literary language would seem mystical: “the god of the J-
Writer seems to me a god in whom I scarcely could fail to believe, since
that god was all of our breath and vitality.”83 But with reference to the God
of Augustine Bloom also admits, “unbeliever as I am.”84
Fite’s Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision has the merit of
being the first and still the best book-length treatment of Bloom’s early
career. Although I am deeply indebted to his scholarship, it is nevertheless
the case that this trail-blazing book was published in 1985, and since then
the amount of biographical material available on Bloom has increased
dramatically. Bloom calls Omens of Millennium (1996) his spiritual
autobiography; the last section of this book is entitled “A Gnostic Sermon,”
and here Bloom deciphers the Valentinian credo that he encountered in
Jonas:
God has no Muse, and needs none, since he is dead, his creativity
being manifested only in the past time of the poem. Of the living
poets in the poem, Satan has Sin, Adam has Eve, and Milton has only
his Interior Paramour, an Emanation far within that weeps incessantly
for his sin, and that is invoked magnificently four times in the poem.
Milton has no name for her, though he invokes her under several; but,
as he says, “the meaning, not the Name I call.”108
Bloom interprets the phrase “grief without a name” as akin to the meaning,
not the name of the Heavenly Muse, because as Thomas Weiskel argues,
“the Imagination may be structurally defined as a power of resistance to the
Word, and in this sense it coincides exactly with the psychological necessity
of originality.”112 In “Martin Buber on the Bible,” Bloom leaves the
precincts of the literary when he investigates Jacob’s wrestling at Jabbok
with “a nameless one” from among the Elohim.113 By wrestling and
defeating Sammael, the angel of his own death (and indeed the figurative
death of all Israelites), Jacob gains a blessing such that his name will
become synonymous with Israel and his people shall not be scattered.
Bloom has said in an interview that the important thing is that Israel
survives and this comment dovetails with the wisdom that pragmatically
Yahweh’s blessing means survival; he includes the Shekhinah, or Divine
Presence, in a list with the real Me and Interior Paramour in The Shadow of
a Great Rock, which prompts me to suggest that he himself is wedded to the
Holocaust as his own dark repression of the angel of destruction.114
Bloom’s exegesis insists that Romantic poets like Wordsworth wrestle
against literal death defined as the empty echoing of a precursor’s stance, so
that their names might attain literary immortality, though in the first draft of
what later became The Anxiety of Influence, the titanic figures that wrestle
are Blake’s Milton and Urizen:
Silent they met, and silent strove among the streams, of Arnon
Even to Mahanaim, when with cold hand Urizen stoop’d down
And took up water from the river Jordan: pouring on
To Miltons brain the icy fluid from his broad cold palm.
But Milton took of the red clay of Succoth, moulding it with care
Between his palms; and filling up the furrows of many years
Beginning at the feet of Urizen, and on the bones
Creating new flesh on the Demon cold, and building him,
As with new clay a Human form in the Valley of Beth Peor.
. . . . (Milton I.19.6-14)115
In the prior passage, Blake’s Milton inverts the creation of man from the red
earth by making a clay man from cold rationalist Deity; but here, Blake’s
Milton casts off the ragged garments of the empirical tradition that would
stifle visionary poetry. The fact that Bloom has a particular penchant for
quoting this passage which boasts a reference to ragged garments can
hardly go unrelated to the fact that his father was a garment-maker.
Although Bloom claims that we fall in love with poetry in an arbitrary
fashion, it is hard to believe that this passage meant nothing to Bloom
junior, presumably after borrowing the text from the Bronx library as a
child. The irony of this is that Bloom’s own anxious exegesis of the above
was instrumental in breaking his belief in the Covenant with the orthodox
Jewish conception of God; Bloom realized his own authentic selfhood by a
Gnostic mode of interpretation that led to a turning away from the religion
of the father.
The most explicit detail of Bloom’s rejection of normative Judaism is his
preference for the irascible warrior-god version of Yahweh that he
championed in The Book of J, which I desire to examine in the light of
Allen’s post-structuralist criticism of the same. The crisis of anxiety, or that
existentialist precipitation of influence between the strong poem in the past
and one in the present tense, would seem remarkably similar to the
proscriptive framework of the Second Commandment, and yet Bloom’s
concept of agon is not Judaic in character but Greek. The Anxiety of
Influence derives from a moment of mid-life crisis and therefore this
becomes a critical word, one borrowed from Abrams’s concept of the
Wordsworthian crisis-autobiography: “A crisis is a crucial point or turning
point, going back to the Greek krisis, which derived from krinein, ‘to
separate’ or ‘to decide’, from which came also the Greek kritos, ‘separated’
or ‘chosen’, and so kritikos, ‘able to discern’, and so to be a critic.”116 This
said, Bloom is especially adept at finding Judaic figures to underpin his
arguments, since in “Martin Buber on the Bible” Bloom has it that the J-
Writer “chronicles the vicissitudes of an agonistic blessing” and that agonist
Jacob, was the “most agonistic of his characters,” while remaining “the
most Jewish of all personages.”117 Bloom once wrote that the first
caveman who daubed a wall suffered from the anxiety of influence, but I
find this instance of the existential dilemma a trifle anachronistic because
Bloom has a Jewish Gnostic conception of influential anxieties. While
thinking through Bloom’s use of the term facticity, Allen dwells upon
Bloom’s statement that we are imprisoned by the contingency of
Shakespeare, Freud, and the J-Writer of Genesis, though I here concentrate
upon the J-Writer, or the putative author of what some philologists claim
was the earliest strand of Genesis, “J is our original . . . precisely because J
was . . . J has authority over us, whether we are Gentile or Jew, normative
or heretic. . . . This is the authority of brute contingency, of our being
imprisoned by what we might call J’s facticity.”118 Allen’s objection is that
“Bloom cannot prove that cultural history depends upon the factitious
power and authority of various strong ‘personalities’”; he merely asserts
that a strong author who comes early in cultural history necessarily
imprisons his or her successors in the arbitrary figures of their particular
stories.119 Whether or not Allen is right—and Bloom would seem
abundantly right in terms of the influence of Genesis upon Paradise Lost—
and Blake’s The Book of Urizen—Bloom nevertheless speaks for his own
beliefs and his treatment of Yahweh is most revealing. My rejoinder to
Allen is that Bloom claims that the earliest significant canonical author is
not the Persian poet of Gilgamesh but the Jewish author of Genesis, who
first set down the Garden of Eden story in writing, and hence strongly
influenced the primary doctrine of Christianity which says that Christ
sacrificed himself on the cross to redeem mankind from Adam’s sin. To
define his own version of facticity, Bloom turns to the Hebraic language of
J, which he argues contains Christian poets like Dante and Milton, because
“those poets are so much imprisoned by the contingency of his being the
Word of God for them.”120 Bloom supposes that J is like an amalgam of
Kafka and Tolstoy, “as though Hadji Murad and the Hunter Gracchus could
be accommodated in the same fictive universe.”121 Leaving aside the
typically Russian theme of east confronting west and the Tolstoyan one of
struggle and loyalty, the Hunter Gracchus presents the reader with the
incommensurable irony of an undead intelligence being interviewed by a
bourgeois mayor: “Do you mean to linger with us in our beautiful town of
Riva is the mundane query, and the more-than-courteous response of
Gracchus is that he thinks not, since his ship has no rudder, and is driven by
winds that come from the icy regions of death.”122 This weird sublime is
the closest thing to the J-Writer’s incommensurable irony, an irony that
breaks the Second Commandment since Bloom argues “irony comes from
clashes or encounters between totally incommensurate orders of reality”
and because J’s Yahweh “likes to go down, walk about amidst places,
persons, and things,” which underlines that Yahweh never shrinks from
face-to-face encounters with J’s characters.123 J’s characters are like
Wordsworth in The Prelude because they enjoy an election love and
compete for God’s blessing, though for Bloom, J’s Yahweh is blasphemous,
insofar as he is depicted as a theomorphic man, yet he is an example of
primitive Judaism that Bloom admits to being obsessed by: “Yahweh is not
here when you need him. . . . I wish he would go away, though he
won’t.”124 Bloom has written that to think of the God of Israel is to
remember mortality and Yahweh’s broken covenant with His people.125
It is vital to flesh out what sometimes seems to be the Jewish-cultural
bee in the bonnet of Ozick’s waspish gentile because otherwise Bloom may
seem overdetermined by his background. Bloom laments that the Jews “are
no longer a text-obsessed people, whether in America or Israel or
anywhere,” but this hardly rings true in Bloom’s own case; he is simply
obsessed with reading texts.126 Like Kierkegaard’s allegiance to being
Christian, Bloom has an existential stance with reference to justifying his
chosen life of reading that is continually reaffirmed by more reading. He
undercuts one myth commonly held about Jewish culture, and in so doing
confirms himself as a secular almost faux Jewish scholar: “Nothing, we
think, could be more Jewish than the idea of achieving holiness through
learning, but the idea was Plato’s and was adopted by the rabbis.”127
Nevertheless, Bloom reads secular texts for their pastness; in the
Kabbalistic sense that they contain meaning between the lines, between the
letters even, because to find meaning in everything is incontrovertibly to
echo the rabbinical doctrine that all possible Midrashic meanings were
already present in the Hebrew Bible, which indicates the Jewishness of
Freudian interpretation, “Primal repression, which ensues before there is
anything to be repressed, is Freud’s version of the Second
Commandment.”128 In The Book of J, Bloom is scandalized by the textual
repression of J’s incommensurable Yahweh undertaken by later orthodox
scribes; thus, Bloom declares that from the perspective of Akiba, he is one
of the minim, a heretical Gnostic, who celebrates “the scandalous power of
J’s text, which by synecdoche stands for the Hebrew Bible as the strongest
poem that I have ever read.”129 Unlike Akiba, Bloom finds the acosmic
center of the Yahwist’s vision in the phrase ehyeh asher ehyeh, which is
often translated as I AM WHO I AM, but which Bloom renders as “I will
be present wherever and whenever I will be present.” Bloom’s contention is
that this phrase would seem the Yahwist’s sublime, or “a time without
boundaries,” an olam (meaning a world created by God but an eternal one
“that transcends spatial limitations”).130 There can be no better indication
of Bloom’s Jewish pride than the historical re-inversion of the Christian
reduction of the Jewish Bible to an Old Testament, which occurs in his
deconstructive analysis of John’s reportage of Jesus’ assertion that “I say to
you, before Abraham was, I am” (8.58). The fathers of the Jews ate manna
in the Wilderness and died, whereas John’s Jesus states “I am the living
bread . . . if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever” (6.51). Bloom
argues that this speech is a rhetorical trap, “the transumption leaps over
Abraham by saying also, ‘Before Moses was, I am’, and by hinting. . . . I
am one with my father Yahweh.”131 Yet Bloom practices his own
transumption and knight-leaps his primal author “J” over the bishops,
castles, and kings of the documentary-hypothesis Moses, John, Paul, and
indeed Akiba. Bloom believes that we are imprisoned by J’s contingency
because J is our original, “as, say, Gilgamesh is not.”132 It is no matter that
a snake steals the tree that grants eternal life from the sleeping Gilgamesh
and that his eponymous epic predates the Garden of Eden story that
possesses its own talking snake that has consciousness before Adam and
Eve, or that the later story turns on a transgressive theft of the fruit of the
tree of life and that therefore Yahweh punishes his children by casting them
out of paradise, itself a Persian word. It follows that Fite’s contextless
reading of Bloom as the present-tense head of tradition eating its
ourobouros tail would be correct if it were not for the anxiety of the Garden
myth; the fact that he takes this story as his starting place means that his
existential fiction is deeply Hebraic in character, truculently so. Bloom then
proceeds to refute Northrop Frye’s argument in The Great Code that his
Bible “is the Christian Bible, with its polemically named ‘Old’ and ‘New’
Testaments,” responding that Frye seeks imaginative liberation from the
imprisoning facticity of the J-Writer “and that liberation is achieved at the
expense of the Hebrew Bible, which indeed is consumed in Frye’s great
Blakean Code of Art.”133 I will treat Bloom’s relationship with Frye in
more detail in the next section, but it is important for now to note that
Bloom has described Frye as the precursor proper. Bloom wrestles with
Frye’s precursive influence insofar as Bloom’s interpretation of the
Yahwist’s “I will be when and where I will be” as “the dialectics of infinite
human aspiration and finite human limitations” almost reads as an
unintended comment upon his own wrestling with what he describes as
Frye’s Myth of Concern, or Frye’s failure to accept that the Bible, like a
secular canon, “is an achieved anxiety,” because “the desire of any
individual poet is to surpass the precursors who created him.”134
Essentially, Bloom adds the idea of agon to Anatomy of Criticism; he writes
that “Frye’s Bible is the Protestant Bible, in which the Hebrew Scriptures
dwindle down to that captive prize of the Gentiles, the Old Testament,” and
concludes, “Yahweh is less a personal possession, even for fundamentalist
American Protestants, than Jesus is.”135 Bloom’s war-like conception of
Yahweh represents earliness and Jesus’ peacefulness lateness; the crease in
Bloom’s Gnostic sense of selfhood is that he is Jewish and American and
that the facticity of the tradition that he wrestles with is mediated by these
two points of origin.
Bloom is deeply uncomfortable with any Christian revision that purports
to supersede the Jewish Bible; his Gnosis would seem deeply Jewish.
Significant Bloomian critics like Allen and Fite underestimate Bloom’s
spiritual affinities, namely the theological and existential consequences of
being Jewish and American. Bloom’s later career might well be
characterized as a running battle fought with those Marxist followers of
Gramsci, who believe that we are entirely dominated by the hegemonic
values that the dominant echelons of society impose upon culture.
Ironically, Bloom’s sublime over-reaction in The Western Canon helps us
tease out his own cultural and spiritual positioning:
In these pages, I propose a dialogue of willful self and cosmic soul where
the daimon is defined as an alternative poetic reality within the self-soul
matrix, the Gnostic myth of an essential purity before and beyond
experience. I do not hold that Bloom is entirely free from the taint of being
reductively defined by the mask of his historical background, even though
the mask in Yeats meant the defenses of poetry against the material world.
My presumption is that Bloom wrestles with American identity conceived
as Protestant selfhood and the honorific Jewish traditions of his fathers, and
that, despite almost unceasing mental activity, he experiences nostalgias.
Bloom views the daemonic in poetry as a morbidly anxious love for the
precursor, an unconscious influence that produces the sublime repetition
compulsion of poetic composition and, indeed, criticism written by a
devouring mind. In this book, the precursor is taken as a composite of
Bloom’s Jewish-American background; the force of Judeo-Christian
tradition that he deconstructs because Gentile poetry was his destiny.
1
In actual fact, Bloom’s attack on the New Critical desire to find formalistic
or organic unity in poems implicitly targets Coleridge’s interpretation of
Shakespeare as an explicit nature deeper than consciousness, which quasi-
religious insight affirms the absolute in the sphere of art: “By likening the
work of art to a living organism, Coleridge does justice to the impression
the work may give us, but he ‘does not express the process by which that
work was produced’.”8 The result is wholeness not in vision or conception
but in an inner feeling of totality and absolute being, the illusionary holistic
wisdom of which Bloom urges should be held “against the formalist
criticism that continued in Coleridge’s absolute spirit,” and we might add
because it breaks the affective fallacy.9 Bloom’s agon with Coleridge (and
his theories of organic unity, as mediated through I. A. Richards and his
reception by T. S. Eliot, John Crowe Ransom, W. K. Wimsatt, Allen Tate,
Robert Penn Warren et al.) is ultimately an attack on German Romanticism.
In particular, Bloom references the New-Critical dogma that the meaning of
an object was to be found only in the critical object itself; he links mimetic
criticism that was dependent upon readerly accuracy, or as Coleridge puts it,
the different throughout a base radically the same, to the thing-in-itself.10
There is an organic loop to Coleridge’s contemplative criticism, “the very
powers which in men reflect and contemplate, are in their essence the same
as those powers which in nature produce the objects contemplated,” and a
religious dimension, since these powers were named by the Pythagoreans
and Anaxagoras “the Nous (the Logos or the Word of Philo and St.
John).”11 Coleridge thought that poetry had a logic of its own that he
exemplifies with specific reference to the great men of English letters: “It
would be scarcely more difficult to push a stone out from the pyramids with
the bare hand than to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or
Shakespeare.”12 It should be remembered that in Judaic theology one
describes the process of building, not the Temple itself; therefore, Bloom
deconstructs in a Jewish fashion the Coleridgean idiom of practical
criticism from the position of the Second Commandment.
De Man compliments Bloom on “debunking the humanistic view of
literary influence as the productive integration of individual talent within
tradition,” and yet without tradition art is not possible, or as Ernst Robert
Curtius argues, “tradition is a vast passing away and renewal.”13 Thus, it is
important to examine the closeness of Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual
Talent” to Bloom’s belated thought and, in particular, “We dwell with
satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from . . . his immediate
predecessors.”14 The concomitant observation has a touch of Bloom about
it: “the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead
poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.”15 The main
influence on Eliot’s famous adage I adduce to be Shakespeare, who is said
to be above his age and therefore impersonal as concerns the characters that
populate his literary creations: “the more perfect the artist, the more
completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which
creates.”16 Life was real as toothache to the bard. His catalyzing conceptual
faculties that created so many characters appear as pure unreactive platinum
to the gentlemanly Eliot. Eliot writes of the metaphysical unity of soul and
unreactively scorns any supposed sense of sublimity, but Bloom’s theories
attack organic unity and are Longinian. Bloom conceives of poets as
wrestling with the centrality of Shakespearean influence, while Eliot
idealizes the Tudor Rose. Eliot praises an escape from personality, Bloom,
the clash of titanic personalities, the triumph of the self. Monuments of
unageing intellect form an “ideal order” for Eliot, which Platonism Bloom
dismisses as statist, since Nietzschean poets fight for freedom, as Eliot
himself points out, anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.17 Eliot is often
the whipping boy of Bloomian aesthetics because, not content with
directing his fiercest criticisms at Blake and Shelley, he denied the influence
of Whitman and Tennyson: “Notoriously, he asserted that his precursors
were Dante and Baudelaire. . . . But that is the usual poetic spiel: the central
forerunners of The Waste Land are Whitman’s ‘When Lilacs Last in the
Dooryard Bloom’d’ and Tennyson’s ‘Maud: A Monodrama’.”18 Eliot was
advised by Ezra Pound to remove “phantasmal gnomes” from The Waste
land because said angels of earth were a throwback to Romantic thought,
but Bloom’s criticism contains gnomic wisdom; he complains that Eliot was
the Anglo-Catholic vicar of Neo-Christianity and “there remains his anti-
Semitism, which is very winning, if you happen to be an anti-Semite, if not,
not.”19 Despite repudiating Hamlet as an aesthetic failure and yet being
haunted by it, Eliot advises that works of literature should be “measured by
each other,” and this insight is entirely consonant with Bloom’s
comparative Judaic definition of the word “canon” as a measuring rod.20
Frye, the Protestant preacher, was more to Bloom’s taste than Anglican-
convert Eliot: “his blend of Protestant Dissent and Platonism is securely
allied to what remains strongest in our poetic tradition.”21 Thus, Bloom has
nostalgias aplenty for the age of Frye: “Frye . . . charmed me by calling
Eliot’s critical vision the Great Western Butterslide, in which a large blob of
Christian, Classical, and Royalist butter melted down and congealed at last
into The Waste Land.”22 But Bloom confesses “that his Methodist
Platonism was very different from my Jewish Gnosticism” and relates how
he fell in love with Fearful Symmetry absorbing Frye’s anatomy “in ways I
no longer can apprehend.”23 He notes that Frye disliked the idea of the
anxiety of influence: “His Myth of Concern saw literature as a benignly
cooperative enterprise, Frye blinded himself to the agonistic element in
Western tradition that has been chronicled from Longinus through
Burckhardt and Nietzsche down to the present.”24 Bloom gives as an
example that “Frye . . . saw Blake as attempting to ‘correct’ Milton . . .
which is to repeat Blake’s idealistic self-deception.”25 Bloom thinks Frye
irenic, and his own temperament bellicose; Anatomy of Criticism finds
archetypes in common, whereas The Anxiety of Influence discovers
concealed agons. Bloom talks of Frye’s archetypes as symmetries; in his
review of The Visionary Company, Robert Preyer notices that the reader’s
attention is directed to “a tissue of correspondences, analogies,
analogues.”26 In The Visionary Company, Bloom borrows what Frye called
the Orc Cycle and used it as an archetype with which to link all the
canonical Romantic poets. At this point in his career, Bloom is still close to
the archetypal criticism of his precursor as described in Anatomy of
Criticism where Frye writes, “we could get a whole liberal education by
picking up one conventional poem, Lycidas for example, and following its
archetypes through literature.”27 Because all the microcosms of literary
works cohere in the encompassing macrocosm as individual manifestations
of the total order of words, Frye’s Christian Platonism is quite manifest:
“Anagogically, then, the symbol is a monad, all symbols being united in a
single infinite and eternal verbal symbol which is, as dianoia, the
Logos.”28 Frye locates the central archetype of Lycidas as that of Orpheus
and then catalogues the Orphic with the Christian myth since “the study of
archetypes is the study of literary symbols as parts of a whole.”29 Bloom
recalls that Frye apprehended him as a “Judaizer of Blake” and that he read
Fearful Symmetry, until it became “part of me,” which nicely captures the
indebtedness of Bloom, as well as his revisionary swerve away from the
Protestantism of his precursor.30
Bloom states that Frye’s precursors were Milton and Blake; the uneasy
dialectic of father and son makes for a pithy start when attempting to define
the Orc Cycle. Frye writes that Blakean desire of man being infinite, he
himself is infinite, and consequently “the limit of the conceivable is the
world of fulfilled desire emancipated from all anxieties and frustrations.”31
Blakean desire became personified as a giant form, or as Bloom
summarizes: “the red Orc of Blake’s symbolism, an upsurge of the Hell of
desire against the Heaven of restraint.”32 Restraint and desire have many
analogs:
The Prose Edda, the Hebrew Cabbala, and the classic myths of
Greece told, according to Blake, one story and one story only. An
Adam Kadmon, a wholly human and therefore wholly Divine Man,
at first existed as comprising all things of heaven and earth in his
own limbs. When this god-man fell, gigantic energies, sprung from
his body, fought for control of it. The wars between Zeus and the
Titans, Odin and Jötuns, Jehovah and the rebel angels are all
traditional, scriptural accounts of the battle for control of the fallen
Albion by his components. These accounts are all orthodox, that is,
told from the viewpoint of the victors, the sky gods Zeus, Odin, and
Jehovah, all setters of limits, orderers of the cosmos, restrainers of
man’s violent energies, like Blake’s Urizen, the god with the
compasses who is meant to embody them in Blake’s attempt at one
central myth. Man in Blake falls from Titan to Giant and finally to
his present weak form, as the sky god presses his limits in. The
chained Prometheus, then chained Loki, the Satan bound in hell are
all embodied in Blake’s Orc, the “imprisoned Titanic power in man,
which spasmodically causes revolutions”. Blake calls him Orc, from
orcus or “hell,” because that is where orthodox morality holds these
bound energies to originate.33
Here we find what Preyer refers to as hot slabs of melded relationships, the
claustrophobic “sense of being imprisoned in a suffocating House of Art
which in turn dissolves into the appearance of a House of Mirrors.”34
Others may remember Frye’s definition of archetypal criticism as “a will-
o’-the-wisp, an endless labyrinth without an outlet” and connect this to
Bloom’s conviction that literary influence is labyrinthine, and hence authors
wander lost, “until the strong among them realize that the windings of the
labyrinth are all internal.”35 This mingled maze of imagination would seem
faintly Coleridgean, since Bloom believes that images reign in the baroque
intermediate world without limits, a world that exists between the empirical
world of the senses and the abstract world of the intellect. Bloom denies
being a Jungian and yet apprehends the archetypal criticism of Frye as his
true model, which means that when he treats of this suprasensible world of
the imagination, it becomes figured as the angelic world of a so-called
giant, archetypal, human image. This giant image when still unfallen is
christened Adam Kadmon (and sometimes Yahweh), and all the angelic
images Bloom collates and analyzes are ultimately related to this
Promethean figure, including the giantism of Emerson and his followers’
Laertes-like rebellion against the Hamlet of English poetry. The giant leap
made by Blake is to read the sufferings of Job as akin to the punishment of
Satan at the beginning of Paradise Lost and then to further identify this
figure with the trials and internalized tribulations of the poetic character:
Missing from this summary is Bloom’s fondness for allegory, since each
revisionary ratio is accompanied by an explanatory anthropomorphism, or
as Johan Huizinga relates: “Having attributed a real existence to an idea, the
mind wants to see this idea alive . . . by personifying it.”43 Bloom’s
admission that Jakobson’s categories influenced his revisionary ratios
reminds me that Jakobson writes, “In aphasia one or the other of these two
processes is restricted or totally blocked.”44 Bloom speaks of the structural
genesis of poetic composition in Freudian terms as an unconsciously
purposeful forgetting; Jakobson derives his twin structural poles from
research into aphasia and mentions an unnamed pathological blocking
agent. As we shall see, Bloom christens his blocking agent the Covering
Cherub; Hartman clarifies this last Blakean figuration as Bloom’s doubt
with reference to Blake’s attempt to correct Milton and even the Bible.45
The Scene of Instruction is incestuously defined in terms of six
revisionary ratios that Bloom proposes are manifest in all Romantic and
post-Romantic poetry. Bloom’s primal scene was Blake’s Milton; this
identification is hinted at in Bloom’s prolegomenon to A Map of
Misreading: “Viewing his Sixfold Emanation scatter’d thro’ the deep/In
torment” (I.II.19-20). What Blake calls an emanation, Frye summarizes as
meaning in Blake “the total form of all the things a man loves and
creates.”46 Bloom explains that “an emanation is literally what comes into
being from a process of creation, in which a series of effluxes flow from a
creator,” so when Blake’s Milton views his six-fold emanation in the deep,
this figuratively equates to a sestina of sisters and their dams.47 The
motherly emanations symbolize the ratios of limitation or contraction,
whereas their daughterly progeny, the ratios of representation or expansion.
I have yet to read a Bloomian reading of Blake’s Milton, but such an
exercise would be entirely concentric to Bloom’s Blakean reading of post-
Romantic poetry. Indeed, it would uncover the incestuous sheets of Bloom’s
relationship with Blake in the act of begetting his severe prose poem upon
his father’s muse. Or, as Bloom argues in The Breaking of the Vessels,
“Freud’s ‘Primal Scene’ takes place in the beginning, when an infant sees
his parents in the act of love, without in any way understanding that sight.
Memory, according to Freud, holds on to the image of copulation until the
child, between the ages of three and five, creates the Primal Scene fantasy,
which is an Oedipal reverie.”48 Bloom refines this myth into the formula:
“As a Primal Scene, the Scene of Instruction is a Scene of Voicing; only
when fantasized or troped does it become a Scene of Writing.”49 By this,
Bloom means a guilt of indebtedness, not so much the fear of there not
being enough left to do (which is not the largest component in the anxiety-
of-influence), but rather “the horror-of-origins that seems to be one of the
most basic of human anxieties.”50 Bloom’s explanation of the Primal Scene
in his introduction to Figures of Capable Imagination is Freudian and
Derridean:
Freud located this horror in our repressed sense of the Primal Scene
where our parents begat us, or alternatively in his more fanciful
Primal scene of transgression in which a primal horde of rival sons
murdered a Sacred Father. The contemporary French philosopher
Jacques Derrida has gone Father Freud one better, by locating the
Primal Trespass in what he calls the Scene of Writing. I am
attempting to go one stage beyond, by situating the anxiety-inducing
transgression in what might be called the Primal Scene of Instruction.
. . .51
Note that Bloom writes “Father Freud,” which almost predetermines that
Bloom falls in love with Freud’s muses or the hysterical women that Freud
psychoanalyzed; one is reminded of Bloom’s fascination with the hysterical
intensity of Blake’s Bard of Experience, as he recites his quatrains to the
Tyger: “The Tyger should be read as meaning ‘fearful ratio’, since The
Tyger’s speaker is the ephebe and the Tyger’s maker the precursor.”52
When Bloom psychoanalyzes the poetry of Blake, like Frye, Freud would
seem a major component of his composite precursor, although the tone in
The Anxiety of Influence seems camp rather than hysterical, overelaborate
more than psychoanalytical, which perhaps represents Bloom’s Wildean
swerve away from Freud. Bloom asserts his individuality in un-prosaic
rhetoric that borders on rhapsody and which later denies Freud; he refuses
to accept that we are “more like one another than we can bear to believe.”53
Christopher Ricks enters this discussion as doubting Thomas; his
incisive summary of the primary influences upon The Anxiety of Influence
interrogates the agonistic aspects of literary anxiety: “‘He who is willing to
work gives birth to his own father.’ (Kierkegaard) ‘When one hasn’t had a
good father, it is necessary to invent one.’ (Nietzsche) ‘All the instincts, the
loving, the grateful, the sensual, the defiant, the self-assertive and
independent—all are gratified in the wish to be the father of himself.’
(Freud).”54 Ricks is chiefly concerned with the problem of allusion in
Dryden and Pope and the Miltonic idea that we receive with gratitude; his
subsequent analysis is that competitiveness is the thing to be competed
with. Therefore, Ricks proposes that Bloom’s agonistic energies are
alternating current, gain and loss, that they make subsequent theorists of
influence: “Beneficiaries, granted his passion, his learning, and his so
giving salience to the impulse or spirit of allusion. Victims, because of his
melodramatic sub-Freudian parricidal scenario, his sentimental discrediting
of gratitude, and his explicit repudiation of all interest in allusion as a
matter of the very words.”55 For Bloom, fluent allusion often disguises
darker relationships; for example, Eliot’s The Waste land is riddled with
allusions and yet, as W. J. Bate records, Eliot could opine: “Not only every
great poet, but every genuine, though lesser poet, fulfills once for all some
possibility of the language, and so leaves one possibility less for his
successors.”56 Bloom partly answers Ricks by lamenting that he “never
meant by ‘the anxiety of influence’ a Freudian Oedipal rivalry.”57 Yet,
those rhetorical flourishes that begem The Anxiety of Influence do seem
rather Freudian for all their Emersonian allusivity and Empsonian ambition:
“The Sphinx, as Emerson saw, is nature and the riddle of our emergence
from nature, which is to say that the Sphinx is what psychoanalysts have
called the Primal Scene.”58 Bloom’s definition of the primal scene is
nothing if not Oedipal: “It is his Poetic Father’s coitus with the Muse . . . he
must be self-begotten, he must engender himself upon the Muse his
mother.”59 This recalls Empson’s sixth type of ambiguity and the
Empsonian reading of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams where conflict
is sometimes expressed as a contradiction, not to mention another Freudian
example expressed by Empson, this time of antithetical primal words, or
specifically the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for young and old, which
reminds one of the Orc cycle’s yoking of the young Orc and the elderly
Urizen.60 Empson supervised Ricks just as Ricks in turn begat Jonathan
Bate, who himself emphasizes literary gratitude, whereas I, alas, tend to see
them as emblematic of a deeply unfair two-tier education system; to wit,
Ricks has every reason to feel grateful. The romantic poet is an Orc who
wants to become Urizen, or as Bloom the Bronx argues in relation to his
archetypal gnosis: “every new poet tries to see his precursor as the
demiurge, and seeks to look beyond him to the unknown God, while
knowing secretly that to be a strong poet is to be a demiurge.”61
The Primal Scene was first introduced in an essay called “Coleridge:
The Anxiety of Influence” in New Perspectives on Coleridge and
Wordsworth. Hartman notes in the introduction to this volume that “Mr.
Bloom’s six versions define nothing less than the life (or death) cycle of
poets genuinely in touch with a sublime tradition.”62 Bloom’s Yale
colleague emphasizes agon: “the relation of past and present is that of
person to person, a dialogue in which someone is bound to live another’s
life, as poet competes with poet for his own, significant difference.”63
Bloom contrasts a Coleridgean Notebook entry of March 1802 (synchronic
with Blake’s composition of Milton), in which Coleridge sets down an
enigmatic plan for a poem called Milton, a Monody that was to be
concerned with “poetical influences” and a potential refutation of Johnson’s
vision of Milton in The Lives of the Poets.64 Developing Hartman’s insight
that the Bard of Experience stands in a symmetrical ratio with a tiger-like
precursive poem, Bloom proposes that the poem-ratio characterizes a total
relationship between two poets, earlier and later, but as an image, a ratio
represents the varied positions of freedom for a poet.65 Yet, Hartman points
to this identification skeptically, when he seeks to free Wordsworth from
Miltonic chains: “For a reason not entirely clear to me, Bloom wishes to
establish English poetry after Milton as a Milton satellite.”66 Bloom calls
Hartman “a noble idealizer of Wordsworth”; Hartman would seem
defensive to the extent of forgetting that quest romance is more Spenserian,
while Shakespeare’s patent swerving is added in the second edition.
Bloom’s scene of instruction is applied in two discrete ways, one
macrocosmically and the other microcosmically; in his essay on Coleridge,
and in his book on Wallace Stevens, an entire career is mapped according to
the psychological allegory of the revisionary ratios, while in A Map of
Misreading and Poetry and Repression, individual poems become subject to
an antithetical form of close reading.
The Anxiety of Influence proposes a Freudian scene of instruction
consisting of three pairs of revisionary ratios, Clinamen and Tessera,
Kenosis and Daemonization, Askesis and Apophrades. Each pair of ratios
represents the contracted ground of a poem’s influence opposed by an
expansion of this influence, and therefore, a three-fold dialectic symbolized
by the revolutionary Orc trying to free himself from the tyranny of Urizen.
Bloom has written that every word is a clinamen and as a consequence there
are no meanings in poems; only bias and swerve, only the verbal agon for
freedom, only words lying against time.67 The word clinamen was
naturalized as a critical term by Coleridge in his Aids to Reflection, where it
figures the gentle warp that concerns the essentials of a man’s being;
Coleridge distinguishes it from the anxiety those suffer whose loveless
passion it is to be admired.68 Bloom develops Coleridge’s Lucretian
source, such that the exiguum clinamen or little swerve guarantees free will:
“I have settled upon the Epicurean-Lucretian clinamen. . . . The clinamen or
‘swerve’ is the trope-as-misreading, irony as a dialectical alternation of
images of presence and absence.”69 Bloomian irony implies the potential
defeat of action, defeat at the hands of introspection, and in Coleridge’s
case the self-irony of being advised to know himself by his own greatest
invention (Wordsworth).70 The wrong kind of irony has to be repressed,
whether the anxiety is caused by a Miltonic revision of Scripture or
Wordsworthian agon with Milton: “Just as rhetorical irony or illusion . . .
says one thing and means another, even the opposite thing, so a reaction-
formation opposes itself to a repressed desire by manifesting the opposite of
the desire.”71 Bloom was taught by Yeats’s misreading of Blake that poetic
influence always proceeds via indeliberate misconception, but this said, his
theory seems somewhat Derridean: “‘supplementary difference’, a rather
baroque, ornamental name for the trope-as-misreading, which Jarry called
by the Lucretian name of clinamen.”72 The influence of Pater is visible in
Bloom’s treatment of Lucretian flux: “truth is always in appearances, the
mind is a flow of sensory patterns, and moral good is always related
directly to pleasurable sensations.”73 Whitman would seem inescapably
epicurean from Bloom’s perspective and the primal American poet had
been reading De Rerum Natura in the run-up to composing Song of Myself,
a poem in which the peace that surpasses understanding is unabashedly
associated with post-orgasmic self-touching, but this deviation was not the
only point of reference for Bloom. In Lucretius, the swerve of the atoms in
the void guarantees free will, but Satan’s fall in Paradise Lost is predicted
beforehand by God, and, as Bloom notes, “Urizen swerves oblique as he
comes down in his Creation-Fall in The Book of Urizen.”74 This struggle
implies that the precursor poem went accurately up to a certain point, “but
then should have swerved, precisely in the direction that the new poem
moves.”75 Here, we find honor and then agon, as well as the figure of
wandering signification, since Bloomian interpretation depends upon
revisionary ratios, and on certain topological displacements that Bloom
calls “crossings.”76 He describes crossings as rhetorical disjunctions, the
moment of transition from a past to a new state, although this power ceases
in the instant of repose. The first one is christened the Crossing of Election
in which the poet overcomes a crisis of confidence as to poetic
originality.77 Bloom speaks of the crossing between clinamen and tessera
as “a movement from a troubled awareness of dearth, of signification
having wandered away and gotten lost, to an even more troubled awareness
that the self represents only part of a mutilated or broken whole.”78
In terms of the ratio tessera, Coleridge is again Bloom’s guide since “he
identified Symbol with the trope of synecdoche.”79 His source in Coleridge
identifies this attack on organic unity as part of Bloom’s answer to the
symbolic urns of the New Critics: “Tessera. . . . I take the word . . . from the
ancient Mystery-cults, where it meant a token of recognition, the fragment,
say, of a small pot which with the other fragments would reconstitute the
vessel.”80 Honor and antithetical agon occur as completion and antithesis,
or “so reading the parent-poem as to retain its terms but to mean them in an
opposite sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough.”81
Bloom writes that “Lacan cites a remark of Mallarmé’s,” which “compares
the common use of Language to the exchange of a coin whose obverse and
reverse no longer bear any but worn effigies” and from this adjudges that
“tessera represents any later poet’s attempt to persuade himself (and us) that
the precursor’s Word would be worn out if not redeemed as a newly
fulfilled and enlarged Word of the ephebe.”82 There is a hint of Nietzsche
in tessera: “Truths are illusions whose illusionary nature has been forgotten,
metaphors that have been used up and have lost their imprint and that now
operate as mere metal, no longer coins.”83 George Steiner writes that few
possess the genius “needed to invent new words or to imprint on existing
words, as the great poet or thinker does, a fresh value and contextual scope.
We make do with the worn counters minted long since by our particular
linguistic and social inheritance.”84 Bloom couples tessera with the
Freudian defense of reaction-formation, which is styled as a contracting
movement, a willful often aggressive need to contradict the precursor:
“Reversal-into-the-opposite is a tessera or ambivalent completion because
it is a process in which an instinctual aim is converted into its opposite by
turning from activity to passivity.”85 He associates the ratio with Whitman
pre-eminently, and the “thou-wast” allusion to Keats’s deathless nightingale
from the Lilacs elegy is as good an example as any because here Whitman
seems caught up in the universal mood, which renders him passive from a
Yeatsian perspective. But I want to consider Shelley’s Mythmaking in which
Bloom makes an antithetical identification between “The Second Coming,”
with its rhapsodic “the best lack all conviction” vignette and “the good want
power” speech from Prometheus Unbound; Bloom states that Yeats would
seem antithetical to Shelley because he appropriates the rhetoric of the left
for the right. As such, Bloom puzzles over Yeats’s synopsis that Shelley
lacked a vision of evil but nevertheless identifies the myth of Demogorgon
in Prometheus Unbound as the ultimate source of Yeats’s theory of the
gyres, or what A Vision calls the repeating cycles of history.86 As Bornstein
points out, cycles oppose historical progress: “Yeats emphasizes apocalyptic
reversals in the course of history, whereas Shelley, though keenly aware of
reversals, emphasizes the possibility of eventual development toward an
ideal.”87 Bornstein confirms Bloom’s reading of Yeats’s intertextual
relationship with Shelley even to the extent of shadowing Bloom’s more
overt distaste for Yeats’s deterministic philosophy that is passive rather than
active.
Kenosis has a Christian source: “St. Paul’s word for Christ’s ‘humbling’
or emptying-out of his own divinity.”88 Metonymies represent wholes by
means of a part (the Stars and Stripes as a metonymy for the United States),
and Bloom outlines that kenosis subsumes “the trope of metonymy, the
imagistic reduction from a prior fullness to a later emptiness.”89 The
determinism of Bloom’s irrational theory of poetry is readily apparent in
three parallel Freudian defenses, those of regression, undoing, and isolating,
“all of them repetitive and compulsive movements of the psyche.”90 The
Freudian defenses are further fleshed out; undoing is defined as an
“obsessional process by which past actions are repeated in a magically
opposite way,” while isolation “segregates thoughts or acts so as to break
their connecting links with all other thoughts or acts,” and regression “is a
reversion to earlier phases or development.”91 Rather than being a
liberating God the precursor is reduced, as is the ephebe poet, “Kenosis . . .
is a breaking-device . . . a movement toward discontinuity with the
precursor” and as such, the later poet, apparently, empties “himself of his
own afflatus,” until “the precursor is emptied out also.”92 Bloom describes
this Whitmanian ebbing as a liberating discontinuity that isolates the self
from the continuity of the Covering Cherub.93 The poet is consubstantial
with the precursor but he individuates like the Pauline Jesus, “made in the
likeness of men . . . humbled himself, and become obedient unto death.”94
By this ratio, the reader hopes to know the dancer from the dance, the son
from the father, the ephebe from the precursor, and Whitman from John’s
Christ.
Daemonization is founded upon the ancient notion of the daemonic as
the intervening stage between the human and the divine.95 Fletcher writes
that men subject to daemonic agents are “obsessed with only one idea . . .
driven by some hidden, private force . . . outside the sphere of his own
ego.”96 He indicates that anxiety is a most fertile ground for allegorical
abstractions: “if a man is possessed by an influence that excludes all other
influences . . . then he clearly has no other life outside an exclusive sphere
of action.”97 To Bloom, it signifies a version of the sublime because
tradition itself is daemonic: “a movement toward a personalized Counter-
Sublime, in reaction to the precursor’s Sublime . . . an intermediary being,
neither Divine nor human, enters into the adept to aid him.”98 The later
poet misreads the power of the parent poem as belonging to this daemon;
the imagined power is honorific, but the process of generalizing away the
earlier poem’s uniqueness would seem agonistic. Bloom discerns that poetic
repression tends toward exaggerated representation, the overthrow called
hyperbole, with imagery of great heights and abysmal depths.99 He
explains that the metonymizer is a compulsive cataloguer, but that the
contents of the poetic self never can be wholly emptied out; Moby Dick
would seem an anatomy of whaling, and yet, to exaggerate etymologically
means “to pile up; the function of the Sublime makes Ahab cry out ‘He
heaps me!’”100 But like Lowell’s evisceration in “The Quaker Graveyard
in Nantucket,” the sublime can degenerate into the grotesque where
Lowell’s hurdling enjambment represents continuity not just with the force
of Melville but also the Whitmanian shore ode.101 Bloom calls the crossing
between metonymy and hyperbole the Crossing of Solipsism, an
extravagant isolation that creates inwardness and a regressive catalogue of
sublime associations.
In the ratio of Askesis, Bloom amalgamates Freud’s scene of instruction
with Shamanistic rhetoric: “Vico’s primitives created a system of
ceremonial magic. . . . The giant forms who invented poetry are the
anthropological equivalents of wizards, medicine men, shamans.”102 The
word severe returns my interpretation of Bloom as a Jewish-American
ephebe of Frye to the question of Puritanism, since Bloom writes: “Dodds
traced the origin of Puritanism to the Greek shamans, and . . . pointed to
ritual and musical incantation as supplementary shamanistic therapies, but
placed the emphasis upon askesis, a conscious training of psychic powers,
the living of life in a particular way.”103 To concentrate upon Puritanism
first, Fletcher mentions that “Swift regarded Utopian schemes as
projections of the mind, particularly as ‘the mechanical operations of the
spirit’ in which the variability of nature was denied.”104 He writes that
ascetic habits induce visions of needs, desires, and hates, “the state of
asceticism with its physical debility induces extremely varied, abundant
fantasies.”105 Who among us would forebear from granting Hamlet’s
quibble the status of anchoritic fantasy: “I could be bounded in a nutshell,
and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad
dreams” (II.ii.255-7).106 Such an apprehension of poetry as shamanistic
utterance resolves Bloom’s definition of askesis, which is associated with
mind/nature dialectics and the figure of metaphor: “the revisionary ratio
that subsumes metaphor, the defense of sublimation, and the dualistic
imagery of inside consciousness against outside nature.”107 Athletic
discipline and ascetic self-denial are combined in the self-restraint of
Paterian ascesis; it is related to the pre-Socratic Pythagorean denial of
sensuality, a skillful economy of means akin to that rejection of materialism
which brings the Christian closer to Christ. Askesis demands a hair-shirt; or
the work ethic of a protestant, but also, requires that element of mythology
which returns us to Shamanistic divination, the interpretation of dreams.
Bloom applies Nietzschean perspectivism to the relationship of precursor
and ephebe, since for Nietzsche, “every trope is a change in perspective, in
which outside becomes inside.”108 The Covering Cherub signifies nature
and the precursor; therefore, Bloom continually decries the Coleridgean
bower of Beulah, the marriage of the mind to nature: “Pater was attempting
to refine the Romantic legacy of Coleridge, with its preference for
mind/nature metaphors over all other figurations . . . the secularized
epiphany, the ‘privileged’ or good moment of Romantic tradition.”109
Bloom explains the privileged moment as a revisionary swerve away from
Ruskin’s reduction of the Wordsworthian spot of time to an instance of
pathetic fallacy: “By de-idealizing the epiphany, he makes it available to the
coming age, when the mind will know neither itself nor the object but only
the dumbfoundering abyss that comes between.”110 Askesis represents the
perspectivizing confusions of metaphor and the dualistic defense of
sublimation, in which the polarities of subject and object defeat every
metaphor that attempts to unify them; it is representative of deterministic
natural cycles.111 Bloom’s career proceeds from the American sublime to
the American religion, or from the repression of European influence in
American poetry that constitutes Bloom’s early obsession to a consideration
of the American religion as a contraction of Protestant orthodoxy consonant
with an Emersonian idolizing of the self. Metaphor does not represent
sublime translation in Bloom but an ironic lessening that combines
Christian purity and pagan-athletic strength: “a movement of self-purgation
which intends the attainment of a state of solitude.”112 In the ensuing
crossing, that of identification, space is set against time, where space
functions as a metaphor of limitation and time as a restituting metalepsis or
transumption.
Apophrades solves the riddle of underdetermination of meaning in the
longer poems of Stevens by means of suggesting an overdetermination of
precursive influence. In Bornstein’s prose, we glimpse the Bloomian ratio
of apophrades: “in the nineties he (Yeats) read his own work in terms of
Shelley’s, he now wants to reverse the process and read Shelley’s work in
terms of his own.”113 The ratio involves a haunting, the return of a
revenant: “I take the word from the Athenian dismal or unlucky days upon
which the dead returned . . . we might believe the wheel has come full
circle, and that we are back in the later poet’s flooded apprenticeship.”114
The uncanniness of this solipsistic openness makes it almost appear “as
though the later poet himself had written the precursor’s characteristic
work.”115 This poetic final movement is frequently a balance between the
Freudian defenses of “introjection (or identification) and projection (or
casting-out the forbidden)”; and imagistically, “the balance is between
earliness and belatedness.”116 At the level of the figure, metalepsis would
seem profoundly Stevensian, not least because ancient guides to rhetoric
associate it with comedy; Stevens employs metalepsis in his Comedian as
the Letter C and hence in its malapropisms “it substitutes one word for
another in earlier figurations.”117 The trope of transumption produces the
sense of having fathered one’s own fathers; Bloom associates it with
divination. He describes transumption as a process in which commonly “the
poet goes from one word to another that sounds like it, to yet another, thus
developing a chain of auditory associations getting the poem from one
image to another more remote image.”118 Bloom’s final definition is
reminiscent of a cryptic crossword puzzle: “metalepsis can be called,
maddeningly but accurately, a metonymy of a metonymy.”119 He means
that a prior poem’s rhythm and tone is captured but the exact wording
altered: “As a figure of a figure, it ceases to be a reduction, either proleptic
or ‘preposterous’, in the root sense of making that later into the earlier.”120
Bloom’s Scene of Instruction is a transformed archetypal Orc cycle that has
been profoundly altered by the addition of rhetoric and Freudian defenses,
since “To undo the defenses of Romantic poets would be to lead them back
to health . . . their identity consists precisely in the strength of their
defenses, this would also strip them of their poetic voice.”121 There is a
subtle anti-Christian element to Bloom’s Freudian borrowings; for example,
R. V. Young implies that the imagistic associations of psychoanalysis
substitute themselves for examination of conscience and the work of
grace.122 Apophrades occurs in Bloom’s oeuvre when he writes religious
criticism that redefines the New Testament as the belated testament; his
other great poetic model for this ratio is Whitman’s transumption of the
Gospels and the poet’s presentation of himself as an American Christ during
the closing sections of Song of Myself.
2
The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history
of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix . . . is the
determination of being as presence in all the senses of this word. It
could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to
principles, or to the I center have always designated the constant of a
presence—eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence,
substance, subject) aletheia (truth), transcendentality, consciousness,
or conscience, God, man. . . .6
In my analogy, the Temple represents transcendent truth that
deconstructionists skeptically reconfigure as a metaphor for the presence of
a god in whose (non-existent) mind exist eternal verities; Derrida attacks
the Socratic method of ironic questioning that leads debaters to truths
grounded in the mind of the Greek version of Deity. In opposition to
Socratic irony, Derrida coins the phrase “there is nothing outside the text,”
which means that rational inquiry never halts at a transcendental signifier
because language is self-contained and does not correlate with the object
world; therefore, its constant iteration would seem not so much a Falstaffian
ruse to corrupt a crypto-Jewish saint, but rather constant interpretation.
Admittedly, there is a hint of the Jewish culture of the book contained in the
idea of constant interpretation and the phrase “nothing outside the text,” if,
that is, text is taken as Jewish Scripture, although I tend to interpret Derrida
as an atheist. Derrida claims Socrates fails to lead his disciples out of the
mysteries of the cave-labyrinth by introducing the skeptical argument that
words refer to words and not to transcendent concepts or God’s truth; the
inference being that Plato’s ideal model Zeus remains more metaphorical
Minotaur, spiriting Europa away toward Crete to be the mother of Minos,
than transcendent Deity symbolic of virtue. In Writing and Difference,
Derrida inverts the Platonic subordination of writing to speech outlined in
the Phaedrus dialogue such that what he terms archewriting, or an
understanding of language as a system of differences, is to be found in both
speech and writing. He argues that, traditionally, writing exists as a
supplement to speech and that what he terms supplementarity corresponds
to the privileging of speech over writing. Derrida further implies that
supplementarity exists in the texts of those thinkers like Plato, Levi-Strauss,
Husserl, and Rousseau, who similarly privilege speech over writing, and
that this discovery leads to dubiety as concerns the truth claims of said
texts. Therefore, Derrida attacks the authenticity traditionally granted to
voice as self-presence; he claims that writing is falsely seen as the shadow
of speech, as somehow dead, a phenomenon christened phonocentrism.
There does not seem much difference between voice-mail and e-mail,
although Plato suggests that when someone speaks they can be called to
proper account by means of Socratic irony, whereas when they write the
resultant piece of writing might be misinterpreted according to the slant of
the interpreter. Yet, spoken words are as apt to be deliberately misprisioned
by the cunning of a barrister, albeit Socrates disingenuously claimed that it
was easy to out-argue Socrates, but impossible to cheat the truth. Here we
approach a great truism of deconstructive criticism, since the stance of the
Yale tribe was precisely an inversion of the relationship that Plato portrays
as existing between the Sophists and Socrates. Iconoclastic deconstructive
arguments reduce Platonists to the status of teachers of rhetoric, the
identification of Socrates as a particularly eloquent Sophist and Platonic
truth as the will-to-power of Plato’s metaphors.7
Bloom’s answer to Derrida revolves around an appeal to literary history
understood as a combination of psyche and text; it is theological in the
respect of preferring a Jewish philosophy of language to a Greek one.
Bloom proposes that poets will themselves into poetic being and, hence,
become the gods of poetry; from this perspective Plato is seen as the poet,
who penned The Symposium, but, who hardened into the punitive Law-
giver and formulated the Laws. The Bloomian poet iconoclastically
smashes influence as allusion and replaces it with echoing shards of
internalized romantic discourse; an old god is replaced by a new god. My
initial discussion focuses on Bloom’s relationship with Derrida and circles
around the same linguistic problems, that is the suspicion that Derrida
deliberately refused to define his terms monotheistically because he was
trying to deconstruct such procedures. A good example is logocentrism, a
word that refers to the mediation of presence via belief in the Platonic forms
that guarantee God’s truth as the highest good, taken together with the
Platonic doctrine that Socratic speech can be called to truthful account
because the speaker and his truth-claims are present and apt to be subject to
rational inquiry (Socratic bullying). From Derrida’s deconstructive
perspective the illusory nature of logocentric truth would seem closely
allied to the term différance, which skeptically implies that concepts
articulated in language cannot be fixed to one single truthful definition, and
which consequently defers our understanding of the precise meaning of any
one sign indefinitely. Another example is trace, or the mark of an absent
presence implied by a sign that has been deconstructively denuded of its
logocentric potential to signify anything but that sign’s relationship to other
signs. Derrida has stated that his philosophy is diametrically opposed to
mysticism (“there is nothing mystical in my work”), and therefore his
deconstruction of a term like presence differs dramatically from Bloom’s
interest in the mystical presence and absence of the Kabbalistic Deity.8 I
find attempts to link Derrida to Kabbalah unconvincing and yet the
convergence between constant Derridean interpretation and the Bloomian
investigation of infinitely regressive language substitutes for God means
that there is at least some vestigial semblance of Jewishness remaining in
the critical procedures of both thinkers. Thus, I distinguish between
Bloom’s Scene of Instruction and Derrida’s Scene of Writing because
Derrida’s deconstructive enterprise questions logocentrism, or the idea that
there is an ideal representation of truth, however obscure. Derrida proposes
in his discussion of the Freudian Scene of Writing that the psyche itself
becomes a text and this text a scene in the sense of a backdrop for the
signature of the author. He undermines the notion of the authorial subject as
lonely self that possesses a Platonic soul replete with the sincere power of
spontaneous expression. Instead, he envisages the writerly subject as a
ghostless machine of writing, in which consciousness, in the act of
composition, actively repeats without copying a prior text that is re-pressed,
and which process Bloom figures as an example of the daemonic. I want to
relate this Derridean attack on authorial presence to Bloom’s thesis that as
tradition becomes more belated so poetic meaning becomes under-
determined and, ultimately, to his thesis that the best analogy for this
phenomenon is to be found in Kabbalah.9 To do so entails investigating
Bloom’s psychological insights into poetic egoism and his understanding of
influence as a metaphor; his dramatizing of a linguistic structure into a
diachronic narrative that considers the text as existing in a willed-into-being
intertextual relationship with tradition thought of as a series of texts and
composite precursors.10 Minus the Freudian subject as anxious poet,
Bloom’s theory of influence would seem embarrassingly similar to
Derrida’s coinage différance, were it not for the influence of Scholem as
revealed in Kabbalah and Criticism. Derrida’s neologism différance
combines “to differ” and “to defer” as the interplay of signs with other
synchronic signs within a linguistic system to the extent that definitions
playfully resist closure; thus, an interpretation of language speaks (rather
than the subject), because meaning is held to be generated by semiotic
oppositions, either in an articulated-as-sound or marked fashion. In some
ways there seems to be little difference between the respective stances of
Bloom and Derrida because as linguistic units on a piece of paper, poems
differ and hence defer in a diachronic way from earlier poems. Indeed,
Bloom believes that the meaning of a poem is another poem just as Derrida
states the meaning of a word is another word and then another ad infinitum.
The main difference lies in Bloom’s belief that without the anxious subject
no poem would differ or swerve from another where said clinamen
guarantees free will.11 Crucially, rather than confining his analysis of texts
to ever-receding synchronic thresholds of signification that assert the
illusory nature of established philosophical truths, including mysticism,
Bloom charts the labyrinth of influence by psychoanalyzing the literary
artifact in a diachronic fashion, and his analyses are often illustrated with
mystical analogies from Jewish theology and esoterica (though both Jewish
interpreters express themselves as guests in a host country’s tongue, and
there is pathos in that).
I wonder that literary anxiety seems more pronounced in a post-
Romantic world because of the imposition of dictionaries, one function of
which was to stop the language of Pope becoming estranged as that of
Chaucer, a settled lexicon denying each new generation fresh rhymes.
Without the phonemic changes associated with Grimm’s Law, language
would be static; though grammarians, lexicographers, and academies do
their best to fix words like specimens in amber. Ever a rebel against stasis,
Bloom smashes the icon of objectivity: “Against Arnold, Wilde insisted that
‘the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is
not’.”12 Bloom’s clinamatic distinction depends upon his assertion that,
cognitively speaking, reading comes before writing; that composition is
closer to mere process, to the automatic behavior of the id, since the
precursor’s literary object becomes absorbed into the id.13 Influence-
anxieties inhibit writing as utterance caught up in a tradition of willful
misprisions, but not the logocentric tradition, because the rational ego is
associated with philosophical logos and poetry would seem irrational, the
cognitive music of the creative spark. From this angle, Bloom is not a
typical deconstructor, since as Hartman outlines, “Derrida, de Man, and
Miller are certainly boa-deconstructors” and enjoy “disclosing again and
again the ‘abysm’ of words.”14 In “The Deconstructive Angel,” Abrams
employs his anti-deconstructive sarcasm to ledger the “skepticism” of
“Derridada” in the hope of catching the leviathan of presence: “Derrida’s
chamber of texts is a sealed echo-chamber in which meanings are reduced
to a ceaseless echolalia, a vertical and lateral reverberation from sign to sign
of ghostly non-presences emanating from no voice, intended by no one,
referring to nothing, bombinating in a void.”15 Confronting what Abrams
interprets as labyrinthine nihilism, but which Derrida calls the free play of
the world, Bloom responds by stating that as far as literature is concerned
“every word is a clinamen,” or the swerve of words lying against past
time.16 Bloom’s complaint is that deconstructive criticism is merely
synchronic and “refuses to situate itself in its own historical dilemma, and
so by a charming paradox it falls victim to a genealogy to which it evidently
remained blind.”17 Bloom refers to the synchronic status of the
deconstructive aporia, or the linguistic moment, when a text deconstructs
itself to reveal a faux one-sided binary opposition termed by Derrida the
supplement, which discovery of indefinite processions of signs of signs
shuts down the referential function of language altogether so that no single
over-arching or privileged reading is possible, because the meanings of
words can be traced only to more supplementary chains of words. A
diachronic approach, on the other hand, suggests that “true” or unitary
meaning becomes lost in a form of willful error that lies in order to justify
one reading over another; or the on-going tessera of modern poetics with
the past. In response to Derrida’s assertion that “all Occidental methods of
analysis, explication, reading or interpretation” were produced “without
ever posing the radical question of writing,” Bloom argues that “this is not
true of Kabbalah, which is certainly an Occidental method, though an
esoteric one.”18 In this formulation, Bloom argues that Kabbalah figures
the presence and absence of God to the extent that during the ratio of
clinamen the demiurgical precursor is and is not present. Bloom’s central
point is that Kabbalah stops the movement of the Derridean trace since it
has a primordial point of origin “where presence and absence co-exist by
continuous interplay.”19 For Bloom, Yahweh’s ambiguous statement “I am
that I am,” translated as “I will be present when I will be present and absent
when I will be absent,” combats the slipperiness of the Derridean concept of
the trace that claims to undermine authorial presence in the constantly
differing interpretations of words and hence their constantly deferred
thresholds of meanings. He battles against the continuous skeptical slide
away from privileged lexicographical definitions toward what Derrida
terms their bricolage of associated meanings and usages, such that
bricolage means the linguistic system of signs created by the inventor of
language games from his/her background culture. Bloom’s system has been
called “psychokabbalistic,” and its emphasis upon the interaction of a
repressed precursive absence and yet sublimated psychic presence opposes
the trace’s merely signified illusion or simulacrum of metaphysical
presence.
To better understand the concept of the trace, we could do worse than
consult what Miller recognizes as a transparent statement of Derrida’s
fundamental theme:
Far from transparency, one detects beautifully circular logic, to call it that.
Miller offers an ingenious analogy, that of a maze within a maze, “What
would be outside the labyrinth? More labyrinth!”21 Even Ariadne’s thread
cannot help us escape the interpretive labyrinth of Derridean discourse in
which the very idea of a transcendental signifier is tomorrowed and
tomorrowed by constant deferrals of meaning. In the Derridean multiverse
of labyrinthine differences (it would be impossible to imagine a Derridean
universe with God at the center) we are beyond even the Freudian
interpretation of dreams:
. . . there is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted
dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware
during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of
dream-thoughts which cannot be unraveled and which moreover adds
nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the
dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown. The
dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from
the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to
branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world
of thought. It is at some point where this network is particularly close
that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its
mycelium.22
Creeping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a
little further, and you perceive it come to a sudden abrupt
termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to
him who had reached the extremity, except into the depths below.
Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi, you suppose, at least, that
his labours must in some way terminate here. But raise your eyes,
and behold a second flight of stairs still higher: on which again
Piranesi is perceived, by this time standing on the very brink of the
abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is
beheld: and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours: and
so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the
upper gloom of the hall. With the same power of endless growth and
self-reproduction did my architecture proceed in dreams.31
Derrida tells us that the psyche is a kind of text and that this text is
constituted of what Derrida calls “written traces”. . . . Derrida
assimilates Freud to Nietzsche by finding “the real origin of memory
and thus of the psyche in the difference between path-breakings” or
sensory excitations as they encounter resistances in consciousness.
What Derrida calls “the trace as memory” is the impalpable and
invisible difference between two path-breaking forces impinging
upon what becomes individual mind.40
The psychic text under discussion is “Tintern Abbey,” where Bloom finds
stray echoes of Milton’s presence in the landscape, much as Coleridge
postulated the ancient Greeks find godkins and godesslings in every bush or
hollow statue. Milton’s scarcely repressed presence as the blind hermit
personifies the prophetic voice, upright and pure, together with the absent
monotheism of the precursor. Another gradation needs to be adumbrated at
this juncture because for Lacan, Pontalis, and Laplanche, the unconscious
as language becomes the central mechanism, but for Derrida, it is one more
faux transcendental signifier. Because Bloom’s impish Yahweh breathed the
life-force into Adam, my tentative conclusion is that Bloom’s conception of
language appears to be mystical, the breath that is Yahwistic influence
continuing to be active at that circumference of writing called the
present.41
For me, the Johannine phrase “In the beginning was the Word” (Jo. 1.1)
is the center point of Bloomian poetics because the anxiety of influence
overturns the priority of the New and Old Testaments. Bloom utilizes
Thorleif Boman’s distinction between the Greek and Jewish words for
word, or logos and davhar: “Davhar is at once ‘word’, ‘thing’ and ‘act’,
and its root meaning involves the notion of driving forward something that
initially is held-back.”42 Bloom comments that davhar is word as a moral
act, an object, or a deed, and if not, then it becomes a lie and this in contrast
to the ordering, arranging and gathering connotations of logos: “Logos
orders and makes reasonable the context of speech, yet in its deepest
meaning does not deal with the function of speaking.”43 By function,
Bloom implies that davhar signifies being and doing, whereas logos implies
ratio and rationality, “The concept of davhar is: speak, act, be. The concept
of logos is: speak, reckon, think.”44 Bloom ends his assessment of Derrida
in A Map of Misreading by making a distinction between the influence of
Spenser and Moses on Milton’s Paradise Lost and contrasts the influence of
written with oral tradition in terms of the id and the superego, respectively.
But first, he recapitulates the Derridean attack on logocentric discourse in
Plato’s Phaedrus, the Socratic wisdom that exalts “words founded on
knowledge.”45 Bloom places Derrida more in the tradition of Nietzsche
than Saussure, and consequently, he writes that his binaries are unbound:
“From Nietzsche descends the tradition that culminates in Jacques Derrida,
whose deconstructive enterprise questions this ‘logocentric enclosure’ and
seeks to demonstrate that the spoken word is less primal than writing is.”46
In A Map of Misreading, Bloom offers a Judaic reading of Derrida’s
privileging of writing over speech, but before discussing this inversion
further, it is apposite to briefly place these deconstructive ideas in the
context of Whitman’s capitulation to the Covering Cherub of Quakerism in
“As I Ebb’d.”
The mysteries of Whitman’s belched words of poetic breath function as
a naturalistic god substitute in Bloom’s Kabbalistic discourse but Whitman
himself was menaced by the iconoclastic nature of conventional Quaker
belief and this inhibition causes his self-belief to ebb. The being and doing
of davhar, or performative act, reminds of Austin’s distinction between
performative and constative discourse and my analogy is that when faith
incarnates as a real agent in the constative sense then imagination stutters.
The said terms derive in How to Do Things With Words, where Austin
sought to call into question the philosophical rigor of asking whether a
statement was true or false; as Jonathan Culler points out, “Austin’s
investigation of the qualities of the marginal case leads to a deconstruction
and inversion of the hierarchy: the performative is not a flawed constative:
rather, the constative is a special case of the performative.”47 Such a
relationship in this opposition would seem closely akin to the structuralist
proposition that words exist in a semiotic system and that meaning is only
derived from the interrelationship of words; the truth of language is not
necessarily the truth of logic. Frank Kermode pinpoints a confessional
example of the difference between the performative and constative in
Allegories of Reading, when de Man distinguishes between confession and
excuse, “The former is ‘governed by a principle of referential verification’,
whereas the latter lacks the possibility of verification—‘its purpose is not to
state but to convince’: excuses are performative whereas confession is
constative.”48 It seems to me that Whitman’s confessional stance in “As I
Ebb’d” is more constative than performative, but this binary can be further
illuminated by a short consideration of Jakobson’s celebrated terms
metonymic and metaphorical. The aforesaid tropes link to Austin’s thesis
that language is more generally performative than constative, as is
demonstrated by the analogy of dreams that either have their own internal
logic, or else some symbolic quality that refers to an event or object that
truthfully exists in the real world:
The subtle truth of rhetoricians is that they demand our connivance; Walter
Nash starts his anti-theoretical book on classical rhetoric with the
observation that “in rhetoric there is always an element of complicity.”1
Abrams puts this point most forcibly in “The Deconstructive Angel,” when
he compares the “textual labyrinth” to that passage in The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell where a ghastly vision of hell as an “infinite Abyss”
replete with “fiery tracks on which revolv’d vast spiders” is shown to Blake
by an Angel. But the black-sun vision fades as soon as the Angel departs
and when the Angel asks Blake how he freed himself, Blake calmly replies:
“All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics.”2 Blake knows that a
Pauline and yet Gnostic conception of Jesus is the way but Bloom does not
because, as he writes in Anatomy of Influence, “literary influence is
labyrinthine.”3 I have argued that Bloom responds to the Derridean sublime
with the figure of Yahwistic irony; in this section, however, it is my
argument that Bloom’s response to de Man is akin to Nash’s insight that
rhetoric requires readerly complaisance, and that genetic influence involves
more tropes than just irony, and the further irony that de Manian
deconstruction does and does not respond to the Holocaust.
Bloom was often given to verbally debate with de Man whether all texts
reduced to the basic trope of irony, since de Man believed that truth was the
coinage of metaphor:
A crucial difference between Bloom and de Man is the way they use terms
like part and whole, inside and outside, early and late. De Man extends
Nietzsche’s claim that cause and effect are actually reversible fictions like
subjectivity and objectivity: “we pair the polarities outside/inside with
cause/effect on the basis of a temporal polarity before/after (or early/late)
that remains un-reflected.”15 In Bloom’s criticism part/whole,
outside/inside, early/late, appear as binaries in his map of misreading; they
are imagistic figures that help the practical critic to apply his revisionary
ratios to a text that has a diachronic relationship with a precursor text, “An
image is necessarily an imitation, and its coverings or maskings in poetic
language necessarily center in certain fixed areas: presence and absence,
partness and wholeness, fullness and emptiness, height and depth,
insideness and outsideness, earliness and lateness.”16 Thus, the precursive
text exists anterior to the text that displays the anxiety of influence, which
willful ignorance “is the trespass of a poetic repression of anteriority.”17
Anteriority exists in de Man’s mind as an allegorical figure for a linguistic
structure that lacks a transcendental center: “it is of the essence of this
previous sign to be pure anteriority.”18 Tradition is in a de Manian sense
Bloom’s allegory, since when Bloom states there is no end to influence, the
ensuing ricochets seem akin to anxious repetition on a temporal but
referentially diachronic scale, in which “every intertextual confrontation
seems as much an abyssing as any other”; however, when Bloom identifies
Shakespeare as the center of the canon, he is no post-structuralist.19
Bloom’s Scene of Instruction begins with the state of clinamen and the
rhetorical figure designate for this revisionary ratio is irony. But The
Anxiety of Influence lists six rhetorical tropes in all and applies them to any
belated poem’s stance with regard to a (composite) precursor’s poetic
discourse. Bloom seems the remote cousin of de Man to the extent that his
revisionary ratios make use of readily identifiable rhetorical figures, and
inasmuch as they are recommended as a form of diachronic practical
criticism. Yet, despite the more self-consciously philosophical stance of de
Man, an element of deconstructive nihilism creeps into Bloom’s work,
when he states that meaning is not possible in the fallen world. The
fractured shards of poetic echoes that exist in a poem stand for the departed
presence of Yahweh in Bloom’s theoretical readings; their referential aspect
equates to the Bloomian aporia: a godless world, or as Bielik-Robson
argues, “Bloom is so thoroughly immersed in the reality of the Fall that he
can offer us no clear way out, pointing unambiguously in the redemptive
direction.”20 Bloom often complains that his theory of reading is weakly
misread when reduced to the agon of egos rather than being understood as
an intrinsically textual phenomenon, and yet herein lies the main difference
between Bloom and de Man, since Bloom is a human looking for signs of a
departed god, whereas de Man’s criticism is merely ironic, “I intend to take
the divine out of reading.”21 It is instructive to correlate their respective
definitions of irony with specific reference to the Bible. Here is the secular
de Man on precisely the question of biblical deconstruction from the
Moynihan interview: “There are always ironic readings possible, though
just what such a reading of the Bible would be I’d prefer not to think
about.”22 That said, de Man emphasizes to Moynihan that “there is no final
authority.”23 Indeed, de Man mentions that the attempt to control is
characteristic of all fundamentally theological modes of reading and that
such commentary, with its illusory hermeneutic patterns of totalization, is
open to demolition. There is no more burning contemporary issue than the
ironizing of Deity, especially in cartoons, since these break the injunction of
the Second Commandment. De Man is not at all interested in irony
(dramatic or narrative) and states that deconstructive irony is a break, an
interruption, a disruption, a moment of loss of control, madness even, but
“not comedy.”24 His reflections on the function of irony indicate how little
of a totalizing fascist propagandist he was in later life; his thoughts are best
contrasted to Bloom’s in The Book of J, where Bloom searches for the best
figure to describe the putative author of the earliest strand of Genesis and
one by one dismisses the traditional usages of the word irony:
“Irony” goes back to the Greek word eiron, “dissembler”, and our
dictionaries still follow Greek tradition by defining irony first as
Socratic: a feigned ignorance and humility designed to expose the
inadequate assumptions of others, by way of skilled dialectical
questioning . . . the use of language to express something other than
supposed literal meaning, particularly the opposite of such meaning,
and also the contrast or gap between expectation and fulfillment . . .
dramatic irony or even tragic irony, which is the incongruity between
what develops in a drama or narrative and the effect of what develops
on adjacent words and actions that are more fully apprehended by the
audience or readers than by the characters. . . .25
Derrida excuses de Man on the grounds that he was a young man affected
by a desire to please Henrik de Man and because at the start of their
occupation the Nazis inveigled to portray themselves as sympathetic to
Belgian nationalist interests, which appealed to de Man’s youthful
prejudices. The iconoclastic issue is one of totality, since de Man’s later
work has the virtue of repudiating totalitarianism, as Hartman declaims:
His turn from the politics of culture to the language of art was not an
escape into, but an escape out of, aestheticism: a disenchantment with
that fatal anesthetizing of politics, blatant in his own early writings,
that gave fascism its false brilliance. De Man’s critique of every
tendency to totalize literature or language, to see unity where there is
no unity, looks like a belated, but still powerful, act of conscience.71
Dante’s mixing of styles and his insistence upon the everyday even in
the midst of the sacred is linked . . . to figural realism. . . . Figura . . .
allows both for the overarching divine order in which everything that
exists is ultimately fulfilled and for the historical specificity of each
particular event. . . . The influence is most striking in the adaptation
of Auerbach’s characteristic opening gambit: the isolation of a
resonant textual fragment that is revealed . . . to represent the world
from which it is drawn and the particular culture in which that work
was produced and consumed.13
I detect the figure of chiasmus in this argument since, while Dante’s epic
represents an instance of aesthetic triumphalism, in Bloom’s view, the
triumph of the internalized Kingdom-of-Heaven Testament over the
Promised-Land Testament represses the fact that the New Testament is
actually a work of considerably less vitalism and representative of aesthetic
decline. The glaring irony is that Bloom speaks for the Jewish dispossessed.
Poetry is written by losers and history by winners; a truism that does not
please what Bloom calls the revolutionary pretences of historicists intent
upon speaking “for the insulted and the injured of the world,” and which
Jeremiad of flatulence causes his enemies to call him conservative.17
McGann discovers reactionary ideology in Abrams and Bloom, even
though the latter chooses Hazlitt to illustrate his argument in the
“Prometheus-Rising” preface to The Visionary Company because the radical
journalist kept “his faith in the Revolution and even in Napoleon long after
every other literary figure of the time had turned reactionary.”18 Due to
Bloom’s synopsis of decline, an obvious parallel to draw is with Byron’s
Romantic literary lower empire that self-consciously felt inferior to the
Renaissance, or as Yeats recapitulates this idea in Three Movements:
Gonzalo: How lush and lusty the grass looks! How green!
Antonio: The ground indeed is tawny. (II.i.53-4)27
In The Image of the Jew in American Literature, Louis Harap notes the
Jewish clothes-seller as a prodigious stereotype that mocks American
Jewry, which observation threads the needle of this reminiscence: “My own
memories of my father, a taciturn and restrained man, begin with his
bringing me a toy scissors for my third birthday in 1933, when the
Depression had left him, like many other garment workers, unemployed.”6
Bloom neither followed in his father’s footsteps, nor became devoutly
observant like his mother, but instead identified with the scandalously
epicurean Elisha ben Abuya, who never tired of singing Greek songs and
who, moreover, decided there was no spiritual reward for the virtuous.7
Bloom’s one Platonic virtue is that of reaping the vicious epicurean rewards
of reading and, indeed, the negative capability of almost losing himself
completely as he gets inside a poem: “I want to bring the whole of me to it.
. . . I want to be totally lost and absorbed in it . . . though at the same time, I
want to maintain my critical faculties.”8 He wants to fall in love, itself a
troubadour phrase indicating a Cathar-Gnostic revision of Genesis;
therefore, Bloom wishes to be seduced but does not read passively,
“Criticism starts—it has to start—with a real passion for reading. . . . You
must fall in love with what we used to call ‘imaginative literature’. And
when you are in love . . . you pass into the agonistic mode.”9 Agons are
Nietzschean to the extent that Bloom argues every word we read is a bias or
inclination, the perfect antithesis of disinterested study: “Nietzsche
inaugurated the modern recovery of Greek agon, and it is now accepted by
classical scholars as a guiding principle of Greek civilization. . . . Western
culture remains essentially Greek, since the rival Hebrew component has
vanished into Christianity, itself indebted to Greek genius.”10 The Greek
Testament usurps the Jewish Testament, and in a similar fashion the Jewish
culture of the book became displaced as a love of reading the poetry and
writing the literary criticism of Christendom; Bloom remarks that he “long
since had found my Bible in the poets and my Talmud in the literary
critics.”11 The immersion of the Jewish ego in American society is a
troubling topic that Bloom has a habit of returning to, and it is worth
mentioning that Greenblatt has the same cultural allegiance as Bloom and
was one of Bloom’s students:
Moynihan renders this vague sense of discomfort thus: “there is also the
matter of Bloom and Hartman being hired at Yale at the same time in the
1950s and being put in a basement office by their old Yankee overseers. . . .
The office walls were crawling with silverfish.”13 William Deresiewicz
maintains that in those days Yale was much less politically correct, “I have
seen a picture of the department from back then, and it looks like a game of
What Doesn’t Belong: a lot of WASPs, one woman, and Harold Bloom.”14
Evidently, Bloom only gained tenure by publishing prolifically and because
Frederick Pottle spoke on his behalf at the decisive meeting; W. K. Wimsatt
regarded him as a loose Longinian cannon. Bloom reminisces that he
“survived by subduing my gentle nature and teaching my barbarous
students with an initial aggressivity and hostility that I now scarcely can
credit, so contrary was it to my mild and shy Yiddishkeit.”15 The treatment
of Bloom and Hartman is deeply reminiscent of Karl Shapiro’s poem
“University” which states that mid-century the Jewish collegiate
community were to be shunned: “To . . . avoid the Jew /Is the
curriculum.”16 Bloom’s mentor at Cornell, Abrams, recalls the dying away
of anti-Semitism in American colleges that had once operated a quota-
system aimed at keeping the number of Jewish students to a minimum: “By
the end of the war, in part as a result of growing information about the
Holocaust and of Jewish participation in the armed forces, the earlier
animus against adding Jews to college faculties had greatly weakened. . . . I
never felt any prejudice at Cornell.”17 It is intriguing to note that Abrams
wanted to be free of his father’s orthodoxy without having to espouse
something else.18 In Abrams’ opinion, Bloom’s theory of reading is “all too
human, for it screens out from both the writing and the reading of ‘strong’
literature all motives except self-concern.”19 Bloom’s theories are far from
those redemptive transformational displaced religious longings his mentor
described in Natural Supernaturalism; for Abrams Bloom “compels us to
face up to aspects of the motivation to write and misread poems—self-
assertiveness, lust for power and precedence, malice, envy, revenge—which
canonical critics have largely ignored.”20 Bloom’s power as a close-reader
of Gentile poetry was critical in raising him out of his ghettoized
beginnings; thus, celebrated vignettes like the following complement
Abrams’ assessment: “Disabuse yourself of the lazy notion that any activity
is disinterested, and you arrive at the truth of reading. . . . When you read,
you confront either yourself, or another, and in either confrontation you
seek power. And what is power? Potentia, the pathos of more life, or to
speak reductively, the language of possession.”21 More life equates to
Bloom’s resolute Jewish sublime, although power alludes to Nietzschean
will-to-power, which is subtly contained in the partly unconscious ego’s
existential confrontation with the text being read. Bloom again turns to
Nietzsche, when he denigrates St Paul: “What he wanted was power; with
St. Paul the priest again aspired to power,” since, as Bloom notes, Paul it is
who conducts a successful agon with Moses: “his misrepresentation of
Torah was absolute.”22 The will-to-power of Bloomian reading is open to
existential analysis because, as Jonas underlines, it signifies the death of the
Jewish God, and in Emersonian terms, the self-reliance of the agonistic
individual upon his own ingenuity. It figures the language of possession and
I am tempted to add the syncretic fusing of the spirit of Protestant
acquisitiveness to Jewish notions of agon such as the heel-clutching figure
of Jacob; it wants more. Bloom very much shares in the spirit of capitalism
—all his books are marketed with a fiscal motive, however, charitable.
These paternal endeavors are well-focused with reference to Bloom’s
thoughts upon Defoe’s penchant for puritan industry: “Defoe’s protagonists
are pragmatic and prudent, because they have to be, there is no play in the
world as they know it.”23
If culture is the lived part of religion, then Bloom’s religion would seem
reading: “I read incessantly from the time I was three years old.”24 Small
wonder then that Bloom asserts Jewishness equates to the culture of the
book, but laments that bookishness declines: “it seems to be diminishing . . .
a falling-away from text-centeredness.”25 Bloom sometimes reveals his
fascination with Judaism thought of as a nomadic cult moving with the
currents of time, inwardly opposed to the spatial orientation of state power.
This internalized religious difference accords with Bloom’s Gnostic thesis
that “signification tends to wander. . . . Meaning . . . wanders wherever
anteriority threatens to take over”; thus, his meta-narrative of belated
misreading parallels the condition of exilic Jewry, in which historical
meaning equates with nomadic anteriority to Zion.26 Furthermore, Bloom
sees Freudian dynamics as based upon “Jewish myths of Exile”:
“psychoanalysis becomes another parable of a people always homeless or at
least uneasy in space, who must seek a perpetually deferred fulfillment in
time.”27 The wandering Jew and the Jew of extraordinary intellect are
listed by Harap, along with the parodic figure of the vengeful Shylock and
the covetous Fagin, as stock Jewish characters in American fiction. Bloom
himself promotes the first two of these images as applying to himself, the
quickest reader in the west and also the quickening theorist of reading, who
powerfully concentrates upon the idea of wandering signification. Bloom
elides significant historical dates like the two Immigration Acts of the
1920s that ended the “greenhorn” society, the heydays of the Yiddish
ghettos, instead asserting his prognosis that American culture and Jewish
culture cannot differ much and that American culture is an eclectic culture,
such that “we know that we are not in Exile.”28 This “at-home-ness” comes
at a price, since he writes that America “is a concept with much Puritanism”
and that “Jewish assimilation in America was frequently a process of
somehow becoming more Jewish by assimilating to Puritan Hebraism and
its Election theology.”29 Bloom’s obsession with text-centeredness
connects to his intuition that Calvinism, with its elective hypothesis and its
return to the early and less Romish form of Christianity, is “congenial to the
spirit of Judaism.”30 Bloom’s own return to earliness identifies the Yahwist
as “the first crucial author of the Torah,” adding that “nearly every other
Biblical writer took J as his point of origin.”31 Tyndale’s English
translation of Genesis is certainly not part of what Bloom regards as Jewish
facticity, the “continuity of ancestors,” all those “Jewish mothers” that
“have given birth to Jewish daughters and sons for perhaps one hundred and
fifty generations.”32 Bloom sarcastically remembers a door-to-door
salesman hawking Yiddish Christian Bibles, which guides me to the
judgment that, while Bloom became Americanized, his criticism remains at
a deep level Judaic; and to the degree that “the American Religion . . .
masks itself as Protestant Christianity,” indeed, Bloom calls himself “an
unbelieving Jew of strong Gnostic tendencies.”33
The phrase Jewish Gnosticism calls the name Gershom Scholem before
us, and Bloom has written, “in our post-Holocaust time, the unknown God
of Scholem, contracted and withdrawn from our cosmos, seems more
available than the normative God of Akiba and Maimonides”; thus
Scholem’s writings “provide the basis for another Jewish Gnosis, perhaps
the inevitable religion of Jewish intellectuals for whom the doctrine of
Akiba is dead.”34 The doctrines of Akiba, Bloom controversially describes
as “normative Judaism”; Akiba’s putative ordering of Mishnah constitutes
what Bloom’s Gnosticism rebels against, the Mishnah being the rabbinical
codification of the Oral Law.35 Normative Judaism Bloom defines as the
religion of the Oral Law, “the strong interpretation of the Bible set forth by
the great rabbis of the second century of the Common Era.”36 In the
following instance, Scholem juxtaposes an Orthodox conception of the
Second Commandment with Valentinus: “the famous passage in the
Mishnah which forbids the questions: ‘What is above and what is below?
What was before and what will be after?’ refers to theoretical speculation in
the manner of the Gnostics, who strove after ‘the knowledge of who we
were, and what we have become, where we were or where we are placed,
whither we hasten, from what we are redeemed’.”37 A central figure in this
discussion is the Kabbalistic regressive implosion of God into the Gnostic
abyss; Scholem writes that “mysticism does not deny or overlook the abyss;
on the contrary, it begins by realizing its existence, but from there it
proceeds to a quest for the secret that will close it in, the hidden path that
will span it.”38 Bloom sometimes claims that he does not believe in myths
of decline but often contradicts himself: “we know less than Blake and
Wordsworth knew, even as they knew less than Milton.”39 Bloom’s
conception of history as aesthetic decline parallels this vignette by Scholem
on the topic of religious history:
Monotheistic is a word readily associable with Milton’s organ note and the
following quotation accurately approximates Bloom’s reading of the
Romantics’ anxious intertextual relationship with Milton, as Bernard
McGinn notes,
Here is the seed for Bloom’s reading of the earliest passages of Genesis
ascribed to the J-Writer but minus the thesis that normative Judaism has
been manufactured from what were essentially folk tales, and here also is
Bloom’s surmise that Gnostic Jews in Alexandria “were seeking to revive a
more archaic Jewish religion that the Temple cult had obscured, a religion
in which the demarcation between God and mankind was not a fixed
barrier.”42 Scholem praises the irrational content of Jewish mysticism; he
broke with the rationalist biblical interpreters of the nineteenth century;
Bloom’s conception of poetry as being irrationally precipitated anxiety is
central to his reading of Blake et al. His Jewish concept of misreading
seems similar to Scholem’s commentary upon Pauline Scripture:
The result was the paradox that never ceases to amaze us when we
read the Pauline Epistles: on the one hand the Old Testament is
preserved, on the other, its original meaning is completely set aside.
The new authority that is set up, for which the Pauline Epistles
themselves serve as the holy text, is revolutionary in nature. Having
found a new source, it breaks away from the authority constituted in
Judaism, but continues in part to clothe itself in the images of old
authority, which has now been interpreted in purely spiritual terms.43
Bloom writes that the Yeatsian quester is divided against himself because he
is half-indebted to a composite precursor that Bloom begins to figure as the
Covering Cherub: “Milton’s Shadow here partly means his influence upon
later poets, for his Shadow, in being identified with the Covering Cherub,
becomes one with everything in the fallen world that blocks imaginative
redemption.”72 Bloom’s authority as a Yeatsian scholar was questioned by
reviewers, or as Sandra Seigal writes, “Yeats appears exceedingly
ideological. The moral tone dominates; judgments abound. What accounts
for this paradox is Bloom’s belief that he is reading Yeats from the point of
view of other poets who are themselves the measure of greatness.”73
Bloom argues that the Irish patriot found two English poetic fathers in
Blake and pre-eminently Shelley, or “the allied influence of Blake, second
only to Shelley’s throughout Yeats’s lifetime.”74 The first chapter of Yeats
outlines Bloom’s developing theory of poetic influence: “The revisionary
readings of precursors . . . are . . . swerves intended to uncover the Cherub,
to free Yeats from creative anxieties.”75 Yeats’s interest in spooks becomes
the repressive haunt of Bloom’s interest: “The winding path is associated
with Blake’s vision of Milton’s Shadow, the Covering Cherub, the burden
of time including the sinister beauty not only of the historical churches but
of Milton’s own poetry, and of the beauty of all cultural tradition.”76
Bloom argues that the source of Yeats’s twenty-eight phases of the moon is
to be found in a Yeatsian commentary upon Blake: “The Cherub is divided
into twenty-seven heavens or churches, that is to say, into twenty-seven
passive states through which man travels, and these heavens or churches are
typified by twenty seven great personages from Adam to Luther.”77 When
Bloom darkly alludes to Yeats’s composite God, he means the esoteric
system outlined in A Vision that purports to offer a horoscope to define the
destiny of each great poet based upon the phases of the moon at his birth.
However, Per Amica Silentia Lunae entertains “another conception of
freedom,” the vaunting flight of their counter-sublime, “their ‘blind struggle
in the network of stars’.”78 Bloom connects this struggle to a host of other
iconic examples in the sublime prose of The Anxiety of Influence, where he
describes the precursor as a baleful greatness “enhanced by the ephebe’s
seeing him as a burning brightness against a framing darkness, rather as
Blake’s Bard of Experience sees the Tyger, or Job the Leviathan and
Behemoth, or Ahab the White Whale or Ezekiel the Covering Cherub.”79
The Covering Cherub, it hardly needs stating, is a Jewish figure, but one
that Bloom marries to Freudian repression. Hence, I applaud the accuracy
of Allen’s insight that Bloom’s reading of Freud in The Anxiety of Influence
and beyond is in the tradition of Lionel Trilling, who praised “Freudian
psychology as being truly parallel to the workings of poetry.”80 In The
Ringers in the Tower, we find Bloom speculating, “that what Blake and
Wordsworth do . . . is closely related to what Freud does” because they
provide “a map of the mind.”81 There is something grisly about Bloom’s
reading of “inescapable” Freud: “the most important page Freud ever wrote
is that ghastly account of the primal history scene, the murdering and
devouring of the totem papa by the primal horde . . . everything follows
from this mad piece of mythological literalism.”82 It is hard to resist
connecting this macabre insight to his Nietzschean argument in The Anxiety
of Influence: “the ancestor of the most powerful tribes have become so
fearful to the imagination that they have receded at last into a numinous
shadow: the ancestor becomes a god.”83 At his most stylized, Bloom
argues, “this God is cultural history, the dead poets, the embarrassments of
a tradition grown too wealthy to need anything more.”84 W. J. Bate outlines
that the anxiety of influence is akin to Johnson’s analogy of the influence of
the weather on the imagination and yet the dejected thoughts of Coleridge
are symbolized by a gathering storm. Bloom writes that opium was
Coleridge’s experiential contact with Milton’s Satan and again constative
belief in what looks from a secular perspective like mere superstition
menaces the poet. In fact, it hardly seems like an exaggeration to suggest
that Pauline denial of the body torments the addicted-to-sensual-pleasure
Coleridge, the same fallen Pauline strictures that Blake identifies with the
Covering Cherub. In Bloom’s Calvinistic treatment, it is the archetypal
man, or poetic Adam created by this cultural god, that experiences the
clinamen of a creation-fall: “the poet is our chosen man, and his
consciousness of election comes as a curse; again, not ‘I am a fallen man’,
but ‘I am Man, and I am falling’—or rather, ‘I was God, I was Man (for to a
poet they were the same), and I am falling, from myself’.”85 In Blake’s
Apocalypse, Bloom quotes Rieff to illustrate his understanding of Freud:
“the ego is the outer portion of the id—crystallizing independently as soon
as the infant becomes aware of a physical world different from the self.
Then, onto this acceptance of reality lodged in the perceptual system, are
superimposed the exhortations of society: first embodied in the figures of
the parents and later constituted as part of the personality.”86 In
Deconstruction and Criticism, Bloom re-works Anna Freud by suggesting
that “the ego is the poetic self and the id is the precursor, idealized and
frequently composite, hence fantasized, but still traceable to historical
author or authors.”87 Bloom suggests that what counts in the family
romance “is not, alas, what the parents actually were or did, but the child’s
fantastic interpretation of its parents,” but this seems ironic because he
argues that Paul’s reading of Mosaic Scripture was just such a fantasy and
yet Paul is definitely Bloom’s blind spot.88 Blake’s Covering Cherub is
subsequently identified with the Freudian id, the distinction that Bloom
draws is that Tharmas is a poet’s power of realization, even as the Covering
Cherub blocks realization, or as Bloom puts it, “Tharmas is the unfallen
link between the potential and the actual, what Man wants and what he can
get.”89 The irrationalism at the heart of The Anxiety of Influence is implicit
in this extrapolation that should be connected to the Cherub understood as a
demon of continuity both with Cartesian nature and the precursor, “the dead
are the source of everything we call instinct” and hence “tradition has taken
the place of instinct.”90 The Cherub represents a form of determinism and
thus Bloom supposes, “Discontinuity is freedom,” while the Covering
Cherub victimizes because this figure is a destruction of desire.91 Bloom
derives the Covering Cherub in Blake and the Bible, “what the Cherub
covers is therefore: in Blake, everything that nature itself covers; in Ezekiel,
the richness of the earth, but by the Blakean paradox of appearing to be
those riches; in Genesis, the Eastern Gate, the Way to the Tree of Life.”92
The Covering Cherub also hides the presence of God from the children of
Israel, “the cherubim in the tabernacle and in Solomon’s Temple spread
their wings over the ark.”93 It is no accident that Bloom argues that poems
lack presence in the New Critical or Anglican sense of possessing organic
unity, since “the rabbis took the cherubim here to symbolize the terror of
God’s presence.”94 By uncovering the Cherub, Bloom reveals that at the
heart of the Judaic faith is an absence and one that surprised the Romans
when they stormed the Temple, since there was no idol occupying a place of
centrality, just an apparently empty box.95 The negative theology that
Bloom advocates represents a form of Gnosticism: “the God of the Gnostics
is called the Stranger or Alien God, and has exiled himself from our
cosmos, perhaps forever.”96 Bloom’s theory of reading depends upon
negative theology, or the notion that God is most palpably present because
so suspiciously absent, but married to Rieff’s reading of Freud, in which
forgetting is active and the unconscious almost completely unknowable.97
In this Gnostic theology the shadow of the demiurge that is cultural history
(the Cherub) prevents re-entry into Eden, “So He drove out the man; and
He placed at the east of the Garden of Eden the cherubim, and the flaming
sword” (Gen. 3.24).98 Bloom’s model of the self resists cloven-fictions and
is monist because poetry arises in the id and fails to make a division
between body and consciousness as is found in Descartes, albeit the
unconscious is a felt but unknown text.99 This said, there is sometimes a
strong element of humanism in Bloom’s writings: “the human writes, the
human thinks . . . defending against another human, however fantasized that
human becomes.”100 Bloom’s irrational figure of the Covering Cherub
shadows this pessimistic vision as “the dark mirror of our egoism and our
fallen condition,” in terms of Whitman’s poetry it takes the form of the
opposition of human nature and carnal sin, and thus, when Whitman
believes in the truth of Pauline Scripture his imagination ebbs.101
However, egoism is the driving force of literary critics too in the respect
that Bloom sometimes seems decidedly uneasy with regard to the influence
of Freud’s Oedipus complex on The Anxiety of Influence: “a Shakespearean
reading of Freud . . . reveals that Freud suffered from a Hamlet complex
(the true name of the Oedipus complex) or an anxiety in regard to
Shakespeare.”102 Bloom reads Freud as a fellow Romantic myth-maker,
the compatriot of Blake and Yeats, although he later attempts to replace
Oedipus Rex with Hamlet the Dane.
The prolegomenon to A Map of Misreading makes reference to
Kabbalah, and to the occupation of Bloom’s father: “As wine in a jar, if it is
to keep, so is the Torah, contained within the outer garment. Such a garment
is constituted of many stories; but we, we are required to pierce the
garment.”103 Bloom bows toward Scholem in his meditation upon
misreading; however, his influence, through interpretations of Zohar, the
founding book of Kabbalah ascribed to Moses de Leon, is, as usual, married
to Gentile sources. In “The Dialectics of Poetic Tradition,” Bloom’s vehicle
is Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, which strongly
associates canon-formation with cosmopolitan learning, although Bloom
puts a negative spin on medieval allusion: “if tradition cannot establish its
own centrality, it becomes something other than the liberation from time’s
chaos. . . . Like all convention, it moves from idealized function to a stifling
or blocking tendency.”104 Bloom reminds that Kabbalah means tradition,
and postulates that Scholem’s formula, “everything not only is in everything
else but also acts upon everything else,” applies equally to literary
tradition.105 Faux singularity is the single most recognizable Bloomian
figure since the simplest answer to what makes a classic is imitation of
other classics. Bloom typically writes with Judeo-Christian duality since
Latin traditio “is etymologically, a handing-over” but a concept that goes
back to Hebraic Mishnah, “an oral handing-over.”106 He argues that poetic
incarnation is a catastrophe relatable to the drying up of the ocean figured
as “the matter of night, the original Lilith or feast that famished and which
mothers what is antithetical to her.”107 Lilith finds a partner with Ananke,
or the goddess who symbolizes the dark Freudian wisdom that the meaning
of all life is preparation for death. Ananke is a feminine version of the
Sphinx but inverted, such that Ananke figures the inexorable return to
nature just as Lilith is a female type of the Covering Cherub, who swamps
the ephebe with the echoing recoil of obsessive influence. From Bloom’s
perspective, poets strive to be antithetical because they seek to escape from
origins; Bloom describes the poet as a figure desperately obsessed with
poetic origins, the subject and object of his or her own quest.108 Yet
Bloom’s origin has duality and it seeps into his American criticism, one
inference being that canonical literature from the west staves off extremist
nationalism. Bloom reveres Curtius partly because the latter begins his book
by “attacking the barbarization of education and the nationalistic frenzy
which were the forerunners of the Nazi regime”; he underlines that his
research “grew out of a concern for the preservation of Western
culture.”109
Bloom is keen to show that the canon is synonymous with book-culture
and thence akin to biblical culture, or rather that the relationship of Milton
to the Romantics resembles that of Torah to belated esoterica, including
Kabbalistic speculations. In A Map of Misreading, Bloom moves his
eclectic theory of influence forward by introducing Jewish Kabbalah to the
debate in the form of Isaac Luria’s speculations that he heralds as “the
ultimate model for Western Revisionism,” and whose “regressive theory of
creation” passes through three main stages: “Zimzum, Shevirath ha-kelim
and Tikkun.”110 Bloom parallels the process of limitation, substitution, and
representation with the aforesaid three phases and applies them to each of
the revisionary pairs of clinamen and tessera, kenosis and daemonization,
and askesis and apophrades. He states that Luria postulated a regressive
theory of creation instead of an emanative one: “Zimzum is the Creator’s
withdrawal or contraction so as to make possible a creation that is not
himself. Shevirath ha-kelim is the breaking-apart-of-the-vessels, a vision of
creation-as-catastrophe. Tikkun is restitution or restoration—man’s
contribution to God’s work.”111 In “The Primal Scene of Instruction,”
Bloom delves ever deeper into Jewish tradition outlining such concepts as
lidrosh, “to seek,” Midrash, “to interpret,” and the Sopherum, or “the men
of the book.”112 He notes that Kabbalah was known as hammer shattering
stone, “the stone being Written Torah.”113 The Kabbalists were anxious
late-comers trying to clear creative space for themselves just as the writers
of Apocrypha and Apocalypses before them were, though Bloom underlines
that these latter wanted original power. This allows Bloom to introduce his
Jewish analogue for the Greek categories of ethos and pathos, since the
“difference between a Talmudic work . . . and an Apocryphal work . . . is
the Hebraic version of the Greek difference between ethos and pathos,”
which is the distinction “separating out all orthodox from revisionist
traditions.”114 Bloom states that origins and ends need to be kept apart and
repeats Mircea Eliade’s argument that “it is the first manifestation of a thing
that is significant and valid, not its successive epiphanies.”115 He echoes
Alistair Fowler’s observation that Milton repeats the word “first” five times,
in the opening few lines of Paradise Lost, which points to an obsession
with priority and belatedness. His example helps to further identify the
Scene of Instruction with Genesis, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and its Romantic
epicycles, and hence an important element to note in regard to the Scene of
Instruction is “its absolute firstness, it defines priority.”116 Bloom keeps
adding fresh storeys to his aesthetic tower-of-Babel-as-tradition; thus, the
Scene of Writing is re-founded upon a poet’s election-love, or ahabah, and
hence at the start of every inter-textual encounter; there is an unequal initial
love, where necessarily the giving famishes the receiver.117 The second
phase is re-defined as covenant-love, or chesed, the development of a
persona, which is related to grace and the Freudian concept of antithetical
primal words. The third phase as the rise of an individual inspiration, muse
principle, or ruach, a further accommodation of poetic origins to fresh
poetic aims.118 The fourth phase becomes synonymous with davhar, or
poetic incarnation. The fifth phase is that of total interpretation, or lidrosh.
In the sixth phase, or revisionism, Bloom returns to Luria in order to name a
wholly Romantic accommodation; the esoteric term he coins is gilgul, or
“the reincarnation of a precursor through his descendants’ acts of lifting up
and redeeming the saving sparks of his being from the evil shells or broken
vessels of catastrophe.”119 In Bloom’s continual re-estimation the last truth
of the Primal Scene of Instruction is the self-reflexive irony that “purpose
or aim i.e. meaning—cleaves more closely to origins the more intensely it
strives to distance itself from origins.”120
Bloom writes retrospectively of “my earlier book Kabbalah and
Criticism” saying that the book’s “sole concern was to use Kabbalah, or
Jewish Gnosticism, and Scholem’s analyses as paradigms for a theory of
reading poetry.”121 The secret to understanding Kabbalah and Criticism
lies in Bloom’s throwaway comment that Kabbalah is belated, which
indicates its usefulness as a theoretical mode with which to find analogies
for American poems. It is necessary to provide an extremely brief outline of
Neo-Platonism before adumbrating Bloom’s comparative usage of a belated
theory of creation like Kabbalah. In Neo-Platonic versions of the creation,
the Good is contemplated by Intelligence, such that the world becomes an
emanation of Intelligence’s act of contemplative creation. Bloom notes that
this version of creation combines that of the Priestly Author of Genesis with
the depiction of Deity contained in Plato’s Timaeus. In the latter, the world
of matter is created by a Platonic demiurge, but material creation is
nevertheless still part of the transcendent Oneness that is the Good and its
ideal forms. Transcendent goodness and the fallen world of pain and evil
possess a genealogical relationship with Persian dualism in the sense that
Sammael or Satan operates in the fallen world of matter, while goodness
abides in a strictly non-interventionist capacity beyond the boundaries of
the human world. The Gnostics take this one stage further by claiming that
Neo-Platonic Intelligence was in fact an evil Creator-god, who separates the
fallen world from the Good. The authors of Kabbalah are likened to the
Gnostics because as members of the Galut or Diaspora they are exiled from
Israel and the rebuilding of the Temple. Bloom writes that Kabbalah is
belated because ten sephirot represent an elaboration upon the Neo-Platonic
myth of creation; therefore, instead of the two phases of creation as
portrayed in The Enneads, there are ten different stages or emanations in the
tree of Kabbalah. The inventors of Kabbalah merely elaborated upon
already existing stories of creation and, in particular, that of Plotinus in
order to invent their own “original” creation myth. Kabbalah means
reception and is genealogically related to Neo-Platonic philosophy; thus,
Plotinus’s transcendent hypostases, “the One or the Good, Intelligence, the
Soul,” are introduced as providing unfolding emanatory bridges over the
abyss between Intelligence, Soul, and, ultimately, the natural, or fallen
world of evil.122 Bloom draws an analogy between Freud’s insight that
humans must love an object external to self or else become ill and the over-
flowing of the Good toward the hypostases of an Intelligent-designer, and
the universe so created. The central and most mysterious paradox of
Plotinus is that the One merely divides, but does not lessen or decrease as it
passes into the world of Platonic Ideas or ideal forms, and then into the
region of immortal human souls, and whence, lastly, into the world of
matter. Bloom recapitulates Scholem’s two antithetical doctrines; first,
Valentinus’ what-makes-us-free doctrine and, second, the do-not-dare-
inquire rabbinic reply.123 The rabbis’ stern rebuke directly contradicts the
very idea that man could have secret knowledge of what lies beyond the
reach of the senses, despite the fact that two sections of Jewish Scripture
would seem to display a familiarity with exactly such knowledge, that is
ma’aseh merkabah (the work of the chariot) and ma’aseh bereshit (the
work of creation), which are from Isaiah and Genesis, respectively. The
Kabbalists take the idea that God creates from nothing to mean that God
creates from himself in the sense that God is unknowable and without
representation.124 Bloom notes that in Plotinus emanation is a process out
from God, whereas in Kabbalah it is within God, which sets up the theory
of contraction or catastrophe creation.
Kabbalah is the pursuit of language substitutes for God. There are ten
emanatory Sefirah in the Sephirot tree through which the Divine manifests
itself; these words are derived from the putative sapphire of God’s throne.
The ten are Keter Elyon, the supreme crown, Hokmah, wisdom, Binah,
intelligence, Hesed, love, Din, rigor, Tiferet or mercy, Nezah or endurance,
Hod, majesty, Yesod, foundation, and Malkhut or kingdom. Moses
Cordovero speculated that each Sefirah has a behinot that is six-fold:
The analogy Bloom draws is that each Sefirah conforms to a poet and each
behinot or discerned aspect to a revisionary ratio as the ephebe works
through his anxiety of influence with reference to the precursive Sefirah.
The garment-making figure of the Bloomian father appears hidden in this
suggestive list of synonyms for the radiant Sefirot: “sayings, names, lights,
powers, crowns, qualities, stages, garments, mirrors, shoots, sources, primal
days, aspects, inner faces, and limbs of God.”126 Bloom mentions that
some Kabbalists termed the Sephirot merely as God’s tools or vessels,
which become broken at each new phase of the catastrophe of creation, and
that, in effect, this acts as a historical metaphor for exile from Israel and
then exile from Spain: “How does one accommodate a fresh and vital new
religious impulse, in a precarious and even catastrophic time of troubles,
when one inherits a religious tradition already so rich and coherent that it
allows very little room for fresh revelations or even speculations?”127 The
Kabbalah is commentary upon Zohar, which was in turn a commentary
upon Jewish Scripture, which means that Kabbalists inherited a psychology
of belatedness, but one that organized the paradoxical homilies of Moses de
Leon and the Oral Tradition into Sephirot and behinot. For Isaac Luria, the
Sephirot were the contractions by which God concealed himself in order to
create new worlds by clearing a space for this concentration-of-Himself-as-
creation to take place.
The second section of Kabbalah and Criticism begins with a meditation
upon Nietzsche’s criticism of the ascetic life as revulsion from bodily
pleasures, and the assertion that Kabbalah is life-affirming because, like the
Nietzschean definition of the artist, it wishes to be different and elsewhere,
and hence desires an end to exile.128 Bloom’s central point is that
Kabbalah stops the movement of the Derridean trace, since it has a
primordial point of origin where presence and absence co-exist by
continuous interplay, or rather God’s will to be present or absent.129 Bloom
then yokes American philosophy in the form of Peirce to Kabbalah by
stating that in the Bloomian-Peircean view a poem is a mediating process
belonging to interpretation and that this is always an evolving act. Peircean
definitions of firstness, secondness, and thirdness are combined with a
summary of Neo-platonic thought, or “immanence in the cause, procession
from the cause, and reversion to the cause—or identity, difference, and the
overcoming of difference by identity.”130 Bloom turns to Iamblichus in
order to define a monad as the cause of identity, a dyad as the instigator of
procession and difference, and a triad as the origin of reversion. Bloom then
notes that poems are not triangular but hexagonal, and after this point, the
difficulty of his most esoteric book slowly dissipates into the familiar six-
fold scene-of-instruction argument. According to Irenaeus the Gnostics
believed that the whole system springing from ignorance was dissolved by
knowledge, which would seem the salvation of the inner man, or the occult
self, that Bloom asserts is separate from the Platonic self that Derridean
discourse assaults.131 Ignorance Bloom parallels with Lurianic Zimzum or
withdrawal and the modes of limitation/contraction, but knowledge with
Tikkun, or restitution, and modes of representation: “The triadic process of
limitation, substitution, and representation, which I shall propose as the
governing dialectic of Post-Enlightenment or Revisionist poetry, is what
Jonas calls a Gnostic concept of happening as opposed to a more orthodox
of Platonic concept of being.”132 Bloom emphasizes that “whereas Neo-
Platonism was a rather conventional theory, in which influence is graciously
received, Gnosticism was a theory of misprision.”133 Bloom adds a further
caveat in that critics themselves are part and parcel of the creative
misprisions or swerves of literary reception and that the “history of poetry
is an endless, defensive civil war,” in which “every new poet tries to see his
precursor as the demiurge,” and yet “to be a strong poet is to be a
demiurge.”134 Bloom writes that for literary purposes emanation means
influence and that Sefirah are analogous to persons, while behinot function
as psychic defenses. With metronomic regularity, he guides his reader
through the analogies to be drawn between behinot and his ratios of
defense. The first behinot in any Sefirah has a hidden aspect before it is
manifested in the prior Sefirah, which indicates that the deepest and most
vital instances of influence are not verbal echoes, image-borrowings or
word-patternings: “A poem is a deep misprision of a previous poem when
we recognize the later poem as being absent rather than present on the
surface of the earlier poem, and yet still being in the earlier poem.”135 The
second behinot occurs when the poem hidden in the earlier poem is
revealed, “which means that we have moved from dialectical images of
presence and absence to synecdochal images of part and whole.”136 The
third behinot attempts to give the illusion of self-sufficiency, and this
unificatory materialization Bloom defines as a mode of metaphor. The
revisionary ratio of daemonization finds an excellent parallel in the fourth
behinot, of which Bloom writes as “the aspect that enabled its precursor to
be strong enough to have emanated the later Sefirah outwards.”137
Dialectically, this ring of Kabbalah is exactly the sublime power that the
ephebe takes on from the precursor, and Bloom underlines its mode is
hyperbole. The fifth behinot is the emanatory power the behinot has to
extend its precursor’s influence outwards, and hence corresponds to
metaphor in which inside becomes outside, but only insofar as this inside
was a prior behinot’s outside. The sixth behinot’s behavior mimics
metalepsis and as such the next behinot of the cycle is set up by the
contraction of the new precursor, before it in turn emanates; therefore,
performing a metaleptic reversal of the fifth behinot’s lateness as its own
earliness. The cyclic aspect of Bloom’s theory is confirmed by this
summing-up: “Cordovero’s theosophical cycle becomes a wheel of images,
or tropes, or defenses, by which one text constantly conducts interchange
with another.”138
The last pages of the second part of Kabbalah and Criticism explore
how Cordovero’s disciple, Isaac Luria, interpreted Kabbalah. Bloom
informs us that “more even than Blake’s parodistic Urizen, Luria’s God is
the ultimate solipsist.”139 This solipsism Bloom reclassifies as the aesthetic
doctrine of “life as art,” or, indeed, criticism as autobiography, and his
human analogy is Pater, a skeptic, whose sense of the experiential was so
emptied out that art had to commence in that void. The “Conclusion” to The
Renaissance becomes a method of demonstrating that modern poetry is
under-determined in concrete meaning to the extent that it is over-
determined in influential terms that provoke defensive levels of abstract
imagery:
Bloom hails Whitman, as Emerson did, as the Central Man, the American
poet proper, but the quotation of sublime poetry that Bloom gives from
Whitman is not a bitter reduction that borders on solipsism, as in the above
quotation from Stevens, but an exciting star-gazing, navel-gazing, sublime
descent into the meteorology of a solitary American selfhood and that self
the particulars of Whitman’s song-dream, the American sublime:
Bloom mentions that a spring can mean source and origin and that “even if
this was not a Jewish parable when Kafka wrote it, it certainly is one now,
precisely because Kafka wrote it.”163 But would Bloom repudiate a
reading that ostensibly reduces him and his interest in canonical literature to
a cultural context? In answer, I quote Bloom on Bloom: “I stand here, just
past fifty years in age, and worry out loud about the problematics of my
identity, an identity inescapably determined for me by a continuity of
ancestors.”164 Bloom proposes that Jewish identity is not static, since the
“authority of identity is not constancy-in-change, but the originality that
usurps tradition and becomes fresh authority.”165 The ultimate authority
Bloom gives as the J-Writer, while modern writers like Philip Roth must try
and usurp Freud and Kafka as Jewish icons when imagistically defining
their culture—Portnoy’s the id is not the Yid, etc. When Bloom opines that
there has not yet been an American-Jewish culture, he means, “We have a
few good poets . . . but they do not include a Wallace Stevens or Hart
Crane, let alone a Whitman or a Dickinson.”166 Bloom is fascinated by the
“too-familiar incongruity of an overtly Jewish stance being rendered in an
alien idiom.”167 He diagnoses the everything-that-can-happen-has-
happened sorrows of poetic Jewishness thus: “to recognize the self-
truncation, the uneasiness, the inhibiting and poetically destructive
excessive self-consciousness of American-Jewish poetry.”168 But the
aforesaid aesthetic apprehension should be balanced by true love: “The first
secular poets I really cared for were Moishe Leib Halpern, Yankev
Glatshteyn, Mani Leib, H. Leivick,” of which Bloom adjudges Halpern, the
Yiddish Baudelaire, the best.169 The roll call of notable Jewish poets is
extended in “The Sorrows of American Jewish Poetry” to include Jacob
Glatstein, Charles Reznikov, Louis Zukofsky, Delmore Schwartz, Howard
Nemerov, Allen Ginsberg, Karl Shapiro, Irving Feldman, John Hollander,
Samuel Greenberg, and Isaac Rosenberg. Bloom believes that the relative
failures of Jewish writers compel American Jews “to rely upon the cultural
identity of the last phases of Galut, yet we . . . scarcely feel that we are in
Exile.”170 Sometimes in exile, sometimes not, his position wanders but
does not hobgoblin. Nonetheless, Bloom designates Nathanael West as the
“most powerful” Jewish-American writer, even though he lacked “a deeper
awareness that American culture and Jewish culture in America could not
differ much.”171 West was born Weinstein, and Bloom describes him as a
“Jewish anti-Semite” but lists the portrayal of gun-toting violence at the end
of Miss Lonely Hearts as part of a personal American sublime.172 Yet for
all his skill as a writer, West does not impose himself as intrinsically Jewish
since “it will be very difficult for us to recognize ourselves as Jewish
anyway, unless an achievement . . . revises us even as it imposes itself upon
us.”173 Although Bloom can propose that nothing is more self-deceptive
for any Jewish writer than the notion that he can define the Jew, his final
verdict is that Jews constitute “a religion that became a people, rather than a
people that became a religion.”174 Bloom speaks as much for himself as
others when he writes “the increasing enterprise of American-Jewish poetry
is what it must be: persistence in seeking to recover what once our ancestors
had,” and to do this a Jewish writer must confront again “the God of the
Fathers.”175 The Achilles heel for American-Jewish poets would seem
their inability to write about the Holocaust with the horror and authority of
Paul Celan, and yet Bloom’s esoteric criticism, dependent as it is upon the
Nietzschean horror and ecstasy of uncovering origins and ends, elliptically
fulfills this injunction.176
However, to confront the God of his father means confronting the
facticity of received readings of Yahweh, including Protestant readings of
the same. On the topic of Heideggerian facticity, redefined here as the hunt
for Yahwistic being in the life-long situational praxis of reading the canon
from end to end, Bloom has this to say:
The symptom of Bloom’s own crisis was the dart of insomniac anxiety that
affected him in the middle of the journey and which alienated him from his
workplace; thus, Bloom further qualifies his toolkit of terms, “Heidegger’s
Faktizität is the modern equivalent of the kenoma, the emptiness into which
we have been and are being thrown. . . . I follow Jonas in so connecting
Valentinus and Heidegger.”178 Bloom’s factual circumstances are
American and Jewish; his work represents a dialogue of Jewish-American
self and Gnostic soul, where soul roughly corresponds to pneuma, and
where his Jewish self/psyche is tormented by the horror of the Holocaust’s
facticity. Bloom cheerfully abhors Heidegger’s Nazi-leanings, but this
overstatement of individuation conceals a debt of influence, since Bloom
redefines what it means to be Jewish in The Book of J and those essays on
Freudian and existential anxiety associated with his fascination with the
influence of Genesis. The thrown-clearness of poetic influence corresponds
to the psychological repression of precursive influence, such that the drive
for originality manufactures its own uncanniness measured as genealogical
distance from Genesis, the contingency of strangeness. It is hard not to push
these ideas into a historical diagnosis because Bloom believes that
normative Judaism begins as an historical response to the destruction of the
Temple by the Romans and because Bloom’s revisionary reading of Jewish
theology owes much to his arbitrary historical status as a post-Holocaust
Jew: “Normative Judaism is a peculiarly strong misreading of the Tanakh
done in order to meet the needs of a Jewish people in Palestine under
occupation by the Romans. What it has to do with 2012, search me . . . it’s a
fossil.”179 Nor will Bloom allow that language speaks to the extent that the
author dies, and the self is smashed to smithereens of discourse, or that
Hamlet is merely marks on a page.180 The point is monumental; great
writers lie themselves into aesthetic being like comets trailing glory;
Bloomian clearing results in the uncovering of the Cherub, and hence
Whitmanian poets know what they have made, that is crisis-lyrics.
Ruin the Sacred Truths boasts material on Genesis, Jeremiah, Job,
Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Freud, and
Kafka. There is a leap between Agon and Ruin the Sacred Truths of some 7
years, and the disparity in the choice of subject matter between the two
books tells its own story. In the former Bloom propounds his extravagant
gnostic poetic and applies it with great gusto to his favorite American
authors—Emerson, Whitman, Stevens, Crane, Ashbery, etc., whereas in the
latter his sphere of interest has widened exponentially, the later volume
covers from the earliest part of the Book of Genesis through the Medieval,
the Renaissance, the Romantics and the Modernists right up to a short
cameo appearance by Samuel Beckett. In order to explore the fissures
between Greek and Judaic influences upon canonical literature, the putative
J-Writer and the hypothetical Homer are contrasted in the early part of
Bloom’s narrative. The J-Writer’s chief strength lies in the fact that “he” is
not as religious a writer as the author of the Pharisaic Book of Jubilees is;
Bloom writes that J gives God a dynamic personality that is so original as to
“usurp psychic space and become a fresh center.”181 But so aboriginal is
the J-Writer, and so influential has Genesis been on future tradition, that
Bloom asserts that we are contained by the elliptical J-Writer just as much
as we are contained by Shakespeare and Freud. By which Bloom means
later authors recycle the J-Writer’s uncanny metaphors. The Hebrew
Homer, though, has been bowdlerized by scribes; Bloom laments that we
have lost J’s version of the Akedah story, when Isaac is to be sacrificed by
Abraham. Likewise, the usurpation of the Priestly Author’s creation-scene
that begins the Bible is thought less primal than this translated first
moment:
When there was as yet no shrub of the field upon earth, and as yet no
grasses of field had sprouted, because Yahweh had not sent rain upon
the earth, and there was no man to till the soil, but a flow welled up
from the ground and watered the whole surface of the earth, then
Yahweh molded Adam from the earth’s dust (adamah), and blew into
the nostrils the breath of life, and Adam became a living being.182
Bloom comments that the Priestly-writer’s Deity “is already almost the God
of Paradise Lost,” while J’s Yahweh is the “first violator of the Second
Commandment,” since Adam is freely molded in Yahweh’s image or zelem,
which means that Adam is theomorphic and Yahweh anthropomorphic.183
Bloom will later argue that Yahweh shares the exuberant personality of
King David, and the implication is that Adam’s creation is a subtle form of
ancestor worship. He will also propose that the western canon starts with
the J-Writer, even though Bloom knows there was a serpent in the Epic of
Gilgamesh, but no Yahwistic Being, and he notes, “it is the largest irony of
J that his God Yahweh had created consciousness in the serpent but not in
the woman or in Adam,” which means the nakedness of primeval
consciousness was anterior to the first human characters from whom
Gentiles and Jews alike descend.184 In so arguing, Bloom reveals a Jewish
bias; he provides an alternative to Heidegger’s etymological grounding of
being in Pre-Socratic Greek sources, but he completely ignores that part of
the Epic of Gilgamesh pertaining to the taming of the natural man, Enkidu,
who comes to a broader form of consciousness after having sex with the
civilized harlot Shamhat.
The next part of Bloom’s published Norton lectures are on the subject of
the prophet Jeremiah, who Bloom heralds as the inaugurator of the
inside/outside dualism that Bloom associates with the figure of askesis. This
revisionary ratio is associated with Emerson and mind/nature dialectics in
Romantic poets, particularly Coleridge and pre-eminently Wordsworth. But
here Jeremiah’s raped and abused stance, his phrase “inward parts” is
interpreted as meaning the fire of inwardness: “what matters is Jeremiah’s
emphasis . . . on the injustice of outwardness and the potential
redemptiveness of our inwardness.”185 Bloom notes that for Jeremiah,
Yahweh has become a God of sufferers rather than a Davidic warrior-god;
the God of suffering is the topic of the Book of Job: “Job’s abominable
friends are what The Marriage of Heaven and Hell calls ‘Angels’, or pious
timeservers, fit to become minor officials of Kafka’s court.”186 Blake
wrote that in the Book of Job, Milton’s Messiah was the Ha-Satan in a
chiasmic reversal of the casting down of Satan into the pit by Christ in
Paradise Lost; the Jobean desire of Milton’s Satan is replicated in Bloom’s
observation that Calvin said of Job, “God would have to create new worlds,
if He wished to satisfy us,” which means humans cannot be satisfied
because they desire too much.187 Bloom adds a supposed Gnostic irony
from Kierkegaard: “Fix your eyes upon Job; even though he terrifies you, it
is not this he wishes, if you yourself do not wish it.”188 His point is that the
vision of God speaking from the whirlwind and of leviathan and behemoth
are of God and God’s creatures; but this intervention is only terrifying if
you accept the first cause as truly first, which Gnostics do not. Bloom’s
confrontational Jewishness and his Gnostic love of the abyss indicate what
came first: “When Milton invokes the Holy Spirit as Muse in Book I, he
asks us implicitly to recall that the Muses originally were the spirits of those
springs dedicated to the triumph of Zeus over the titanic gods of the
abyss.”189 This abyss becomes the universal blank of nature over which
Milton in his blindness broods and which is Milton’s greatest foe in the
combat of creativity versus nonentity. Bloom reminds his audience that the
sublime takes place between origin and ends since no one speaks of “Father
Nature,” and hence the abyss which Milton’s ephebe Wordsworth broods
upon “is at once the ego’s need and its attempt to be unfathered, to originate
itself and thereby refuse acknowledgement to a superior power.”190
The Judaic seam in Ruin the Sacred Truths reappears as a discussion of
the Jewishness of Freud’s thought, in which “psychoanalysis becomes
another parable of a people always homeless . . . who must seek a
perpetually deferred fulfillment in time.”191 The religion of Akiba is
oriental by inference and Bloom writes: “Western conceptualization is
Greek, and yet Western religion, however conceptualized, is not.”192
Bloom investigates how after Alexander’s conquest Greek thought seeped
into Jewish life, such that Torah-learning and the sanctification of
instruction now represented a saving intellectual grace. Book culture in a
Platonic mold saved the Jews and yet separates normative Judaism from the
religious vision of the Yahwist. That Bloomian phrase of historical
revelation, “I am that I am,” becomes re-parceled as “what matters are the
times when God intervenes and Israel responds.”193 Bloom speculates that
“a certain curious sense of interiority marks Jewish thought,” which Bloom
relates to the Second Commandment’s prohibition.194 Thus, the description
of the Temple being built reminds of the bildungsroman involved in
Freudian transference, where the transference of authority from a figure in
the patient’s past to the psychoanalyst is the first principle of therapy,
especially if the neurotic affect is repressed in the manner of a censorious
“thou shalt not.” Taboo repressions that hinder the free associations of
poetic afflatus, the hum of Whitmanian thoughts evaded in Stevensian
imagery, become for Bloom not a pushing under or pushing down but “an
estrangement from representations.”195 In fact, Bloom calls the Second
Commandment primal repression and implies that Freud’s determination
that everything potentially has meaning to be similar to rabbinical memory,
in which everything is already contained in the Bible. Repression or
Verdrängung becomes the flight from representations, the presumption of
god-like emulation, which Bloom connects to the sin of Prometheus. Bloom
notes that in Moses and Monotheism, Freud speculates that Moses was
Egyptian and that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare, thus doing away
with two paternal rivals. Freud’s figure of the devoured father could not be
more different from Yahweh’s paternal covenant of an elected love for
Israel; Bloom proposes that the Jewish prophets stand against the injustice
of the outside world and that this interiority creates the desire associated
with inwardness.196 Bloom identifies the prophetic conscience not just
with the superego, but also with an unending burden that quests for more
life, though fully in the knowledge that the prophetic work cannot be
finished: “Jewish dualism is neither the split between body and soul nor the
abyss between subject and object . . . it is the ceaseless agon within the self
not only against all outward injustice but also against . . . the injustice of
outwardness.”197 Interiority therefore negates idolatry with the latter’s
bondage to the bodily eye because sense in everything means over-
determination and character-as-fate battling against outward injustice. The
ego, on the other hand, is interpreted as the frontier of the mental and the
physical in contrast to the Romantic self with its dual split between
adverting mind and object in nature; therefore, inwardness “is the true name
of the bodily ego.”198 Bloom argues that Freud’s intrinsic Jewishness is
abundantly apparent in his consuming passion for interpretation, but this
observation applies equally to Bloom, who yokes the inwardness of
Freudian psychology to the fiery prophetic interiority of Jeremiah.
Bloom’s working hypothesis for interpreting Kafka is that this Jewish
writer perversely did everything he could to evade analysis. The
quintessential parable for his reading is this Kafkan statement that plays
upon the fact that Kafka in Czech means crow: “the crows maintain that a
single crow could destroy the heavens. Doubtless that is so, but it proves
nothing against the heavens, for the heavens signify simply: the
impossibility of crows.”199 Here Bloom modestly admits that “there can be
no ultimate coherence to my Gnostic interpretation . . . because Kafka
refuses the Gnostic quest for the alien God.”200 He disagrees with Milena
Jesenká’s synopsis that Kafka was “a man of insight who was frightened of
life. . . . He saw the world as being full of invisible demons which assail
and destroy defenseless man. . . . All his works describe the terror of
mysterious misconceptions and guiltless guilt in human beings.”201 Bloom
thinks she distorts Kafka’s evasiveness, his interest in Jewish religion which
hungrily draws Bloom toward this Jewish genius. How oddly Kafka seems
to pre-figure Bloom’s own presentiments with regard to the nihilistic
possibilities of the Yahweh-less universe of the Gnostic speculator:
In creating, Yahweh rode above the Deep, which rose against him.
Tehom, queen of the Deep, sought to drown out Yahweh’s Creation,
but he rode against her in his chariot of fire. . . . Yahweh destroyed
her vassal Leviathan with one great blow to the monster’s skull,
while he ended Rahab by thrusting a sword into her heart. The waters
fled backward, awed by the voice of Yahweh, and Tehom fearfully
surrendered. Yahweh shouted his triumph, and dried up the
floods.222
Bloom’s agonistic creation narrative does not display Yahwistic irony; more
generally, he foists a supreme fiction with the temperament of a child on the
trembling universe, a triumphant charioteer that reacts angrily when
confronted with disobedience. Bloom himself notes that “the Yahwist,
unlike every subsequent biblical writer, shows no awe or fear of
Yahweh.”223 His entire reading depends upon the idea that from the
perspective of later editors the J-Writer breaks the Second Commandment;
he reveals knowledge of earlier antique writers, but J is the chosen Jewish
text, the author of the story most transformed by Christianity.
Bloom borrows from Gerhard von Rad’s argument that the undersong of
the Yahwist is always the sublimities of David’s monarchy and the ironic
coda of less successful ancestors. Bloom thinks J a woman because Sarai,
Rachel, and Tamar are portrayed as heroines and because the creation of
Eve is given more textual space than that of Adam. He describes his
essentialistic intuition that J was feminine as a sublime fiction, while her
own imaginative triumph, the Davidic Yahweh, is revealed in subtle
innuendoes to the heroic age of the United Monarchy. Yet, Bloom mentions
that David was as fervent in love as in war and that he had abundant wives
and concubines, while Solomon enjoyed hundreds of both. J’s depiction of
polygamy is not at all optimistic; Sarai persecutes Hagar, while Rachel is
jealous of Leah, and Rebecca cannot brook a rival. For Bloom, David is the
hero of the Jewish Bible much more so than Moses, although he does not
allow that The Book of J once encompassed the life of David and surmises
that it ends with the burying of Moses’ body in an unmarked grave because
this is antithetical to the making of Adam from the red clay. Bloom gushes
that he is charmed by David and that his charisma is due to originality: “He
is an original, yet of that rarest sort whose advent establishes a new center,
whose freshness has nothing of the eccentric in it.”224 J’s putative nostalgia
for David places J as a throwback to the age of the Solomonic
Enlightenment, a woman intent on satirizing the ailing age of Rehoboam.
The golden calf that causes Moses to break the tablets of the Law alludes to
Jeroboam’s construction of two golden calves at the rival shrines of Bethel
and Dan.225 The hapless Rehoboam allows the United Monarch to split
into the rival states of Israel and Judea; Bloom surveys J’s punning word
play upon the root of Rehoboam’s name and the sarcasm readily associable
with her consequent references to wide and open spaces. J’s characters
quest to hold the blessing of Yahweh, and hence to become the ancestors to
David: “Adam receives Eden, and Moses his unwilling mission, because
David is to be.”226 David moves the imagination of his own people, Bloom
suggests, because David represents more life “and the promise of yet more
life into a time without boundaries.”227 It is of great dramatic irony that
Bloom calls J’s Yahweh “interventionist” and that he revels in David’s
adulterous exuberance in slaying Uriah the Hittite.
Bloom’s inventive critique relies upon comparison with like texts such
as those written by the Court Historian author of II Samuel; he also notes
that “the Tree of Life is prevalent in the literature of the ancient Middle
East.”228 The entire Documentary Hypothesis is dependent upon an
exacting labor of close reading, but a destructive rather than a constructive
one, Moses, the traditional author of the text is deconstructed into a number
of narrative strands, which are historicized into different eras according to
religious imagery. Bloom’s J is effectively the supplement to E, P, and D. It
is characteristic of Bloom’s later criticism that he engages more with
character, whether these are the dramatis personae of Shakespeare’s plays,
or the inhabitants of J’s psycho-dramas, in which various personalities
compete for the Yahwistic blessing. The Davidic blessing of more life is
repeatedly propounded by Bloom, who underlines that the opposite of
successful agonistic struggle for the blessing is to be scattered and,
therefore, forgotten. Ironically, Bloom’s gnosis means that he subtly picks
up on moments when Yahweh is less than effective, an example being the
fall-narrative. In Bloom’s reading of J there is no fall, or guilt, just
disobedience with regard to Yahweh’s warning not to eat of the Tree of
Knowledge of Good and Evil: “J has given us no candidates for culpability,
except perhaps Yahweh, already portrayed as a bungler in his original
creation of candidates fit for Adam.”229 Bloom takes J to be a woman
because Bloom thinks that the text hints at process, Adam was made from
mud, but Eve from an altogether more human source. But Bloom’s
argument relies on just such an aggregative premise, since J enables not just
E and P, but also later writers, who are her pupils in opposition to Philo’s
belief in the Moses hypothesis. This hermeneutic base applies in almost
every example of which Bloom treats: “His (Yahweh’s) invective against
the serpent is so excessive that it encouraged two strong misreadings of J,
one normative Judaic and Christian, the other Gnostic, the first seeing the
poor snake as Satan, the second weirdly exalting him as a liberator.”230
Ironically, Bloom points out that as well as being a God of invective, the
God of Eden is also a mothering Deity whose human creations behave like
naughty children. A God, chary of boundaries, who baffles monoglot
speech because man is in danger of challenging the boundary between man
and God in Babel/Babylon, is hardly the monologic deity of the Redactor.
Bloom is drawn to the way that Abraham haggles with Yahweh, in order to
save the benighted inhabitants of Sodom for their contempt of Yahweh in
buggering strangers, and to the blessing that is conferred on Jacob whose
“progress and survival are marked by fraud or tricksterism, by heel-
clutching.”231 At least J likes Jacob and gives him preferential treatment in
comparison with Esau, J’s baffled natural man, the father of the Edomites,
whose leader, Saul, potentially brought the worship of Yahweh into Canaan,
and this to cement his reign. Bloom writes that born-red Esau does not
interest the sophisticated and courtly J, who celebrates the usurper David. In
spite of J’s elegant distaste for the rugged-outdoor type, Bloom describes
her version of charisma as having Wordsworthian overtones: “J’s vision of
the charismatic is that its quality lets us envision a time without boundaries,
a sense of something ever more about to be, a dream that is no dream but
rather a dynamic breaking through into a perpetually fresh vitalism, the true
abundance of Yahweh’s promise to those he favors.”232 Jacob and Joseph
carry the blessing and are smooth, insofar as Joseph is recognized as the
archetype for all those court Jews to come through the ages, down to Henry
Kissinger in the Nixon-Ford era.233 The haunting specter of anti-Semitism
is never very far away from Bloom’s mind, and after admitting that Joseph
was a sharp trader, “reducing all the farmers of Egypt to the status of serfs,”
he laments that this passage has been used by the Christian tormentors of
Jews throughout the ages.234
Bloom muses upon the customary uncanniness of the unsuitability of
Moses’ character to lead his people out of bondage: “anger, impatience, and
a deep anxiety about his own hold on authority.”235 The outstanding
moment for Bloom in the story of Exodus is the patently blasphemous
invitation to view Yahweh, who (like J) can hardly control his testy distaste
for the plebs of Israel and their seventy representatives. Bloom addresses
himself to this true vision of the western sublime as the elders of Zion
witness the feet of their God walking on a pavement of sapphire,
momentarily forgetting of course that the event takes place in the Middle
East.236 Such a sight—that of transparently seeing the God of Israel—
clashes dramatically with the Second Commandment, which solemn
directive not to represent Deity underpins Bloom’s sublime description of
how Blake’s Tyger is made from revisionary ratios. Bloom effectively
invents his own J-writer and a personalized Supreme Fiction superior to the
aesthetic failure of God in Paradise Lost. Yahweh bears a striking
resemblance to Blake’s Tyger, a dangerous and not particularly moral
creature that leaps off the page into the reader’s imagination. Bloom’s
depiction is Gnostic through and through because the Pleroma has an imp-
like vitalistic Deity, and the Kenoma a remote gaseous vapor that
apologizes for the calamity of the captivity. The vital spark or daemon of
his dynamic Deity promises the breath of life that was grotesquely pumped
into Adam’s earthy figurine and which defamiliarizing uncanniness
pervades canonical strangeness. Agon is a Hellenic ideal, and Bloom cannot
reconcile this with obedience for the father, or the troubling thought that in
the Pentateuch human life does not own itself but is the property of the
dynastic Yahweh and, consequently, a people struggling to be a nation.237
His irreconcilable explanation is that the true root of Judaism was
dominated by the ideal of a warrior-king and his womanly poet-laureate,
who wrote with dramatic irony about agonists that contested with each
other for the blessing of Yahweh. An excellent example of the mixing of
sublimity and irony occurs when Bloom picks out the incident of Balaam
and the Angel for special consideration because the sublimity of an angelic
presence opposes the high comedy of a pompous timeserver being
humiliated by a wise beast of burden. Yet, Bloom discerns that unlike the
moaning of the Israelites, who wander in a wilderness after obtaining the
Yahwistic blessing, and who are punished for their pains, Balaam’s talking
ass is perfectly justified in talking back to his master. Bloom ends his
commentary upon Moses with Kafkan irony: “Any man’s life . . . is not
long enough to enter Canaan.”238 Bloom explains away J’s preference for
words and reluctance to represent images as her wariness in representing
David, the passion of her desire. This statement is open to the objection that
J on David may have been lost, or edited, and hardly agrees with Bloom’s
argument that J’s imagination was uninhibited: “the religious version of
imagination is always stunted by anxieties of representation.”239 The
Israelites were a religion that became a people because the central point of
J’s text is the agon for the blessing of Yahweh, “the basis for J’s fivefold
repetition of Yahweh’s blessing.”240 That Yahweh is here when he is here
and not when he is not, reduces to perpetual potential for power, a restless
dynamism that refuses to be confined. Bloom’s deity is lively because he
creates life and all life derives from this act and its eternal repetition, even if
the suppression of J’s creation narrative has been replaced by P’s cosmic
harvest festival.241 Blakean Bloom ultimately emphasizes that the largest
insight into the psychology of Yahweh is that, despite endless energetic
exuberance, He sets limits, boundaries, contexts for his creations and does
not allow presumptuous or contemptuous violations.242 The redactors
framed Yahweh’s fearful symmetry; thus, Bloom deconstructs the covenant
of Orthodox Judaism and one is left with the feeling that he has remade
Scripture in his own image.
In Jesus and Yahweh, Bloom ruminates over the creation of the Christian
myth, compares Christ and Yeshua to Yahweh and God the Father, and
indulges his penchant for Kabbalistic speculation. Scholem’s scholarship
would seem the dominant influence on Kabbalah and Criticism and the
latter portions of Jesus and Yahweh. Idel I see as an important later, but
much lesser, influence upon Bloom’s thought, although he intelligently
underlines that Bloom’s “spiritual quest is quintessential.”243 Near the start
of Omens of Millennium, Bloom remarks that “there are angels throughout
the Hebrew Bible but they are rarely central concerns, and frequently they
are editorial revisions, surrogates for Yahweh whenever the priestly
redactors felt the early J-Writer was being too daring in the depiction of
God.”244 The first few pages of Jesus and Yahweh reverse this humanizing
tendency, insofar as Bloom proposes that “Yeshua was transformed into a
theological God” by New-Testament Christology and then by Hellenistic
philosophy.245 Likewise, the all-too-human Yahweh of the primal text is
transmogrified by the Redactor’s preference for the Priestly Author and the
Deuteronomist and vanishes beneath later rabbinical writings. Allied to this
insight is the replacement of Yeshua with Christos, since Bloom’s belief is
that John is the most anxious in tone of all the Gospel writers. The original
conclusion to John was that of the story of doubting Thomas, “a manifest
metaphor for a sect or coven undergoing a crisis of faith.”246 These
frustrated expectations are further focused with reference to what Bloom
describes as the impossibility of the New or belated Testament competing
with the Hebrew Bible and “the Yahwist in particular.”247 From this
perspective, the Johannine mode is seen as a lie against time, such that John
the Baptist states, “He who comes after me ranks before me” (Jn 1.15).
Moses is similarly belittled when placed in comparison with Jesus: “No one
has ascended into heaven but he who has descended from heaven, the Son
of Man. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the
son of man be lifted up” (Jn 3.13-14). Bloom comments that John is a
revisionary genius and that “Moses was only a part, but Jesus is the
fulfilling whole.”248 Thus, the Jews eat manna but die, whereas Jesus
offers living bread so that Christians can live eternally, which indicates that
John invents a Christian counter-sublime. The phrase “before Abraham
was, I am” (Jn 8.58) is interpreted as a faux fulfillment of Yahweh’s “I am
that I am,” hinting that John’s Jesus has more agonistic intensity than J’s
Moses or Abraham. John is berated as a Jewish anti-Semite because of his
nastiness to the Pharisees and for his portrayal of the Judas myth that
Bloom thinks is the cause of murderous anti-Semitism. Meanwhile, Paul is
subjected to Nietzschean scrutiny, as someone who wanted power and gains
it over Exodus 32:32, where Moses offers his life as atonement for the
sinfulness of worshiping the golden calf, to which Paul replies: “For I could
wish that I myself were accused and cut off from Christ for the sake of my
brethren” (Rom. 9.3). Paul, therefore, offers to suffer eternal damnation by
becoming cut off from Christ, which Bloom decides is a hyperbolic reply to
Moses, who by offering his life only wishes to atone for the orgiastic
worship of the golden calf.249 Paul is hailed as the writer who sanctified
the New Testament, or the later as earlier, and therefore as the man, who
relegated Jewish Scripture to the status of an old-timer Testament, while
Bloom wishes to relegate the Talmud to the status of a belated Testament
with reference to the primal Book of J.
Bloom’s argument is that John’s rhetoric places Christian life above
Jewish death and owes much textually to Paul, since Paul’s epistles are the
earliest surviving Christian writings, and hence Paul is the crucial founder
of the Christian faith. Though he is a Pharisaic thinker, Paul begins the
shrinkage of Yahweh to what Bloom figures as the Blakean Nobodaddy, a
distant cosmic law-giver, almost entirely supplanted by the kenosis of Jesus,
the god who became man in order to atone for Adam’s sin. Bloom is not
enamored of Paul, whom he describes as being like a character in Dickens,
and, indeed, a psychosexual crank. He is, however, found by Mark, the next
earliest of the first Christian writers. If repressed homosexual-longing and a
failure to break completely with Jerusalem are beyond Bloom’s
understanding, then Mark is an entirely different matter, since Mark’s Jesus
is secretive and so is Mark. Bloom would seem to have his interest pricked
because Mark proclaims with considerable anxiety in relation to a putative
precursor, the first Isaiah, and his unseeing listeners: “Mark swerves from
Isaiah by portraying the disciples as not very bright students of a
quicksilver master.”250 Bloom’s liking for Mark is partly engendered by
the mercurial nature of the Christ portrayed by Mark, since in this Gospel
Jesus simply provokes a species of astonishment in all whom he meets,
which is deemed too idiosyncratic not to be Mark’s invention.251 Mark
takes captive the Hebrew texts because he does not seek to write
exegetically; in contrast, Matthew quotes Isaiah and Jesus side by side.
When Jesus relates parables to those who see and yet understand not, hear
and yet hear not, Mark is unafraid to duplicate the ambiguous mode of
saying of Isaiah and, ultimately, the Yahwist. What Bloom calls the
shocking and uninhibited immediacy of Mark derives in his ability to renew
the J-Writer’s freedom in depicting an all-too-human man.252 Bloom
rejects the Greek Trinitarian Jesus as well as the Gospel of John’s Jesus-as-
the-Christ of Catholic theology in favor of that more Hebraic Yeshua
portrayed by Mark, and, of course, the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas,
which Bloom thinks “profoundly compatible with J’s Yahweh.”253
Bloom frequently propounds the double parallel that Hamlet is death’s
ambassador in an ironic parody of Jesus the divine-envoy, and that Lear
parodies those sudden furies caused by Yahweh’s demand for too much
love.254 However, he is profoundly ambivalent about anything that falls
without this neat parallelogram and puzzles over the gradual transformation
of Yeshua, who is hailed as the greatest-ever Jew, into the incarnated
Christian God, a crucified Messiah, and finally the Bringer of atonement:
“The Gospels give us a Jesus as mythological as Attis, Adonis, Osiris, or
any other dying and reviving divinity.”255 Bloom writes that had Yeshua
lived, he would have been amazed at his subsequent deification and even
outraged at the emergence of three other gods in the form of God the Father,
the Virgin Mary, and the Holy Spirit. He sourly notes that many millions of
his fellow Americans would find these assertions unacceptable, that
American Fundamentalists “eagerly anticipate the Rapture, in which Jesus
Christ will gather them up into heavenly immortality.”256 Bloom gets his
teeth into the Nicene Creed, the dogma of the Trinity, considered as “the
structure of anxiety it most assuredly was, is and always shall be.”257 This
is because, in Bloom’s words, Jesus Christ represents “a new God on the
Greco-Roman model of Zeus usurping his Father Chronos-Saturn,” and
therefore the Trinity’s purpose is to replace “the Father by the Son, the
Original Covenant by the Belated Testament, and the Jewish people by the
Gentiles.”258 A formula that can be reduced to theology is necessarily a
system of metaphors and doctrine its literalization, which Emersonian
statement Bloom turns on its head by writing that the best poetry is a kind
of theology in waiting and theology generally is bad poetry.259 Bloom
dislikes the poem of the Trinity, which he compares to Abraham’s potential
sacrifice of Isaac, since God the Father, a mere shadow of Yahweh, sends
his only Son because He loves mankind. Bloom then ponders the
Athanasian Creed, that is that Jesus is made of the homoousia, translated as
the “same stuff,” or “essence,” as God the Father. He writes that Joyce
rendered this as a process, in which Jewgreek becomes Greekjew, intending
that one civilization surpasses another in a process of Hellenization,
underlining that Jesus envisages only Jews as beneficiaries, but that his
disciples address themselves only to Gentiles.260 At this point, we come to
the triumph of the American religion since Bloom reveals his cyclic
conception of history: “Our Law is not Hebraic or Greek, but ultimately
Roman, and our great chronicler, whom we await, would be an American
Edward Gibbon, who will depict our inevitable decline and fall.”261 Bloom
has decided that the J-Writer’s Yahweh was a person and a personality, as
was Mark’s Jesus, that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are extreme metaphors
and that the American Jesus is beyond metaphor, because He “has
subsumed the national myth of the New People chosen for a future of a
dreamlike happiness, compounded of emancipated selfishness, and an inner
solitude that names itself as true freedom.”262 Bloom’s argument that Jesus
was a sublimely charismatic Jew provides a platform for the transition of
my argument from Bloom’s interest in deconstructing Judaism to doing the
same to Christianity, an argument that would be impossible to contemplate
unless religious-writing was interpreted aesthetically, and comparisons,
which are outlawed in certain creeds, the modus operandi.
Bloom dislikes anthropomorphic gods, preferring theomorphic men, and
yet he emphasizes the “wonderfully anthropomorphic” depiction of Yahweh
fashioning Adam out of clay.263 Bloom reveals a favorite anthropomorphic
depiction as being when Yahweh stands before the walls of Jericho “drawn
sword in hand” (Josh. 5.13). He is attracted to the warrior-god of Exodus
(15.3) who is figured as a “man of war” but countenances the idea that
Yahweh is a redaction of a number of gods and counts perhaps seven
different personalities subsumed beneath one all-encompassing name that
was later rendered as Elohim (divine being) and Adonai (lord). A striking
feature of Bloom’s theological criticism is that he agnostically oscillates
between describing Yahweh as a literary character, who was created (an
argument that scandalizes Fundamentalists), or as your Creator, and as such
definitive of “our continued need for authority to sanction the self’s
sometimes desperate yearning for a mode of transcendence.”264 He applies
his distinctive literary-critical methodology to biblical characters, and hence
Jesus finds a composite precursor, not just in John the Dipper, but in
Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and pre-eminently Yahweh. But John’s severe
revisions inflict an Orphic sacrifice, and thus the text of Torah is rended in a
sparagmos, “scattering Yahweh’s limbs as if the Master of Presence was
another Osiris,” or the sacrifice of “a contemporary Israeli blown apart in a
bus by a Palestinian.”265 Bloom remembers seeing graffiti on a New York
subway: “Nietzsche is dead! God lives!”266 He then observes that
Nietzsche’s prod, Darwin, would seem embattled by Creationism in
American schools, which dovetails with his observation that the all-too-
human Yahweh knows limits but that later monotheistic deities based upon
Yahweh possess total power. Bloom’s wry remark is that as “God’s might
augments, his presence wanes.”267 This leads Bloom to ponder the puzzle
of Jesus and his various biographers; does He incarnate Yahweh as John
says, or is He uncannily questing for “the origins of his sense of self, unlike
the doom-eager hero-god-victim of John.”268 The questing-sense-of-self is
crucial to my argument since by this method Bloom becomes the prophet of
an encyclopedic concatenation of works that measure the perpetually
growing mind of cultural tradition from a faux secular perspective.
Inevitably, Bloom treats of the Yahwist’s anxiety and asks whose
Yahweh’s father was? He states that while “Zeus usurps his own father,
Chronos . . . Yahweh is unfathered. Bereshith (Genesis) is not a
beginning/again.”269 He recalls Totem and Taboo where the slaying of the
totem father by a horde of sons (who cannibalize their forebear) represents
the origin of all religion and culture.270 Although Bloom refuses to
contemplate that Islam or Christianity did this to Judaism, he nevertheless
asserts: “the Roman holocaust of the Jews, with its first climax at the fall of
Jerusalem and destruction of Yahweh’s Temple . . . resulted in the rise . . .
of Rabbinical Judaism.”271 Neither will Bloom admit of that egregious
Christian truth, called by Bloom a creative misreading, that is the suffering
servant passage in II Isaiah (52.13). In Christian terms, the sheep being led
to slaughter, bearing the guilt of many, and for the intercession of sinners is
the Messiah, but to those of the Hebraic faith, he is all captive Israel, whom
King Cyrus of Persia can release from bondage. From Bloom’s perspective,
the purpose of the text is to persuade the Jews to abandon their exile in
Babylon.272 Jesus shouts out on the cross, “Lord why have you abandoned
me?,” and Bloom meditates that unless God is a personal figure, then
worshippers abandon Him. In effect, Bloom suggests that the modern
American psyche is founded not on enlightened rational principles, but
instead on Christian ideas that derive from Judaism. One is never quite sure
who creates whom in Bloom’s prose; for instance, he speculates that
creation is the ruination of earlier worlds and that God creates within
himself, via zimzum, “a Gnostic opening up of an abyss within
Yahweh.”273 Therefore, God has to fall into himself and hence molds man
from mud so that men can remake their literary creations into gods and
Bloom’s supreme fiction, Yahweh. Indeed, Bloom believes that “we must
dare to say that the human on earth is a mortal god but that god in heaven is
an immortal human.”274 Bloom repeats that the Kabbalistic name for
Yahweh, or Ein-Sof, means without limits, but that every all-too-human act
of Yahweh indicates accepting limitations, which leads Bloom to quote
what for him is a hauntingly humane and Quakerish passage from Auguries
of Innocence:
Bloom asks this provocative question of American culture: “How can any
societal over-determination account for the phenomenon of any solitary
genius?”1 In the remainder of this book, I explore this paradox by
examining Bloom’s relationship with Protestantism; the thread through the
maze is that Bloom’s autobiographical criticism sifts through the over-
determinations of post-Puritan American culture that affected him from
infancy onwards. My discussion begins with a short definition of
Protestantism; it then charts Bloom’s childhood recollections of reading
alone, his vocation to write criticism, and his apprehension of an American
religion of the Whitmanian self. After this, I investigate his truculent
relationship with the New Critics, which was characterized by a memorable
defense of displaced Protestant poetry. From here, I proceed to his marriage
of Yeatsian Gnosticism to Emersonian transcendence and his Gnostic
definition of the American Sublime in Whitman and Stevens. I argue that
displaced Unitarian and Quaker ideas underpin American poetry at its most
formative moments and analyze Bloom’s contention that the aforesaid poets
freed imagination and discarded Christianity. Further thoughts on
Gnosticism in Agon and elsewhere are considered before an analysis of The
American Religion in terms of Bloom’s synopsis that native-American
religious movements are a combination of Protestant tradition and Gnostic
theology. Bloom’s hyperbolic championing of Shakespeare as the inventor
of the modern self is compared to prior instances of inwardness in the
Protestant tradition. The book ends with a treatment of Bloom’s anti-
Platonic writings, which epicurean stance indicates his Falstaffian unease
with certain branches of ascetic thought. Overall, Bloom attempts to
redefine Protestantism in America as a type of Emersonian Gnosis, but
herein dwells a further paradox. Material pleasure is a sin from the
perspective of Pauline Scripture and in its most extreme form this doctrine
leads to Ahab-like iconoclasm; the puritan anxiety as to election produces
hard work from the inner machinery of faith and yet scorns the showy
fripperies of wealth. Gnostics hate the material world and this attempt to
explain the problem of evil ultimately recapitulates the Second
Commandment; thus, the graven image of England in the wicked
Manichaeism of Emerson becomes the psychological block that prevents
divination. Hatred of material culture gives birth to modern consumer
society and yet I argue that Bloom craves more than epicurean delight; he
wishes for metaphysical materialism.
Blake declared that he must invent his own system, or else be enslaved
by another man’s; ironically, there can be no better indication of Non-
conformism. The Latin root Protestantem means declaring in public; thus,
Protestants often portray themselves as vocal revivalists of the earliest form
of Christianity. This makes Protestantism fundamentally opposed to Popery
and Roman Catholic dogma that mortgaged souls to pay for the High-
Renaissance artworks decorating the Sistine Chapel. Although my
definition can only be a rough guide to the fundamentals, already, it
contains punning overtones of Protestant Romantic poets breaking with the
florid poetry of Alexander Pope in their desire to enact a renaissance of the
English Renaissance. Distant memories of my Methodist upbringing in
Wales remind me that Protestantism is best defined as the five “alones”:
Sola Scriptura or Scripture Alone, Sola Fide or Faith Alone, Solus Christus
or Christ Alone, Sola Gratia or Grace Alone, and Soli Deo Gloria or Glory
to God Alone.2 The one that most over-determines Bloom would seem to
be Scripture Alone since he relates that we should read by inner light, a
doctrine developed from Luther’s contention at the Diet of Worms that
because Catholic councils contradict one another, the only way to read the
Word of God is by conscience, that is a rejection of catechism in favor of
personal interpretation: “Unless I am convinced by Scripture and plain
reason . . . my conscience is captive to the Word of God.”3 The five overlap
since Scripture Alone intends that the believer has a close personal
relationship with the Gospels and therefore with Christ, or the tenet of Faith
Alone. The apostles knew Christ personally and the reformers wanted to
recapture this intimacy unsullied by mediatory priestly dogma; Luther was
particularly drawn to Paul’s statement in Romans that “a man is justified by
faith without the deeds of the law” (3.28). Bloom’s rejection of New
Criticism and New Historicism, his emphasis that there is no other way to
read than the self, temperamentally mimics Protestant skepticism for
Catholic instruction, or indeed any iconoclastic act directed against
institutional authority whatsoever: his Miltonic department of one. The
principle of Grace Alone does not entirely break with Catholic teachings
with regard to Divine Mercy as salvation, but subtracts the Catholic
emphasis upon good works as a method of obtaining salvation, and a
concomitant belief that the sacrament of the Eucharist grants grace through
the actual material presence of Christ during transubstantiation. The
combination of justification by faith in Christ and belief in Grace Alone
seems counter-intuitive because, in rejecting the doctrine that one might be
saved by good works, the resultant uncertainty as to salvation created
anxiety in Calvinists since Puritan preachers sermonized against hypocrites,
who outwardly seemed saved but nevertheless were inwardly damned. I
write counter-intuitive because Protestants were still exhorted to act
charitably and because Weber argues that the urge to excel in business and
wealth-creation became an unintended consequence of this anxiety. The
doctrine of Christ Only targeted intercession by papal indulgence to gain
money from poor grieving relatives in order to shorten the time spent in
purgatory by dead loved ones; it emphasizes that Christ died on the cross to
expiate the sins of the believer. To Lutherans, Calvinists, and Puritans,
Original Sin indicates total depravity in unregenerate man and prevenient
grace, such that man’s willful imagination potentially opposes predestined
salvation, which is important in the present context because the said
doctrine intends that, if man rejects salvation by Christ Alone, then man
turns his own preoccupations into a kind of idolatry of self. Wordsworth
writes that by our own spirits are we deified; Bloom—that the Spirit which
moved over the face of the waters “is identical with the shaping spirit
dwelling within the soul of the inspired Protestant poet.”4 Glory Alone
rejects the monastic Romish division of sacred and secular in favor of
leading one’s whole life in imitation of Christ for the glory of God. This
latter is another interesting tenet for the student of Bloom because the Holy
Spirit creates the gift of faith in the human heart and hence facilitates belief
in atonement or at-oneness with God. A Protestant believer might subdue
the ego to prepare for a visitation from the Holy Spirit, but grace itself
could not be induced. At the start of Paradise Lost, Milton arrogantly
summons the Muse, and Bloom explains this as “an epic device that he
transforms into the summoning of the Holy Spirit of God,” and further
reflects that Milton’s egoism finds direct descendants in Blake and
Wordsworth, in the respect that these were examples of “the autonomous
soul seeking its own salvation outside of and beyond the hierarchy of
grace.”5 Finally, the radical potentialities of Protestant congregations has to
be underlined since New-World Puritans would soon proclaim: “Without
Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing . . . as publick Liberty,” or
as Perry Miller comments, “there is inherent in Protestantism a mentality
bound, sooner or later, to turn techniques of protestation against its own
origins.”6
The seed of what would become Bloom’s mature Gnostic philosophy is
present in his earliest childhood memories; Bloom records: “something in
me was very lonely. Something in me felt what I think is the deep pleasure
that solitary reading only could bring.”7 The solitary existentialist pleasure
of reading converted him to the American Religion, which Bloom relates
“contaminated me long ago” and “envelops us all.”8 Putting a name to
Bloom’s solitary meaning, one thinks of Emerson’s Waldeinsamkeit, which
translates as frontier-loneliness. Bloom connects the American religion to
Whitman and the isolated self, one of his revisionary ratios is strongly
American in this puritanically ascetic respect: “askesis in strong American
poets emphasizes the goal of the process, self-sustaining solitude.”9 Though
Bloom’s revisionary ratios are useful for discussing intertextuality, full-
scale readings in the Bloomian mode feel unsatisfactory, and Bloom
explains why: “There is no method other than yourself. All those who seek
for a method that is not themselves will find not a method . . . they will ape
and involuntary mock.”10 The studious method of the self that stands alone
before God with only Scripture as guidance was congenial to the Quaker
faith and originates in the wisdom of John: “That was the true light, which
lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (1.9). This version of
Luther’s “here I stand” represents the ultimate source of the Protestant Sola
scriptura, which stipulates that the dissenter’s own reading of the Bible has
ultimate authority. Bloom’s outline of English religious dissent establishes
private judgment in morality as sovereign and “inner light within each soul,
by which alone Scripture was to be read” as the principle that would ensure
absolutely nothing came between man and his God.11 In a secular context,
Bloom sounds not unlike Fox, who advised students of the Bible that they
need not depend upon teachers and guides but instead should read by their
own inward light; Bloom writes that Blake “read the Bible by a light so
inward that he . . . found therein his own imaginings.”12 The word
“inward” is pivotal since, in The American Religion, Bloom propounds the
view that “a religion of the self burgeons . . . and seeks to know its own
inwardness, in isolation.”13 Bloom’s interest in Protestantism lies precisely
in its adherents courting of a solitary existence, since the Miltonic reading
of the Bible by one’s own inner light belies ex cathedra catechisms and
nurtures what Bloom apprehends as the inner self, “there are three crucial
components in Emerson’s American religion: the god within; solitude; the
best and oldest part of the self, which goes back before creation.”14 He then
adds a religious utopian caveat with specific reference to Whitman:
“Whitmanian democracy fuses them in the divinity of the self, which is our
native understanding of the Resurrection as an escape from history, that is
to say, from European time.”15 Bloom admits that Emersonian capitalistic
reactionaries and, indeed, shamanistic hippy revolutionaries, resist the calls
of societal feeling; therefore, his political support for liberal politicians is
humane but rather incongruous: “I’ve never voted for a Republican for
dogcatcher.”16 Poetic Protestantism in an American context should be
distinguished from Christianity because, as Bloom states, “Emerson and
Whitman . . . freed imagination and discarded Christianity.”17 Bloom’s
thesis is that Whitman as the American Christ became the god of the New
World: “to find Divine Walt, we need to center upon Song of Myself . . . in
which the God of the United States achieved decisive self-recognition.”18
Walt’s ecstatic poetic shamanism contains the directness of Hicksite
Quakerism, a form of Protestantism that hearkened back “to the Inner Light
vision of George Fox.”19 This innermost counsel when reading Scripture
becomes in Bloom’s analysis, “What the Gnostics called the spark or
pneuma, the breath of being, Whitman terms the Me myself or the real
Me.”20 Bloom is writing of the Protestant sense of individual autonomy,
“the awareness that not to be alone is itself a House of Bondage.”21 The
logic of Bloom’s interpretations of Whitmanian metaphors is that
“European Protestantism, like European poetry, undergoes a
transmemberment in our Evening Land.”22
Bloom knew by the time he was twelve that all he wanted to do was read
and discuss poetry; this indicates an almost Lutheran sense of calling. The
paradoxes multiply when interviewers reveal a canonical teacher of secular
literature surrounded by the constant buzz of callers and phone-calls, who
nevertheless apprehends a hermetic sense of loneliness in the self. He
recognizes the irony that “Isaiah and Ezekiel did not believe that the Jewish
nation would save itself through study, which is Plato’s idea of salvation”; it
is Bloom’s in the sense that he finds salvation by existentially feeding the
inner self with aesthetic pleasure.23 Bloom’s at-home-ness with American
society does not conquer the solitude of the American sublime: “in the end
one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude.”24 This
lonely thought deserves its corollary, Bloom’s insight that “absolute inner
isolation . . . is . . . the essence of Protestantism.”25 I find it provocative to
link this wistful love of solitude to Bloom’s American cultural background,
since for Bloom “the United States is the evening land of Protestantism.”26
Allen goes so far as to say that Bloom’s analysis of American poetry
“provides a terminal point in that narrative of the gradual westering of the
muse, which, in many respects, is the theory of the anxiety of influence.”27
But the feeling of being in and belonging to the evening land of American
Protestantism is problematic, since Bloom thinks the Jewish identity of the
Diaspora is a permanent enigma; one good example of this is that Bloom
would seem somewhat alienated from, and yet at the same time
imaginatively open to, the writing of Protestant authors: “whether I
immerse myself in the Geneva or the King James Bible, Tyndale’s genius
(though not his Protestant zeal) enriches me. As a Jewish reader, I tend to
be aware that these are Christian Bibles, and therefore alien to me
spiritually though not as language and as imaginative experience.”28 One
might surmise that when writing on the topic of the King James Bible,
because Bloom mentions that Tyndale “sought to appropriate the Hebrew
text for a Protestant Christ,” Bloom reclaims these translations from a
Jewish perspective.29 A good example of this process of chiasmus that
seeks to reinvent the Old Testament as the earlier Covenant and the New
Testament as the belated Covenant is provided by Bloom’s words on Paul:
“Nobody else misreads the texts of the Hebrew Bible so outrageously as
Paul does, and always by design. More even than the rest of the New
Testament (except the Gospel of John) the writings of Paul suffer an anxiety
of influence in regard to the Hebrew Bible. Seeking power and freedom,
Paul tears to shreds the authority of Tanakh.”30 Usually, Bloom admires
aesthetic audacity, but his treatment of John is soured “by its anti-
Semitism,” such that he concludes “The Torah cannot be truth for John, and
yet he needs to steal his own authority from it.”31 Bloom’s paradoxical
commentary is that the Protestant Bible tallies with his imaginative
sensibility but not his epicurean Jewish skepticism, it could not be stranger
that the Gnostic spiritual side to his agonistic personality warms to the
aesthetic strength of the aforesaid work of literature. His readings of British
novelists like Samuel Richardson and Jane Austen dwell upon their
explorations of solitary inwardness, which Bloom believes to be the mark
of Protestantism. Bloom places Henry James’s Isabel Archer and Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne in the line of descent from Richardson’s
Clarissa Harlowe; in the former character he discovers “the force of the
Protestant will in its earlier intensity,” and this is especially so for Hester
because she “defies Puritan Boston.”32 To an even greater extent, in its
westering belatedness, the religion of Emersonian self-reliance that he
thinks defines Prynne and Archer defies a British tradition that is also
Protestant and Romantic. Nevertheless, the anxiousness of this Protestant
tradition caused his primal American religionist anxiety enough to begin a
New World tradition, since Bloom’s definition of the American Religion
“renders European Protestantism inauthentic in our professedly Protestant
culture” because this religion “has turned us towards Gnosis these last two
centuries.”33 Bloom believes the disjunctive Emerson to be “the mind of
America” and that “the central concern of that mind was the American
religion, which most memorably was named ‘self-reliance’.”34 A crucial
distinction opens up here since Bloom turns against Abrams’ doctrine that
Protestant Romantic poets did not so much delete and replace religious
ideas as assimilate and reinterpret them; and thus, “despite their
displacement from a supernatural to a natural frame of reference, however,
the ancient problems, terminology, and ways of thinking about human
nature and history survived, as the implicit distinctions and categories
through which even radically secular writers saw themselves.”35 It should
be added that Bloom distrusts two areas of Emersonian scholarship: firstly,
that of Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch, who trace Emerson’s ideas
back to Puritans like Cotton Mather etc., and secondly, the received
scholarship that views Emerson as a weak descendent of Wordsworth,
Coleridge, and Carlyle. Bloom’s intention is to redefine American
Protestantism as a form of Gnosticism and to claim very much in opposition
to Abrams and his early influence that poetry lies against time and hence
hardens into religion, such that Emerson symbolizes America’s
independence from European religious and poetic models, but as well
represents the point of origin for the American religion.
Bloom’s undergraduate tutor at Cornell, Abrams, argued that English
Romantic poetry is a form of displaced Protestantism, but, as Adam Begley
relates, this was not the kind of criticism Bloom encountered as a graduate
student at Yale: “The dominant orthodoxy was T. S. Eliot-inspired New
Criticism. Bloom’s field, Romantic literature, was held in low esteem; the
tone was gentlemanly, high-church Protestant.”36 The early Bloom argues
there is no more important point to be made about English Romantic poetry
than the fact that it is a form of displaced Protestantism, and therefore
uncongenial to the Catholic cast of mind, “particularly since it has been
deliberately obscured by most modern criticism.”37 Thus begins Bloom’s
most pugnacious assault upon the Urizenic New Critics in The Visionary
Company: “the poets deprecated by the New Criticism were Puritans, or
Protestant individualists, or men of that sort breaking away from
Christianity and attempting to formulate personal religions in their
poetry.”38 Bloom’s point in The Visionary Company is that, just as the
Romantics assert their individuality against the authority of William Pitt’s
regime, so in a parallel fashion Bloom struggles against the strictures of the
Anglican New Critics: “the poets brought into favor by the New Criticism
were Catholics or High Church Anglicans—Donne, Herbert, Dryden, Pope,
Dr Johnson, Hopkins in the Victorian period, Eliot and Auden in our own
time.”39 From Bloom’s Orc-like perspective, one line of English poetry,
“and it is the central one, is Protestant, radical, and Miltonic-Romantic; the
other is Catholic, conservative, and by its claims, classical.”40 Bloom
attacks C. S. Lewis’s A Preface to Paradise Lost as an Anglo-Catholic
document, while defending the Romantics from the charge of megalomania
made “by a series of modern critics from Irving Babbitt and T. E. Hulme
through T. S. Eliot down to the American academic critics called ‘New’.
”41 The epilogue to The Visionary Company proposes an alternative canon
to the Metaphysical poems championed by the New Critics: “Milton’s
Penseroso becomes Wordsworth’s Solitary, and the Solitary in turn becomes
Byron’s pilgrim, Shelley’s wandering poet, Keats’s shepherd-prince,
Browning’s Paracelsus and Childe Roland, and later the wandering Ossian
and Forgael of Yeats and the sublimely defeated Crispin of Stevens.”42
Even in a late essay on Spenser, Bloom underlines that the father of the
questing poetic self “did not allow himself to be inhibited either by the fear
that a universal symbolism founded on sacramentalism might betray him
into Catholic poetry,” and that Derek Traversi decried Spenser’s poetry as
“furthering the dissolution of the declared moral intention into mere
rhythmical flow.”43 It should come as no surprise that Bloom opposes the
New Critics in Shelley’s Mythmaking on the grounds that “The New Critics
. . . have become for their followers the fathers of a new church.”44 We find
iconoclastic echoes of this schism in Bloom’s liking for “Christian Liberty,”
or the Miltonic “prerogative of every regenerated man under the New Law
of the Gospel to be free of every ecclesiastical constraint.”45 He writes that
Wordsworth battled to surpass Milton (as did the other canonical
Romantics): “Milton is the fountainhead of . . . a Satanic idolatry of self.”46
In The Visionary Company, Bloom establishes Wordsworth as the
principal poet of the Romantic generation because he instigates a
Copernican revolution such that poets after him are shackled to the
subjective mode that he and Coleridge largely invented. It is Bloom’s
contention that “to make a myth is to tell a story of your own invention,”
although he adds that to do this the greatest of the Romantic poets fully
entered “into the abyss of their own selves.”47 Bloom’s reading of
Wordsworth begins with the poet passing Jehovah unalarmed, an example
of the autonomous soul seeking its own salvation outside and beyond the
hierarchy of grace and Blake’s response that Divine Mercy was never
absent except to Wordsworth’s perception. In The Prelude Imagination rises
from the mind’s abyss as Wordsworth discovers he has crossed the Alps,
and Bloom writes that the poet’s possible sublimity, or the soul in creation,
rises out of the striking metaphor of unfathered vapor. How the soul felt in
remembered moments of obscure sublimity becomes the central concern of
Bloom’s reading of The Prelude where Wordsworth suggests that nature
humanizes man. Bloom explains the Wordsworthian by contrasting the
latter’s relationship with the book of nature to Blakean idealism: “The
visible body of Nature is more than an outer testimony of the Spirit of God
to him; it is our only way to God. For Blake it is a barrier between us and
the God within ourselves.”48 Bloom ultimately states that Blake “could not
ruin the sacred truths . . . to a story that might emerge clearly from the abyss
of his own strong ego”, and that “Blake is one of the last of an old race of
poets; Wordsworth was the very first of the race of poets that we have with
us still.”49 Bloom knows that Wordsworth invents the poem of imagination
and its relationship to nature and calls this the myth of memory as salvation;
Tintern Abbey becomes the modern poem proper. His reading of Tintern
Abbey emphasizes the reciprocity of mind and nature until, seeing into the
life of things, we are laid asleep in body and become a living soul.
Worshipful love of sovereign nature (the outward world) leads Wordsworth
from selfish perceptions to renewed love of humanity because anchoring
nature becomes the soul of Wordsworth’s moral being. But the phrase a
“living soul” refers to I Corinthians 15:45, or the opposition between God’s
creation of the natural man from clay and spiritual resurrection, and
indicates that displaced Pauline doctrine lurks behind the Neo-Platonic
sublime of Tintern Abbey. Bloom describes the image of the seashell in The
Prelude as symbolic of reasoning and of primal unity, and hence it is an
ideal type of imagination; he underlines that the tyranny of the eye renders
the psyche half-passive, whereas the organic fusion of seeing-hearing in the
Intimations Ode causes the mind to know itself without exterior cause.
Bloom’s discussion of Beulah introduces The Visionary Company because it
rules his discussion of the mind/nature dialectic that he insists characterizes
the marriage of the mind to nature, or the central problem of Romantic
nature poetry:
“Tintern Abbey,” the Intimations ode, and “Peele Castle” trace the
stages by which the bard of Beulah, desperately trying to maintain a
vision of a married land against the lengthening shadow of organic
mortality, gradually gives way to orthodoxy and timidity and at last
falls into the Ulro of Ecclesiastical Sonnets, and beyond that, the
final abyss of the sonnets favoring capital punishment.50
This cycle from the poet of “possible sublimity” and “something evermore
about to be” to the Urizen who could write “Fit retribution, by the moral
code,” is the natural cycle that Beulah alone as a vision must at last come
to.51 The originality of Bloom’s position lies in a sensitive reading of
Blake’s four mental states that are then used to illustrate the other five
canonical Romantic poets: “innocence, or Beulah; experience, or
Generation; organized, higher innocence, or Eden; and the Hell of rational
self-absorption or Ulro.”52 Bloom asserts that the imagery of Blake’s
Beulah, or the cycles of nature, contains the entire pattern of symbols to be
found in Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode, Coleridge’s Primary Imagination,
Keats’s Endymion and Shelley’s pastoral romances.53 Bloom’s reading
functions well for Blake, for the Wordsworth of The Prelude and for Keats
in “Ode to Psyche”: “Like the other great Romantics, Keats distrusted the
Beulah of earthly repose”—“he went on from it to a myth that promised a
humanism that could transcend nature’s illusions.”54 But his imaginative
modus operandi does not work as well for his discussion of Don Juan,
where Bloom is forced to admit that Byron hardly ever leaves the primary
world; the secondary being that of the visionary imagination: “Byron lived
in the world. . . . Don Juan is, to my taste, not a poem of the eminence of
Milton and Jerusalem, of The Prelude or Prometheus Unbound.”55
However, Bloom later changed his mind and gallantly admitted that Don
Juan was the greatest production of the Romantic period. Bloom confesses
that he reads Wordsworth like he reads the Hebrew Bible, that is for
blessings granted by the spots of time and, further, that Freud has cost him
Blake but not Wordsworth because while “both sought to replace a dying
god” with “the god of the perpetually growing inner self” only Wordsworth
truly succeeded.56
The centerpiece of The Ringers in the Tower is “The Internalization of
Quest Romance,” which along with efforts by Wellek, McGann, Perry, et al.
is one of the most influential essays on the notoriously difficult topic of
how to define Romanticism. Bloom’s influential essay initially reduces
Romanticism to the figure of quest romance in Shelley’s Alastor then
broadens to consider Wordsworthian identifications with six other canonical
poets. Before considering his arguments in more detail, it is important to
note that “The Internalization of Quest Romance” continues his critical
defense of Shelley: “Eliot thought that the poet of ‘Adonais’ and ‘The
Triumph of Life’ had never ‘progressed’ beyond ideals of adolescence.”57
Instead, Bloom proposes that the subjective mode of modern poetry in
English is largely the invention of Wordsworth and that Wordsworth’s
turning to the past resembles Freud’s psychoanalytic therapies:
“Wordsworth is a crisis-poet, Freud a crisis-analyst; the saving movement
in each is backward into lost time.”58 Bloom will later suggest that there is
a shamanistic element to Freudian psychoanalysis, but, in The Ringers in
the Tower, he is more interested in contrasting Romantic eros with Freudian
eros and the formula that “the libido leaves the inner self when the inner
self has become too full . . . man must love in order not to get ill.”59 We
have seen that the quest-romance is defined as the search of the libidinous
self for a fulfillment that will deliver it from anxiety; Bloom’s counter-
intuitive stance is that Wordsworth is an anti-natural poet fleeing from
entrapping nature, and he stakes his authority upon a definition of
Romanticism that involves a rejection of nature as well as the sympathetic
imagination: “The Romantic movement is from nature to the imagination’s
freedom . . . and the imagination’s freedom is frequently purgatorial,
redemptive in direction but destructive of the social self.”60 Bloom argues
that the “hero of internalized quest is the poet himself, the antagonists of
quest are everything in the self that blocks imaginative work.”61 What
Bloom defines as Selfhood has to be subdued and in Blake’s Milton this
Selfhood is recognized as Satan; in later works, this parallel becomes
further defined as the internalized influence of the Covering Cherub taken
as the influence of Milton upon Blake.62 The heroic quest is Miltonic in the
sense of being satanic, or, as Bloom explains, “The internalization of quest-
romance made the poet-hero not a seeker after nature but after his own
mature powers, and so the Romantic poet turned away, not from society to
nature, but from nature to what was more integral than nature, within
himself.”63 All romance is founded upon enchantment; Bloom declares that
enchantment is resisted by an organic anxiety principle identical to the
ego’s self-love, a creative principle which resists in the name of a higher
mode than the sympathetic imagination, which in Bloom’s schemata is
identical with the Promethean phase of the quest.64 In Bloom’s opinion the
Romantics “tended to take Milton’s Satan as the archetype of the heroically
defeated Promethean quester.”65 Thus, we come to the famous delineation
between the two phases of the Romantic Quest, the Promethean Phase and
the Real man, the Imagination:
Bloom prefers the Romantic poets when they have abandoned their
revolutionary aspirations and instead seek consolation in the realms of
visionary desire, or what he has christened, after Blake, the Real Man, the
Imagination. The highest examples of the Real Man are listed as, “The Four
Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem; The Prelude and the Recluse fragment; The
Ancient Mariner and Christabel; Prometheus Unbound, Adonais, and The
Triumph of Life; the two Hyperions; Don Juan; Death’s Jest-Book.”67
Bloom takes his inspiration from his authoritative precursor Frye: “in
Romanticism the main direction of the quest of identity tends increasingly
to be downward and inward, toward a hidden basis or ground of identity
between man and nature.”68 The rising currency of Wordsworth in Bloom’s
canon is well represented by the insight that an organic anxiety principle
identical with the ego’s self-love overcomes Wordsworth’s desire for
transgression of the natural order: “in his crisis, Wordsworth learns the
supernatural and superhuman strength of his imagination. . . . But his
anxiety for continuity is too strong for him, and he yields to its dark
enchantment.”69 The hero of internalized quest is the idealist poet himself
and the dark enchantments, “the antagonists of quest” or “everything in the
self that blocks imaginative work.”70 Bloom means partly the daemonic
spirit of solitude that pursues Shelley’s questing poet in Alastor but also the
dark and nameless thoughts that Wordsworth identifies in Coleridge in
Resolution and Independence and which refer to religious opacity in
Milton’s invocation.
In Blake’s Apocalypse, Bloom argues that Blake loved the free-play of
imagination more than anything: “ ‘I know of no other Christianity and of
no other Gospel than the liberty both of body & mind to exercise the Divine
Arts of Imagination’, this ‘liberty’ being the Jerusalem of the poem.”71 In
The Visionary Company, Bloom employs the psychological insights of
Blake to explicate other poems of the same era, but in Blake’s Apocalypse,
he is adamant that Blake should be read for his originality, the unlikeness of
his giant forms to the corresponding likenesses that he discovers in Freud:
The constant battle that Bloom fights in order to reconcile the reader to the
ostensible strangeness of Blake’s visionary poems points to the fact that
Bloom began reading Blake at a young age; Blake seems more homely than
shocking in his conceptual originality.73 In Bloom’s mature philosophy, the
American religion is defined as a personalized relationship with Jesus
coupled with the knowledge that each American possesses an inner life that
existed before the Creation-Fall. Bloom’s Gnostic analogy reinscribes in
American terms Blake’s coalescence of “the individual creativity or Poetic
Genius in every man with the principle of individuation itself.”74
Elsewhere in Blake’s Apocalypse, Bloom writes on the topic of state
religions that “the heaven of orthodoxy, or idea of restraint, was formed by
the Messiah or Reason, but to get the stuff of creativity he had to ‘fall’ into
the energetic world of imaginings, or else Reason could have no ideas to
build on.”75 Bloom decadently builds a displaced spiritual world of art in
opposition to American society, which activity finds consonance with Blake
and Milton: “So John Milton, at the end, learned to wait, comforted by a
paradise within himself, happier far than the outer one he had failed to bring
about in his England.”76 Bloom notes that “only two books truly mattered
to Blake . . . the Bible and Milton” and that history to Blake was
intrinsically cyclic:
The English Bible, as Blake read it, began with a Creation that was
also a Fall, proceeded to the cycle of history, with alternate
movements of vision and collapse, and achieved the pastoral art of
the Song of Solomon, the tragedy of Job, and the triumphant
prophecy of greater poets like Isaiah and Ezekiel. The entrance of
this poetry into history in the Gospels was culminated in the
Apocalypse, and set a pattern for the Christian poem, a pattern that
Milton, in Blake’s view, had almost succeeded in emulating.77
There is the centrifugal, the Ionian, the Asiatic tendency, flying from
the center . . . throwing itself forth in endless play of undirected
imagination; delighting in brightness and color, in beautiful material,
in changeful form everywhere, in poetry, in philosophy . . . its
restless versatility drives it towards . . . the development of the
individual in that which is most peculiar and individual in him. . . . It
is this centrifugal tendency which Plato is desirous to cure, by
maintaining, over against it, the Dorian influence of a severe
simplification everywhere, in society, in culture . . .119
Bloom writes that the “centrifugal is the vision of Heraclitus, the centripetal
of Parmenides . . . the centrifugal is the Romantic, and the centripetal the
Classic.”120 He prefers the Romantic individualism of the Protestant Yeats
to impersonal modernist classicism; Bloom suggests that Yeats’s Pre-
Raphaelite intensification in The Wanderings of Oisin represents a
resurgence of Victorian Romanticism.121 Pater’s The Renaissance was one
of Yeats’s sacred texts, but Bloom argues that Yeats’s reading indicates the
triumph of mechanical chaos over art, of nature over the visionary moment
and neither a Paterian assertion of personality against the flux of sensations,
nor the privileged moment when inward and outward momentarily correlate
in an epiphany. The tragic quest that is doomed to failure, death, and rebirth
is hence symbolized by the Yeatsian lyricism that acted as a prolegomenon
for The Ringers in the Tower: “I shall find the dark grow luminous, the void
fruitful when I understand I have nothing, that the ringers in the tower have
appointed for the hymen of the soul a passing bell.”122 This beautiful
quotation recasts the precious metal of Pater’s style as a mystical, fated
gnosis that the poet’s antithetical sensibility apprehends in an undeceived
and experiential fashion, while tragically being caught up in the cycle of
death and rebirth. It removes the weight of Paterian meaning, that is that the
world of experience fades after temporarily setting the spirit free in a
moment of epiphany. Bloom argues that Yeats follows Wilde in converting
“Pater’s vision of the flux of experience into a theory of masks,” wherein
poetic truth remains detached by a powerful relativism: “the movement of
sensations is matched by the flux of contending beliefs and actions.”123
Yeatsian terminology is notoriously stylized and Bloom distinguishes the
fated Image from life and the Mask that is chosen by the poet to redress his
essential poverty; hence, the Mask represents the various poses of poetic
imagery created by the poet and the fated Image the obsessive perception of
certain ideas obtained from primary processes. Pater is important for
Bloom’s argument precisely because his emphasis upon idealism stands
mid-way between Wordsworth and the Modernists and because his
epicurean criticism explains “why all post-Romantic poetry resolves itself
into another aspect of Romanticism, despite its frequently overt anti-
Romanticism.”124 Bloom’s chapter on “Late Victorian Poetry and Pater”
ends in an extraordinary fashion with a reading of “Tea at the Palaz of
Hoon” in which Stevens incarnates as the Poetical Character, or the rebirth
of the Paterian poet as Apollo, “a declaration of the mind knowing its own
autonomy, declaring that outward sense is wholly the servant of its
will.”125 Bloom’s final point is a judgmental one; the active virtue of Yeats
would seem more tough-minded than the tragic generation, but not as
strong as Stevens.126
The sweetest part of Bloom’s corpus is dedicated to the decadent poetics
of Keats, Pater, Ruskin, Browning, and Tennyson. In “Keats and the
Embarrassments of Tradition,” he asserts the dark Stevensian wisdom that
death is the mother of beauty. Life to Milton is death to Keats, and hence
Bloom writes that the Shakespearean “way of Negative Capability” was “an
answer to Milton.”127 Bloom intuits that we prefer Keats to almost all his
contemporaries because he shares our materialist sensibility; nevertheless,
he argues that Keats’s poetic descent is traced from the solitary line of
Protestant poets. Therefore, the most striking image in Bloom’s writings on
Keats is this comparison with Orc: “The contrary to prospective vision, in
Blakean rather than Nietzschean terms, is the cycle of the being Blake
called Orc, who would like to tear loose from Nature’s wheel, but
cannot.”128 Instead of eternal return, Bloom suggests that “by the point at
which the fragmentary The Fall of Hyperion breaks off, Keats . . . has
become the quest-hero of a tragic adventure.”129 The quest begins when
Wordsworth’s Solitary manifests itself in Keats’s Endymion where this
questing-for-love example of nympholepsy “becomes a figure nearly
identical with poetry itself.”130 Bloom brings Stevens to the Keatsian
banquet with great decadent gusto: “Poetry is not a means of good; it is . . .
like the honey of earth that comes and goes at once, while we wait vainly
for the honey of heaven.”131 Bloom supposes that the “wealth of tradition
is great . . . in its own subtleties of internalization” and that Keats followed
Wordsworth on the path of Romantic internalization, in order to guard
against the large “often paralyzing embarrassment” of the “rich
accumulation of past poetry.”132 Pater could appreciate a life of sensations
but a stable boy like Keats would be left to do the living; thus, Bloom
decadently quotes Yeats’s fine fiction that Keats was an urchin ruined by his
thirst for luxury and compares Keatsian psychology to Pater’s bundling
wisdom that the self is a movement of dissolute impressions, images,
sensations, of which “analysis leaves off—that continual vanishing away,
that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.”133 In
Bloom’s opinion, Tennyson never achieved autonomy for his own
imagination, his best poem being Mariana where Tennyson produced a
sensuous imaginative phantasmagoria “running down into isolated and self-
destructive expectation.”134 By far my favorite essay in The Ringers in the
Tower is “The Place of Pater: Marius The Epicurean,” in which Bloom
quotes Tennyson’s male muse Hallam on Wordsworth’s crowd:
While all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite
passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted
horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the
senses, strange dyes, strange colors, and curious odours, or work of
the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate
every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the
brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways,
is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.138
Bloom comments that the burden of Marius The Epicurean is the “near
solipsism of the isolated sensibility, of the naked aesthetic consciousness
deprived of everything save its wavering self and the flickering of an
evanescent beauty in the world of natural objects, which is part of the
universe of death.”139 Reductively, Bloomian aesthetics is a something-
ever-more-about-to-be decadent appreciation of poetic beauty by
estrangement that feeds the inner self, that elusive inner world of the
unconscious.140 But Pater’s unorthodox opinions warn that epicurean
fullness of life should not be mistaken for a “kind of idolatry of mere life,
or natural gift”; the important thing is that insights are guided by choice.141
Paterian Epicureanism is outed by Bloom as the aesthetic sensibility
proper, and by this Bloom means not sensually indulgent pleasure but the
high-tide of life and above all insight into the full variety of aesthetic
experience, the pulsations of the arteries of artistic impressions—
impressions that must one day end. Bloom talks of the self-defeated fate of
Pater’s Roman quester and takes Marius as decadent archetype for modern
lyric poets in the mold of Stevens and Yeats.142 In “Blake’s Jerusalem: The
Bard of Sensibility and the Form of Prophecy,” Bloom criticizes “the poet
of Sensibility, the man of imagination who cannot or will not travel the
whole road of excess to the palace of wisdom.”143 This lucid statement
introduces a related insight into Bloom’s favorite Victorian poem, Childe
Roland To The Dark Tower Came: “By marching into that land of his
terrible force of failed will . . . he compels himself to know . . . the anxiety
of influence.”144 To summarize Browning’s poem, a questing knight rides
across a ruined landscape toward a mysterious tower and right at the end of
the poem sees a terrible fire, which Bloom interprets as the Yeatsian
Condition of Fire. In Bloom’s view, the poem “becomes a ballad of the
imagination’s revenge against the poet’s unpoetic nature, against his failure
to rise out of the morass of family romance into the higher romance of the
autonomous spirit questing for evidences of its own creative election.”145
Bloom records Browning’s association of Shakespeare with the objective
poet, and Shelley with the subjective poet, and Yeats’s transformation of
these opposites into the primary and the antithetical. Roland rides across a
landscape without imagination and Bloom, who was born in 1930 and
whose essay on Pater was published in 1967, notes that Browning was
thirty-nine when he wrote the poem; an age at which the imagination learns
that “no spring can flower past its meridian,” while adding that Shelley was
“impatient of our staler realities.”146 In “Ruskin as Literary Critic,” Bloom
outlines that the qualities of “Reverence, sensitivities, and accuracy, taken
together, are the theological virtues for criticism, but the combination can
thwart creation.”147 Bloom sees this morish quotation as the very center of
Ruskin’s criticism: “There is no wealth but Life—Life, including all its
powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which
nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.”148 But
this noble vision darkens, “Ruskin’s formulation of the Pathetic Fallacy is a
profound protest against nineteenth-century homogeneities,” since a
primrose should be a fact more than a feeling of something more deeply
interfused. Ruskin would have adored the tough sensibility of Stevens but
not his dictum that reality should be made more difficult to see: “But it is
still a grander condition when the intellect also rises, till it is strong enough
to assert its rule against, or together with, the utmost efforts of the passions;
and the whole man stands in an iron glow, white hot, perhaps, but still
strong, and in no wise evaporating; even if he melts, losing none of his
weight.”149 Ruskin wants for Wordsworth’s unsubstantial structure to melt
into reality without its imaginative force evaporating like morning mist,
whereas Pater wishes for dream-like sensation to melt into fantasy like the
passionate Porphyro into Madeline’s dream. Bloom believes that we are on
Pater’s side because (with sour wit) he remarks: “Wordsworth could see
only landscapes that he had seen before, and that no landscape became
visible to him that he had not first estranged from himself.”150 The
workings of the imagination are adjudged compensatory for primary
perception, especially that of childhood perception, and hence Bloom
includes Ruskin’s post-Wordsworthian insight into the child-like quality of
genius: “the whole difference between a man of genius and other men . . . is
that the first remains in great part a child, seeing with the large eyes of
children, in perpetual wonder . . . infinite ignorance, and yet infinite
power.”151 To see as a child sees is to purge the familiar, to see as if for the
first time but perpetually renewed as the poet in the act of creation attempts
to become his own begetter. Bloom explicitly states that, unlike
Wordsworth, Pater welcomes excessive self-consciousness and hence
inaugurates the decadent phase of Romanticism, “in which, when honest,
we still find ourselves.”152
The very last section of The Ringers in the Tower is entitled “Epilogue:
A New Romanticism? Another Decadence?” Here Bloom writes that in
1968 observers of the contemporary cultural scene liken it to “Romanticism
. . . from 1770 to 1830” and “the Decadence, or Aestheticism . . . 1870 to
1900.”153 He quotes Pater, who suggests that the romantic character in art
is found in the addition of strangeness to beauty: “mass culture increasingly
is in a Romantic or Decadent phase, and its images begin to acquire the
strangeness or curiosity in which Pater pioneered.”154 Pater is of interest to
Bloom because “his historical novel Marius the Epicurean compared the
condition of late Victorian England to that of Rome in the age of the
Antonines, the last high moment of a great civilization directly poised on
the verge of Decline and Fall.”155 Hugh Brogan has argued that the period
of Nixon and Carter gave rise to “loose talk” of decline in American
political circles, a phenomenon that Paul Kennedy enlarges upon in The
Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: “An economically expanding Power—
Britain in the 1860s . . . may well prefer to become rich rather than to spend
heavily on armaments. A half-century later, priorities may well have
altered. The earlier economic expansion has brought with it overseas
obligations (dependence upon foreign markets and raw materials, military
alliances, perhaps bases and colonies).”156 Bloom rails against
interventionist presidents; the prophet in him would presumably welcome
Robert Nisbet’s gloss on the public reception of Kennedy’s thesis:
. . . when Yale history professor Paul Kennedy published his The Rise
and fall of the Great Powers with its concluding argument that the
“American Empire” was already manifesting signs of decadence and
decline, a storm of outrage issued forth from neoconservatives. . . .
They could not abide the thought that American progress might be
tapering off, already succeeded by the stigmata of decline and
possibly, fall. Never! The Americanization of the world would go
on!157
E. H. Carr observes that “After the First World War, Toynbee made a
desperate attempt to replace a linear view of history by a cyclical theory—
the characteristic ideology of a society in decline.”158 Bloom begins
Anatomy of Influence by diagnosing symptoms of decline that I want to
connect to the British analogy: “We have approached bankruptcy, fought
wars we cannot pay for, and defrauded our urban and rural poor.”159 The
Orc cycle would seem rather cyclic, as would Bloom’s pervasive interest in
the life-cycle of poets who age from Orc to Urizen, which just leaves a
direct apprehension of political decline unproven: “twenty-first-century
America is in a state of decline.”160 Bloom’s interpretation of the Orc cycle
is something of an aesthetic obsession and the fact that America has passed
from its Orcish revolutionary origins to an Urizenic colonial power is part
of Bloom’s nightmarish prophecy: “It is that singular kind of nightmare
some of us dream obsessively, in which you encounter a series of terrifying
faces, and only gradually do you realize that these faces are terrified, and
that you are the cause of the terror.”161 These words were written about
David Lindsay’s Orcish quester Maskull that Bloom relates to Prometheus
and the Yeatsian Mask: “Lindsay’s narrative thus has the shape of a
destructive fire seeking for a kindlier flame, but finding nothing because it
burns all in its path.”162 Bloom reveals something quintessential about his
own aims, when he draws this striking historical analogy between the
British and the American centuries:
Alas, Stevens was to write of the world washed in his imagination that “We
have imagined things that we have failed to realize,” which prompts Bloom
to reflect that “his lyric is an authentic American elegy, a study of the
nostalgias.”214 My favorite of Bloom’s readings in the chapter entitled
Parts of a World is his meditation upon “The Man on the Dump,” where the
poet expresses belated disgust as he refigures the dew in yet another poetic
mimesis. The dew is not new and is therefore old enough to be heaped on a
dump, or the expressiveness of an American High Romantic perpetually at
work reconstructing his poetic stance. Bloom reads the peculiar and
arresting phrase “The the” as any object whatsoever, outside the self, which
is in the process of being taken up again into language . . . another incipient
realization that there are no proper meanings in the language of poetry.215
The short chapter ends appropriately enough with this Nietzschean
contribution to the American sublime: “As soon as we . . . seek for once to
know ourselves fully by means of introspective reflection, we are lost in a
bottomless void.”216
Bloom underlines that we often underestimate how labyrinthine Notes
Toward a Supreme Fiction is, in its subtle evasions and preternatural
rhetoricity, it’s excessive self-awareness as text.217 Bloom means that
Stevensian poems are images of abstraction that resist sentimentality:
In its theological aspect this doctrine states that the Divine is alien to
the world and has neither part nor concern in the physical universe;
that the true god, strictly transmundane, is not revealed or even
indicated by the world, and is therefore the Unknown, the totally
Other, unknowable in terms of any worldly analogies.
Correspondingly, in its cosmological aspect it states that the world is
the creation not of god but of some inferior principle whose law it
executes; and, in its anthropological aspect, that man’s inner self, the
pneuma (“spirit” in contrast to “soul” = psyche) is not part of the
world, of nature’s creation and domain, but is, within that world, as
totally transcendent and as unknown by all worldly categories as is
its transmundane counterpart, the unknown God without.244
This quotation contains the key to Yeats’s “A Dialogue of Self and Soul”
since Bloom writes that Yeats’s “characteristic poem” is often a dialogue
between “the antithetical self and the primary soul” or the Gnostic pneuma
and psyche, respectively.245 In order to trace a genealogy that runs from
Orpheus through Pythagoras and Empedocles to Plato, and thence to St
Paul and ultimately Valentinus, Bloom relies on Dodds and to a lesser
extent Jonas. The genealogy itself starts with the concept of the occult self
in Shamanistic belief and the idiomatic Homeric concept of the thumos,
which Bloom glosses as being similar to Freudian drives. The thumos
becomes associated with the psyche or anxious self, whereas the occult self
became the detachable daemonic self that undergoes transmigration and
which causes an ascetic revulsion of the body:
Plato advances the genealogy by identifying the guilty occult self with the
rational Socratic psyche and thus Bloom surmises:
Bloom has sympathy for Urizenic poets because “loving poetry is a Gnostic
passion not because the Abyss is loved, but because the lover longs to be
yet another Demiurge.”252 But the poet’s election-love is chained to that
initial love of the precursor’s words that reminds of Madame Bovary’s
idealistic belief that love must come suddenly and hurl you heart and soul
into the abyss. Milton’s rebellious Satan maintains that he knows no time
when he was not as now and before this namelessness, which is the gist of
the almost absurdist gnosis of Basilides:
Even as fear fell upon the angels in the presence of Adam when he
uttered greater sounds than his status in the creation justified, sounds
caused by the one who invisibly had deposited in Adam seed of
celestial substance so that Adam expressed himself freely, so also
among generations of men of our world, the works of men become
objects of fear to their own makers, as in the instances of statues,
images and everything which hands fashion in the name of a “god.”
For Adam, being fashioned in the name of “man,” inspired angelic
fear of the pre-existent man because pre-existent man was in Adam.
They, the angels, were terrified and quickly concealed or ruined their
work.261
. . . far over the sea, we have a few black persons rendered extremely
“free” indeed . . . Sitting yonder with their beautiful muzzles up to
the ears in pumpkins, imbibing sweet pulps and juices; the grinder
and incisor teeth ready for ever new work . . . Sunk to the ears in
pumpkin, imbibing saccharine juices, and much at ease in the
Creation . . . rum-bottle in his hand, no breeches on his body,
pumpkin at discretion. . . . A bit of the great Protector’s own life lies
there; beneath those pumpkins lies a bit of the life that was Oliver
Cromwell’s. . . .274
Here Whitman is the son of Manhattan rather than the Son of Man; he is by
no means the sensitive poetic measure of all things. That part of the shy
Whitmanian self Bloom loves most is figured in this passage, which
corresponds to the transmundane but phallic real Me:
The sensual self does not stand apart, whereas the real Me stands up like a
Quaker speaking at a meeting house, is amused like a louche Oscar Wilde,
stands apart from the autoerotic pulling-and-hauling, a phrase that has
connotations of fishing with nets in Whitman’s prose and hence further
Christian associations. But the real Me is not exactly a Foxian orgasm
because a wild-card in and out of the constative/performative poker-faced
language game; indeed, the in-and-out allusion here to John 10.9 suggests
that Christ is the door by which man can find pasture. Christian
sanctification means standing apart, being in the world but separate unto
God, and hence the Me myself finds a source text with parataxis that echoes
the “they-are-not” dualisms of John: “They are not of the world, even as I
am not of the world. Sanctify them through thy truth: thy Word is truth. As
thou hast sent Me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the
world. And for their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they also might be
sanctified through the truth” (17.16-19). Christopher Marlowe was accused
of saying that John was Christ’s bedfellow; we should not ignore the
homoerotic influence of the Beloved Disciple on this American son of a
carpenter, or the tradition that John comforted Mary, Christ’s mother, while
her Son was being crucified. My tentative hypothesis is that Whitman
resurrects first, then dies, because the Pauline resurrection-seed, and the
Jesus of John, who says I am the resurrection, meld in Whitman’s
Quakerish refusal to abase himself to the influence of Emerson. The third
division occurs when Whitman’s “I” addresses the soul:
I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other. (“Song of Myself,” 82–3)
In Ephesians, Paul says: “If you have heard of the dispensation of the grace
of God which is given me to you-ward” (3.2). This translation is Tyndale’s
from the King James Bible but a common alternative is provided by the
Complete Jewish Bible: “I assume that you have heard of the work of God
in his grace has given me to do for your benefit.” We can assume that
Whitman wishes you the Emersonian blessing of good health; he wants to
convert Americans to a transformed kind of Pauline grace and that
sanctification-errand the conversionary experience of reading Whitman’s
poetry. But paradoxically, Whitman’s iconoclasm is such that he archly
advises his eleves to destroy the teacher, although “He that by me spreads a
wider breast than mine own proves the width of my own” (“Song of
Myself,” 1234).
Bloom classifies Whitman, Twain, and Melville as a composite trinity:
“The United States does not have a single national epic, but an amalgam of
three very diverse works: Moby-Dick, Leaves of Grass, and Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn.”300 The Norman-Rockwellesque adventures of
Huckleberry Finn do not find Bloom, except as a figure for solitary lying,
and when Emerson writes that, which I can gain from another, is never
tuition but only provocation, we know that our street-fighter’s true subject
is the American Sublime: “Walt Whitman says that the sunrise would kill
him if he could not now and always send forth the sunrise from himself, but
Ahab is even more American and vows that he would strike the sun if it
insulted him.”301 The sunrise would kill the angel of death and,
presumably, Whitman takes the name of the American Christ symbolized
by sunrise on the Emersonian evening land, whereas Ahab wishes to strike
through even this cosmos. Milton’s Satan apprehends the sun as being like
the god of the new world and yet in a notebook entry Whitman writes that
he would not abase himself to the God of this world; his Ahab-like
obduracy could not be more different to Emerson’s meek portrayal of
Quakerism in “The Over-Soul.” Bloom sees Melville as one of the founders
of the American Religion, which this exegete defines as the trinity of
Gnosticism, Enthusiasm, and Orphism and which from his idiosyncratic
perspective would seem more Gnostic than Protestant. Moby-Dick is set in
what Bloom calls the Gnostic Kenoma, “ ‘Wonder ye then at the fiery
hunt?’ Ishmael asks us, once he too has been swept up into Ahab’s thrust
into the watery wastes that the ancient Gnostics called the kenoma, a
sensible emptiness.”302 This emptiness is the white blank of nature that the
whale symbolizes and which Ahab wants to apocalyptically break through,
“a true apocalypse, not the path of revolution that always becomes reaction
again.”303 Melville writes that white “is not so much a color as the visible
absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for
these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a
wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we
shrink?”304 Bloom’s comment is Emerson orientated: “I take it as a
critique of Emerson’s epiphanies of the Transparent Eyeball and the ‘ruin or
blank’ in his Nature.”305 But Bloom relates that his favorite passage in
Moby-Dick is from the chapter named “Candles,” in which the mariners
behold St Elmo’s fire, or ball lightning flaming like Ariel from the
boresprit. Bloom confesses that he memorized the passage when he was
twelve years of age and analyzes the passage thus: “Once he had been a
convert to Zoroastrianism, but I now know thee, and the gnosis makes him
free. He confronts one version of genius, the fire’s fathering force, with his
own personality or daemonic genius, and mocks the fire for not knowing
the fore-mother, the Abyss of the Gnostics, the origin before the Creation-
Fall.”306 At the end of Song of Myself, Whitman indicates that he is to be
found under the dreaming sod of the prairies; a Heraclitean Christ absorbed
into the mysterious processes of nature that he cannot translate but which he
associates with acts of glossolalia. Neither can Americans understand this
mysterious speaking in tongues, except that it seems to be a coming home
to the naked self of America, where blood and soil unite as the perceptual
filter and moral fiber of Whitman’s influence and the Orphic and therefore
Aeolian message of his buried body and its scattered leaves. The sublimated
autoeroticism of Whitman’s displaced Quaker aesthetic is nowhere better
exemplified than in that disjointed shamanistic dream episode, when, as
Bloom indicates, the real Me is raped. Here the traitorous villain touch is
grotesquely figured as a rape fantasy and Whitman, who has just related
that he cannot bear to be touched by another person, becomes the passive
victim of what at the beginning of the poem is merely the whimsical dream
of a lover’s plunging tongue that strips to the bare breast and the heart
beneath. Whitman repudiates organized religion and yet exalts being
sadomasochistically abased much like a Blakean clod of clay under the boot
soles. The richer recompense of this orgiastic sensation roughly conforms to
the recompense offered by Christ to the just at the resurrection (Lu. 14.14);
Whitman’s material seed is metaphorically spent for vast spiritual returns.
The striptease of Whitman’s final merit is tantalizingly refused to the
reader, who nevertheless holds the author’s leaves in his own hand. Bloom
describes this quasi-devotional fantasy as the crisis of the poem and his
insight is praiseworthy in the respect that Whitman would seem deeply
ambivalent as to the ostensible holiness of tactility. Christ exclaims do not
touch (Jo. 20.17), but when Whitman touches his lips he silences skeptics,
and my explanation is that this touch represents the displaced hush of the
meeting house. It is this iconoclastic quiet that allows Whitman to loaf and
hence voyeuristically befriend the justified workers of America that he
celebrates in his poetry. It is almost as if the text Whitman weaves says that
because the Lord clothes the grass; there is no need to toil, and by this
means the visionary poet transparently addresses the puritan anxiety as to
salvation, which might be taken as the central puzzle of American Being.
The American Religion is divided into five sections; the first identifies
and outlines Bloom’s definition of the American Religion in terms of
American-protestant spiritual history just as the last continues the process
of political commentary, to which this diagnosis gives rise. Bloom’s books
frequently contain irruptions of political prophecy together with the not
uncommon phenomenon of the flippant Bloomian aside. But in The
American Religion these interruptions effloresce into pages and pages of
commentary in their own right. Nevertheless, the middle sections of the
book work through Bloom’s initial proposition with particular reference to
the Mormons. We also find commentary on Christian Science, Seventh-day
Adventism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostalism, and Southern Baptists.
For reasons of space, I shall treat of Bloom’s synopsis that the American
religion is a form of gnosis and then concentrate upon his thoughts on
Mormonism and the increasing political commentary that characterizes the
closing section on Southern Baptism. With delicious ex cathedra pomposity
Bloom informs us that religious criticism confronted by the indigenous
American visions of a religion-soaked society “is compelled to become
national criticism.”307
Bloom defines the American Religion as a form of Gnosticism despite
the fact that many of the adherents of the aforesaid religious groups would
not accept his conclusions, religious or political. Given that Bloom is a
deconstructive critic and many of the groups he examines are
fundamentalist, his ideas certainly would not please those who believe in
the literal truth of the Bible: “Literature and religion are not allied
enterprises, except insofar as both are conceptual orphans, stumbling about
in our cosmological emptiness that stretches between the unattainable poles
of meaning and truth.”308 Self and, disconcertingly, selfishness are located
at the center of Bloom’s insight into the American Religion, the essence of
which is that God loves the individual and that this God is Jesus and not
God the Father. Due to the fact that this God is known to the believer, and
has an intimate personal relationship with him or her, Bloom deduces that
this constitutes a gnosis. The furious American search for the spirit is
consequently equalized with a quest for “the original self, a spark or breath
in us that we are convinced goes back to before the Creation.”309 The
beginnings of the American Religion are traced to two sources. The first,
the African-American belief in “the little man within,” which signifies a
self that was not created but true to each American, who had come to, or
else come into being, in the new world.310 Bloom speculates that the first
African-American Baptists married the figure of the resurrected Jesus to the
concept of the little man or woman within each of them, from this
conceptual marriage derives the African-American Baptist rhetoric of Jesus
as a friend that ironically made the Southern Baptist faith possible. Bloom
claims that like Whitman’s divisions of the self this inner consciousness is
an expression of imagination, since the American Religion “is judged to be
an imaginative triumph.”311 He says this because “religion is imagined,
and must be reimagined” and because Emerson wrote that the idioms and
figures of Christ’s teachings have usurped the place of his truth, or to
employ one of Bloom’s favored Blakean proverbs: “Fundamentalists . . .
refuse to know that they have chosen forms of worship from poetic
tales.”312 The self-reliant hub of the American Religion is reached with
reference to William James, who writes in The Varieties of Religious
Experience that religion means “the feelings, acts, and experiences of
individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to
stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”313 Emerson
was evidently hailed by Sydney Ahlstrom as the theologian of the American
religion in the same way that Bloom seems the critic of the American
century. The American Christ is therefore more American than he is Christ,
or as Joyce had it, Greek-Jew, and because Christ is a personal experience
for the American Christian.314 Bloom draws a parallel with Whitman, who
sings of two selves at once, the first a rough merging into social grouping
and the second the “real Me” or “Me myself,” an identity always standing
apart.315 During his discussion of enthusiasm as Gnosticism opposed to
Puritan Fundamentalism, we stumble across the potential reason for
Bloom’s misapprehension of Whitman’s categories: “in St. Paul, this
transcendent principle in the human soul is called the ‘spirit’ (pneuma), ‘the
spirit in us’, ‘the inner man’, eschatology also called the ‘new man’. ”316
Bloom points out the significance of Paul never using the term “psyche” to
denote the divine principle in man: “he opposes . . . ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’, and
‘psychic man’ and ‘pneumatic man’. ”317 He goes on to write that spark,
seed of light, and daemon and pneuma have the same meaning, which is
nearer to “the indwelling spirit which the shaman inherits from other
shamans” than it is to the rational “soul” or psyche in which Socrates
believed.318 In Agon, Bloom mentions that the King James Bible psychikos
is translated as natural man but does not pause to consider that the elided
concept of the carnal man sarkinos should merge with the concept of the
believer’s rational soul. Whitman employs the concept of the soul to unify
Americans behind his status as would-be national bard; Bloom, however,
writes in praise of Romantic individualism or a form of Protestantism that
brooks no parley with either group authority in the first place, or even with
the everyday ego in the second, and for Bloom the Me myself is the best
and oldest part of Whitman, going back before the Creation. Bloom
connects American Protestantism to ancient Gnosticism defined as a proto-
Christian sect, whose doctrines were based on two convictions: “The
Creation, of the world and of mankind in its present form, was the same
event as the Fall of the world and of man, but humankind has in it a spark
or breath of the uncreated, of God, and that spark can find its way back to
the uncreated, unfallen world, in a solitary act of knowledge.”319 He is
helped in this identification by Philip Lee’s Against the Protestant Gnostics,
in which Lee protests against “the exaltation of the elite self against
community.”320 Bloom concludes that urging a need for community upon
American religionists would be in vain for the simple reason that “the
experiential encounter with Jesus or God is too overwhelming for memories
of community to abide, and the believer returns from the abyss of ecstasy
with the self enhanced and otherness devalued.”321
Bloom asserts that religion rises from our apprehension of death and
reminds us of his existential dread by remarking: “to give meaning to
meaninglessness is the endless quest of religion.”322 Bloom believes, after
Shakespeare, that there is nothing at the center of the self and that the abyss
within American selfhood finds peace when it is alone with the primal
abyss. Not unexpectedly, selfishness craves freedom, though not Christian
Liberty, but a solitude that represents an inner loneliness at home with an
outer loneliness or cosmological emptiness.323 This personal Jesus is
identified by Bloom as the resurrected Jesus and not the figure who died on
the cross, and yet this sublime knowledge is miserably selfish: “the
American finds God in herself or himself, but only after finding the
freedom to know God by experiencing a total inward solitude.”324 Bloom
suggests that religion culminates in the growing inner self; his pithy
formula is that religion is the poetry, not the opiate of the masses; he adds
that just as poetry triumphs over time, so religious experience scrimmages
against death. But Bloom is on his guard against the self-righteous and
fundamentalist moral virtues, which he describes in Blakean terms as “the
selfish virtues of the natural heart.”325 The American religion wishes no
limitation and a consequence of this desire is the crude literalization of the
Bible committed by Fundamentalists in their attempt to “overcome the
terror of death.”326 Bloom’s argument is that, like American imaginative
literature, the desire to find some intimation of immortality leads to a
severely internalized quest romance; this quest escapes from being time-
bound by becoming personally acquainted with Jesus, the resurrected Jesus,
who conquered death. Bloom picks up on Santayana’s wisdom that a living
religion has to be idiosyncratic, that its power comes from a swerve-bias,
which has to remind of Bloom’s ratio of clinamen. We come now to the
precursor-in-chief of American enthusiasm whom Bloom introduces as
John Wesley, “who received a supreme experience of conversion.”327
Conversion Bloom introduces as the fundamental experience of the
American religion because it figures renunciation and a new start; to be a
Christian you must feel that your sins have been forgiven. The closest
Bloom comes to the figure of Johannine justification by faith is hence being
born again, or the thought that Christianity is itself the malady for which
conversion offers a cure. Wesley’s more restrained English mode of
iconoclasm, with its enthusiastic motif of renunciation as conversion, is
then superseded by the violence, both internal and external, of the American
Religion: “the American Religion . . . is a knowing, by and of an uncreated
self, or self-within-the-self, and the knowledge leads to freedom, a
dangerous and doom-eager freedom: from nature, time, history, community,
other selves.”328
Bloom touts a triad of Wesleyan Enthusiasm, Gnostic Selfhood, and
Orphic ecstasy as the bedrock of the American Religion. Having traced
Bloom’s assertion that enthusiasm is at the center of the American Religion,
and outlined his belief that American self-reliance is a Gnostic stance, I
come now to the intoxication of religious ecstasy. Bloom draws a parallel
between Woodstock drug-taking and love-making and turn of the nineteenth
century revivalism at Cane Ridge, where approximately twenty thousand
rough frontiersmen and women from Kentucky assembled, and
experienced, in Orphic unison, a deeply spiritual and Pentecostal
phenomenon. In Bloom’s judgment the goings on at Cane Ridge were of a
bizarre sadomasochistic kind:
A person affected with the jerks, especially in his head, would often
make a grunt, or bark, if you please, from the suddenness of the jerk.
This name of barking seems to have had its origin from an old
Presbyterian preacher of East Tennessee. He had gone into the woods
for private devotion, and was seized by the jerks. Standing near a
sapling, he caught hold of it, to prevent his falling, and as his head
jerked back, he uttered a grunt or kind of noise similar to a bark, his
face being turned upwards. Some wag discovered him in this
position, and reported that he found him barking up a tree.329
That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may
hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted,
and their sins should be forgiven them. (Mk 4.12)
That the Gentiles should be fellow heirs, and of the same body, and
partakers of his promise in Christ by the gospel: (Eph. 3.6)
Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that
we should be called the sons of God: therefore the world knoweth us
not, because it knew him not. (1 Jn 3.1)
I know him: and if I should say, I know him not, I shall be a liar like
unto you: but I know him, and keep his saying. (Jn 8.55)
Preface
1 W. C. Martyn, The Pilgrim Fathers of New England: A History (New
York: Kessinger, 2010), p. 390.
2 Stephen Marx, “The Prophet Disarmed: Milton and the Quakers,”
Studies in English Literature 1500–1800 (Winter 1992), no page
number. http://cla.calpoly.edu/~smarx/Publications/prophet.html
[Accessed 16 February 2013]. George Fox, The Journal of George
Fox, ed. by John Nickalls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1952), p. 198.
3 http://www.radioopensource.org/harold-blooms-melville/ [Accessed 16
February 2013].
4 Andrew Collier, Christianity and Marxism: A Philosophical
Contribution to Their Reconciliation (London: Routledge, 2001), p.
63.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Harold Bloom, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative
Minds (New York: Warner Books, 2002), p. 308.
8 Collier, Christianity and Marxism, p. 63.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose,
ed. J. Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982).
12 Bloom, Genius, pp. 309–10.
13 Christopher Hitchens, “Stand up for Denmark! Why are we not
defending our ally?,” Idealist (21 February 2006).
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2006/
02/stand_up_for_denmark.html [Accessed 22 February 2013].
Introduction
1 Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the
Bible to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1991), p. 27.
2 Harold Bloom, Poetics of Influence: New and Selected Criticism (New
Haven: Henry R. Schwab, 1988), p. 318.
3 Adam Fitzgerald, “The Anatomy of Influence: An Interview with
Harold Bloom,” Boston Review (April 2011), no page number.
http://bostonreview.net/NPM/adam_fitzgerald_harold_bloom.php
[Accessed 12 January 2013].
4 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd edn
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973) p. 35.
5 Ibid., p. 37.
6 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 87.
7 Ibid.
8 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 24.
9 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930), pp. 117–18. Reinhard
Bendix, Max Weber (London: Methuen, 1969), p. 59.
10 Ibid., p. 61.
11 Ibid., p. 275.
12 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, pp. 125–6.
13 Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 137.
14 Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1964), p. 5.
15 Harold Bloom, The Book of J, trans. David Rosenberg (New York:
Grove Press, 1990), p. 35.
16 Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams,
and Resurrection (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), pp. 187–8.
17 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 356.
18 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. xvii. Harold Bloom, The Western
Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Macmillan,
1994), p. 23.
19 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. xvii.
20 Bloom, The Western Canon, p. 23.
21 Bloom, Genius, p. ix.
22 Harold Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism (New York: Continuum,
2005), p. 36.
23 Harold Bloom, “The Glories of Yiddish,” New York Review of Books (6
November 2008), no page number.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/nov/06/the-glories-of-
yiddish/ [Accessed 28 May 2013]
24 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 117.
25 Cynthia Ozick, “Literature as Idol: Harold Bloom,” in Art and Ardor:
Essays by Cynthia Ozick (New York: Knopf, 1983), pp. 178–99. See
also Sanford Pinsker, “Jewish Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in
Modern Critical Views Cynthia Ozick, ed. Harold Bloom (New York:
Chelsea House, 1986), p. 122.
26 Graham Allen, Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflict, p. 130. Harold
Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination (New York: Seabury Press,
1976), p. 75.
27 Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of The Post
Christian Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 32. Harold
Bloom, “Introduction to American Religious Poems,” in American
Religious Poems: An Anthology, eds. Harold Bloom and Jesse Zuba
(New York: The Library of America, 2006), p. xxxvi.
28 Cynthia Ozick, “Judaism & Harold Bloom,” Commentary 67, 1 (1979),
46–7.
29 Bloom, The Book of J, p. 11.
30 Bloom, Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 29.
31 Timothy Parrish, “Creation’s Covenant: The Art of Cynthia Ozick,”
Texas Studies in Literature and Language 43, 4 (2001), 440–64.
32 Bloom, “Introduction” to Modern Critical Views: Cynthia Ozick, p. 5.
33 Ibid., pp. 2, 4.
34 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 7.
35 Quoted from Victor Stranderg, “The Art of Cynthia Ozick,” in Modern
Critical Views: Cynthia Ozick, pp. 83–4.
36 David Fite, Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), p. 222.
37 Parrish, “Creation’s Covenant: The Art of Cynthia Ozick,” p. 10.
38 Sanford Pinsker, “Jewish Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in
Modern Critical Views: Cynthia Ozick, p. 122.
39 Interview with Brian Lamb,” Booknotes (3 September 2000).
http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/157968-1/Harold+Bloom.aspx
[Accessed 22 May 2013].
40 Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust (London: Fontana Press, 1987), p. 218.
41 Gilbert, The Holocaust, pp. 218–19.
42 Ibid., p. 219.
43 Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 23.
44 Ibid., pp. 23–4.
45 Ibid., pp. 24–5.
46 Ibid., p. 25.
47 Bloom, Genius, pp. 748–50.
48 Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 25.
49 Ibid., p. 15.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid., p. 14.
52 Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), p.
198.
53 Ibid., p. 329.
54 Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 26.
55 Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p. 81.
56 Ibid., p. 339.
57 Bloom, The Book of J, p. 307.
58 Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 244.
59 Harold Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 18. Bloom, Omens of
Millennium, p. 244.
60 Bloom, Omens of Millennium, pp. 234, 247.
61 Ibid., p. 236.
62 Ibid., p. 252.
63 Bloom, Genius, p. 75.
64 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 357.
65 Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence, p. 278.
66 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. xi.
67 Robert Moynihan (ed.), A Recent Imagining: Interviews with Harold
Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, Paul De Man (New York:
Archon, 1986), p. 38.
68 Thomas Carlyle, Sartus Resartus (Edinburgh: CanonGate Classics,
1999), p. 112.
69 S. T. Coleridge, Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H.
Coleridge, 2 Vols (London: William Heinemann, 1995), II, p. 709.
70 Norma Rosen, Touching Evil (Michigan: Wayne State University Press,
1969), p. 3. See also Emily Miller Budick, “The Holocaust in the
Jewish American Literary Imagination,” in The Cambridge Companion
to Jewish American Literature, eds. Hana Wirth-Nesher and Michael P.
Kramer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 212.
71 Harold Bloom, The Shadow of a Great Rock (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2011), p. 144.
72 Bloom, Genius, pp. 799–800.
73 Ibid., p. 805.
74 Fite, Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision, p. 66.
75 Ibid., p. 337.
76 Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), p.
xxiii.
77 Ibid., p. xxv.
78 Ibid., p. 6.
79 Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1964), p. 34.
80 Fletcher, Allegory, p. 63.
81 Harold Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (New York: Penguin,
2004), pp. 37, 39.
82 Norman Finkelstein, The Ritual of New Creation: Jewish Tradition and
Contemporary Literature (New York: State University of New York
Press, 1992), p. 38.
83 Antonio Weiss, “Harold Bloom, The Art of Criticism No. 1,” The Paris
Review 118 (Spring 1991), no page number.
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2225/the-art-of-criticism-no-
1-harold-bloom [Accessed 9 May 2013]. See also Bloom, The Book of
J, p. 15. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New
York: Schocken Books, 1941), p. 17.
84 Bloom, Genius, p. 86.
85 Fite, Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision, p. 69.
86 Ibid., p. 70.
87 Jonathan Rosen, “So Who Is King of the Jews?,” New York Times (27
November 2005), no page number.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/27/books/review/27rosen.html?
pagewanted=all [Accessed 28 May 2013].
88 Bloom, The Shadow of a Great Rock, p. 113.
89 Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 242.
90 Ibid., p. 243.
91 Ibid., p. 25.
92 Ibid., p. 26.
93 Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p. 339.
94 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 57.
95 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 43.
96 Ibid., p. 84.
97 Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p. 332.
98 Fite, Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision, p. 187.
99 Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom be Found?, p. 6.
100 Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p. 332.
101 Ibid., p. 339.
102 Ibid., p. 329.
103 Harold Bloom, “Literature as the Bible,” New York Times (31 March
1988), no page number.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1988/mar/31/literature-as-
the-bible/?pagination=false [Accessed 10 May 2013].
104 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), pp. 136–7.
105 Fite, Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision, p. 69.
106 Winston Churchill, “Atlantic Charter, August 24, 1941, Broadcast,
London,” in Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897–1963,
ed. R. S. James, 8 Vols (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1974), VI, p. 6467.
107 Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (London:
HarperCollins, 1986), p. 186.
108 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 20.
109 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 5.
110 Ibid.
111 Harold Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic
Tradition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1972), p. 327.
112 Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime (Baltimore: The John Hopkins
University Press, 1986), p. x.
113 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, pp. 337–8.
114 Moynihan, A Recent Imagining, p. 42. Bloom, The Shadow of a Great
Rock, p. 215.
115 William Blake, The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David
Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1965).
116 Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 400.
117 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 333.
118 Ibid., p. 408.
119 Allen, Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflict, p. 146.
120 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 409.
121 Ibid., p. 333.
122 Ibid., p. 365.
123 Ibid., pp. 330–1.
124 Bloom, “Introduction to American Religious Poems,” p. xxxiii.
125 Harold Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005),
p. 221.
126 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 356.
127 Ibid., p. 358.
128 Ibid., p. 363.
129 Ibid., p. 395.
130 Ibid., p. 390.
131 Ibid., pp. 398, 400.
132 Ibid., p. 408.
133 Ibid., pp. 408, 417.
134 Ibid., pp. 418–19.
135 Bloom, The Book of J, pp. 14–15.
136 Bloom, The Western Canon, p. 22.
137 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, pp. 349–50.
138 Bloom, The Western Canon, p. 23.
139 Ibid.
140 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 7.
141 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 50.
142 Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p. 42.
143 Ibid., p. 23.
144 Ibid., p. 37.
145 Ibid., p. 326.
146 http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/157968-1/Harold+Bloom.aspx
[Accessed 22 May 2013].
147 Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (London: The Athlone
Press, 1980), p. 319.
148 Harold Bloom, The Breaking of the Vessels (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1982), p. 16.
149 Lentricchia, After the New Criticism, p. 320.
150 Ibid., p. 324.
151 Ibid., p. 326.
152 Allen, Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflict, pp. 35, 37.
153 Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (London: Faber and
Faber, 1984), p. 4.
154 Frank Lentricchia, “Introduction to The Breaking of the Vessels,” in The
Breaking of the Vessels, ed. Harold Bloom (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982), p. x. Allen, Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflict,
pp. 17–18.
155 Allen, Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflict, p. 29.
156 Lentricchia, After the New Criticism, p. 326.
157 Ibid., p. 328.
158 Ibid., p. 329.
159 Ibid.
160 Ibid., p. 331.
161 Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York:
Forth Estate, 1998), pp. 424–6.
162 Ibid., p. 427.
163 Ibid., pp. 428–31.
164 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 207.
Chapter 1
1 Geoffrey Hartman, A Critic’s Journey: Literary Reflections, 1958–
1998 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. xiv.
2 John Ellis, Against Deconstruction (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1990), p. 39.
3 Bloom, The Western Canon, p. 483.
4 Angus Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1971), p. 28.
5 Imre Salusinszky, Criticism in Society (New York: Methuen, 1987), p.
68.
6 Jean-Pierre Mileur, Literary Revisionism and the Burden of Modernity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 33.
7 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 64.
8 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 3.
9 Ibid., p. 4.
10 Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence, pp. 16–17. S. T. Coleridge,
Biographia Literaria, eds. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 Vols
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), II, p. 72.
11 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Philosophical Lectures, ed. Kathleen Coburn
(London: The Pilot Press, 1949), pp. 114, 175. See also
http://www.catherinemwallace.com/Home/coleridge/coleridges-theory-
of-language [Accessed 21 May 2013].
12 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, I, p. 23.
13 Paul de Man, Blindness & Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of
Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 267.
Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1975), p. 32.
14 T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London:
Methuen, 1934), p. 48.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., p. 53.
17 Ibid., p. 50.
18 Bloom, Genius, p. 371.
19 Ibid.
20 Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, p. 49.
21 Bloom, “Introduction to Anatomy of Criticism,” in Anatomy of
Criticism: Four Essays, ed. Northrop Frye (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1957), p. viii.
22 Bloom, “Introduction to Anatomy of Criticism,” p. ix.
23 Ibid., p. vii.
24 Ibid., p. x.
25 Ibid.
26 Robert Preyer, “Voyagers of the Imagination,” Yale Review 51, 2
(1961), 316–19.
27 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 121.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., p. 118.
30 Bloom, “Introduction to Anatomy of Criticism,” pp. vii, ix.
31 Ibid., p. x. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 119.
32 Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. 64.
33 Harold Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking, 2nd edn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1959), pp. 60–1.
34 Preyer, “Voyagers of the Imagination,” pp. 316–19.
35 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 118. Bloom, Anatomy of Influence, p.
31.
36 Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1969), pp. 169–70. Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. 12.
37 Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaker, p. 61.
38 Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life,
Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1966), p. 34.
39 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, pp. 33–4.
40 Ibid., p. 20.
41 Geoffrey Hartman, A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a
Displaced Child of Europe (New York: Fordham University Press,
2007), p. 47.
42 Bloom, Anatomy of Influence, p. 194.
43 Fletcher, Allegory, p. 17.
44 Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1987), p. 110.
45 Hartman, A Critic’s Journey, p. xxi.
46 Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking, p. 207.
47 Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1963), p. 195.
48 Bloom, The Breaking of the Vessels, pp. 60–1.
49 Ibid., p. 61.
50 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. xi.
51 Ibid., p. xii.
52 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 95.
53 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. xii.
54 Christopher Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004), pp. 14–19.
55 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. xi. Ricks, Allusion to the
Poets, pp. 5–6.
56 Quoted from Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the
English Poet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 4.
57 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. xxii.
58 Ibid., p. 36.
59 Ibid., p. 37.
60 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, pp. 226–7.
61 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 31.
62 Geoffrey Hartman, “Introduction to New Perspectives on Coleridge
and Wordsworth,” in New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth,
ed. G. Hartman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), p. xi.
63 Ibid.
64 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 16.
65 Harold Bloom, “The Breaking of Form,” in Deconstruction and
Criticism, ed. H. Bloom (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 16.
66 Geoffrey Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (London: Methuen,
1987), p. 178.
67 Bloom, Deconstruction and Criticism, p. 9.
68 S. T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer (Princeton, London:
Princeton University Press, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1993), p. 193.
69 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, pp. 16–17.
70 Ibid., p. 17.
71 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 97.
72 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 65.
73 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 30.
74 Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, p. 156.
75 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 10.
76 Bloom, Deconstruction and Criticism, p. 12.
77 Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, pp. 60, 402.
78 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 18.
79 Ibid., p. 17.
80 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 10.
81 Ibid., p. 11.
82 Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, pp. 294–5.
83 Paul De Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau,
Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, Yale University Press,
1979), pp. 110–11. Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden, ed.
Karle Schlecta (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1956), p. 3:314.
84 George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
(London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 197.
85 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 98.
86 Harold Bloom, Yeats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 62.
87 George Bornstein, Yeats and Shelley (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1970), p. 211.
88 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 18.
89 Ibid.
90 Ibid.
91 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 99.
92 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, pp. 10–11.
93 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 88.
94 Ibid., p. 91.
95 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 18.
96 Fletcher, Allegory, pp. 40–1.
97 Ibid., p. 49.
98 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 50. Bloom, Figures of Capable
Imagination, p. 11.
99 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 18.
100 Ibid., pp. 19, 24.
101 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 100.
102 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 59.
103 Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, pp. 8–9.
104 Fletcher, Allegory, p. 37.
105 Ibid., p. 36.
106 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1987).
107 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 19.
108 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 63.
109 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 19.
110 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 28.
111 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 101.
112 Fletcher, Allegory, p. 41. Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p.
11.
113 Bornstein, Yeats and Shelley, p. 210.
114 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 11.
115 Ibid.
116 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 20.
117 Ibid.
118 Ibid.
119 Ibid., p. 102.
120 Ibid., p. 103.
121 Lucy Newlyn, “Foreword,” in The Monstrous Debt: Modalities of
Romantic Influence in Twentieth-Century Literature, eds. Damian
Walford Davies and Richard Turley (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 2006), p. viii.
122 R. V. Young, “The Critic as Gnostic,” Modern Age 47, 1 (Winter 2005),
19–29.
Chapter 2
1 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 4.
2 Salusinszky, Criticism in Society, pp. 51, 68. Agata Bielik-Robson, The
Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2011), p. 333.
3 Harold Bloom, The Labyrinth (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009),
pp. xv–xvii.
4 Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment, p. 37.
5 De Man, Allegories of Reading, pp. 110–11. Friedrich Nietzsche,
Werke in drei Bänden, p. 3:314.
6 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London:
Routledge, 1979), p. 279.
7 See especially Michael Kelly, Iconoclasm in Aesthetics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 97–8.
8 Florian Rötzer, “Französische Philosophen im Gespräch” (Munchen,
1986), p. 74. http://www.newkabbalah.com/JDK.pdf [Accessed 18
August 2013].
9 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 43.
10 De Man, Blindness & Insight, p. 276.
11 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 56.
12 Ibid., p. 66.
13 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 50.
14 Geoffrey Hartman, “Preface,” in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. H.
Bloom (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. viii.
15 M. H. Abrams, Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and
Theory (New York: Norton, 1989), p. 244.
16 Bloom, Deconstruction and Criticism, p. 8.
17 Ibid., p. 10.
18 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 25.
19 Ibid.
20 Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on
Husserl’s Theory of Signs (Evanston: North Western University Press,
1973), p. 156. See also J. Hillis Miller, Theory Now and Then (London:
HarvesterWheatsheaf, 1991), p. 104.
21 Miller, Theory Now and Then, pp. 122–3.
22 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (London: Allen &
Unwin, 1932), pp. 671–2. Miller, Theory Now and Then, p. 137.
23 Miller, Theory Now and Then, p. 107.
24 Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 102.
25 Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other or, The Prosthesis of
Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1998), p. 53. See also http://www.newkabbalah.com/JDK.pdf
[Accessed 18 August 2013].
26 Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 289.
27 Ibid., p. 285.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., p. 286.
30 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 193.
31 Alethea Haytor, Opium and The Romantic Imagination (London:
Faber, 1968), pp. 94–5. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an
English Opium Eater and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 70.
32 Jonathan Bate, “The Literature of Power: Coleridge and De Quincey,”
in Coleridge’s Visionary Languages: Essays in Honor of J. B. Beer,
eds. Tim Fulford and Morton Paley (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993),
p. 137.
33 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 1.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., p. 5.
36 Ibid., p. 16.
37 Ibid., p. 27.
38 Ibid., p. 40.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., p. 55.
41 Bloom, The Book of J, p. 15. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in
Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1941), p. 17. Antonio
Weiss, “Harold Bloom, The Art of Criticism No. 1,” The Paris Review
118 (Spring 1991), no page number.
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2225/the-art-of-criticism-no-
1-harold-bloom [Accessed 28 May 2013].
42 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 42.
43 Ibid., pp. 42–3.
44 Ibid., p. 42.
45 Ibid., p. 43.
46 Ibid., p. 44.
47 Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after
Structuralism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 113.
48 Frank Kermode, “Paul de Man’s Abyss,” London Review of Books 11,
6 (16 March 1989), pp. 3–7.
49 Jakobson, Language in Literature, p. 113.
50 Fletcher, Allegory, p. 188. J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (Worcester:
Macmillan, 1990), pp. 34–5.
51 Frazer, The Golden Bough, p. 45.
52 Gayatri Spivak, “Introduction to Of Grammatology,” in Of
Grammatology, ed. Jacques Derrida, trans. G. Spivak (Baltimore: John
Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. xv.
53 Christopher Norris, Deconstruction Theory and Practice (London and
New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 109.
54 Ibid., p. 48.
55 Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 5.
56 Ibid., p. 6.
57 Ibid.
58 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Walters (New York:
Continuum, 1981), p. 80.
59 Ibid., p. 97.
60 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 43.
61 Ibid.
62 Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. xxxix.
63 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 48.
64 Peter de Bolla, Harold Bloom: Towards Historical Rhetorics (London:
Routledge, 1988), pp. 50–1.
65 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 25.
66 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 49.
67 Ibid., p. 50.
68 Bloom, Deconstruction and Criticism, p. 9.
69 Ibid.
70 Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 279.
71 Ibid., p. 280.
72 Ibid.
Chapter 3
1 Walter Nash, Rhetoric: The Wit of Persuasion (London: Blackwell,
1989), p. 1.
2 Abrams, Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Theory, p.
250.
3 Bloom, Anatomy of Influence, p. 9.
4 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, pp. xix–xx.
5 De Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 300.
6 Ibid., p. 205.
7 Abrams, Doing Things with Texts, p. 319.
8 De Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 106.
9 Ibid., p. 117.
10 Ibid., p. 301.
11 Bloom, Deconstruction and Criticism, pp. 7–8.
12 Ibid., p. 8.
13 J. Hillis Miller, The Linguistic Moment: From Wordsworth to Stevens
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 339.
14 Miller, Theory Now and Then, pp. 348–9.
15 De Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 108.
16 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, pp. 8–9.
17 Ibid., p. 8.
18 De Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 207. See also Miller, Theory Then
and Now, p. 349.
19 Bloom, Deconstruction and Criticism, p. 8. Bloom, The Western
Canon, p. 40.
20 Bielik-Robson, The Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction, p.
18.
21 Moynihan, A Recent Imagining, p. 143.
22 Ibid., p. 142.
23 Ibid.
24 Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 182.
25 Bloom, The Book of J, p. 25.
26 Ibid., pp. 25–6.
27 Ibid., p. 26.
28 Fletcher, Allegory, p. 38.
29 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 94.
30 De Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 274.
31 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 73.
32 Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, p. 386.
33 Ibid., p. 401.
34 Allen, Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflict, p. 45.
35 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 76.
36 Ibid., p. 70.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., p. 74.
39 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 17.
40 Allen, Harold Bloom A Poetics of Conflict, pp. 45–6.
41 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 77.
42 Ibid., p. 64.
43 Ibid., p. 65.
44 Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, p. 392.
45 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 67.
46 Ibid.
47 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 80.
48 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 69.
49 Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language: From
Chaucer Through Robert Frost (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004), p.
883.
50 Ibid., pp. 76–7.
51 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, pp. xviii–xxiii.
52 Ibid., p. xxiii.
53 Peter de Bolla, Harold Bloom Towards Historical Rhetorics, p. 28.
Bloom, The Western Canon, p. 8.
54 De Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 112.
55 Ibid.
56 Bielik-Robson, The Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction, p.
100.
57 Ibid., p. 94.
58 Ibid., p. 263.
59 Ibid., p. 274.
60 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 70.
61 Fletcher, Allegory, p. 62.
62 Ibid., p. 44.
63 Harold Bloom, “Coleridge: The Anxiety of Influence,” in New
Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth, p. 265.
64 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of The Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1990), p. 311.
65 Ibid.
66 Christopher Norris, Paul de Man: Deconstruction and the Critique of
Aesthetic Ideology (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 182.
67 Kate Soper, What is Nature: Culture Politics and the Non-Human
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 32.
68 Paul de Man, “The Jews and Us,” in Responses: On Paul de Man’s
Wartime Journalism, eds. Werner Harmacher and Paul Hertz (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 29.
69 Jacques Derrida, Mémoires for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1989), p. 201. Jacques Derrida, “Like the Sound of
the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War,” Critical Inquiry XIV
(1988), 590–652.
70 Quoted from Derrida, Mémoires for Paul de Man, p. 204.
71 Quoted from Norris, Paul de Man: Deconstruction and the Critique of
Aesthetic Ideology, p. 190, but see also Geoffrey Hartman, “Blindness
and Insight,” The New Republic (7 March 1998), pp. 26–31, 31.
72 Derrida, Mémoires for Paul de Man, p. 258.
73 Ibid., p. 260.
74 Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 328.
75 Derrida, Mémoires for Paul de Man, p. 259.
76 Paul de Man, “Shelley Disfigured,” in Deconstruction and Criticism, p.
57.
77 Quoted from Eamonne Dunne, J. Hillis Miller And The Possibilities of
Reading: Literature After Deconstruction (London: Continuum, 2012),
p. 43.
78 Quoted from John Harwood, Eliot to Derrida: The Poverty of
Interpretation (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 198.
79 De Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 300. Derrida, Mémoires for Paul de
Man, p. 228.
80 De Man, Mémoires for Paul de Man, pp. 228–9, Allegories of Reading,
p. 288.
81 De Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, p. 4.
82 Ibid., p. 153.
83 Seán Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and
Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1998), pp. 1–3.
84 Ibid., pp. 5–6.
85 Ibid., p. 7.
86 Barbara Johnson, “The Surprise of Otherness: A Note on the War-time
Writings of Paul de Man,” in Literary Theory Today, eds. Peter Collier
and Helga Geyer-Ryan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), p.
13.
87 R. S. Thomas, What is a Welshman? (Swansea: Christopher Davies
Publishers, 1974), p. 12.
88 Byron Rogers, The Man Who Went Into The West (London: Aurum,
2006), pp. 35–7, 79.
89 Evelyn Barish, The Double Life of Paul de Man (New York: Norton,
2014), pp. xvi, 440, 427.
90 R. S. Thomas, Song at the Year’s Turning (London: Rupert Hard-
Davis, 1955), p. 64. Rogers, The Man Who Went Into The West, p.
307. See also Alistair Heys, R.S. Thomas and Romanticism (Plovdiv:
The Pygmalion Press, 2004).
91 Peter Brooks, “The Strange Case of Paul de Man”, New York Review
of Books (3 April, 2014).
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/apr/03/strange-case-
paul-de-man/?
utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=March+11+2014&utm_content=
March+11+2014+CID_bc4fac6a5a161cec184203d112277fb3&utm_so
urce=Email%20marketing%20software&utm_term=The%20Strange%
20Case%20of%20Paul%20de%20Man [Accessed 3 March 2014].
92 Rogers, The Man Who Went Into The West, p. 45.
93 Hartman, A Critic’s Journey: Literary Reflections, 1958–1998, p. xxiii.
Chapter 4
1 Quoted from John Harwood, Eliot to Derrida: The Poverty of
Interpretation (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 1.
2 Harold Bloom, Novelists and Novels (New York: Checkmark Books,
2007), p. 21.
3 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. xvii.
4 Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 93.
5 Quoted from A. D. Nuttal, Two Concepts of Allegory (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), p. 5.
6 Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 13.
7 Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy,
Socialism (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 96, 100.
8 Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern
Culture (London: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 5.
9 Jerome McGann, The Beauty of Inflections (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998),
p. 65.
10 Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 13.
11 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practising New
Historicism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 29.
Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, p. 3.
12 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practising New
Historicism, p. 51.
13 Ibid., pp. 34–5.
14 Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 39.
15 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practising New
Historicism, p. 32. Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of
Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: University of Princeton Press,
1952), p. 23.
16 Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 42.
17 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. xvii.
18 Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. xvii.
19 W. B. Yeats, W.B. Yeats: Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1990).
20 Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 149.
21 McGann, The Romantic Ideology, p. 1.
22 Ibid., p. 29.
23 S. T. Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual, ed. W. G. T. Shedd (New
York, 1875), pp. 437–8.
24 Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language, p. 63.
25 Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1972), p. 109.
26 Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, p. 9. McGann, The Beauty of
Inflections, p. 63.
27 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994).
28 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practising New
Historicism, p. 9.
29 Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, p. 3. Bloom, The Western Canon, p. 23.
30 Salusinszky, Criticism in Society, p. 66.
31 Ibid., p. 67.
32 Ibid., p. 66.
33 Bloom, How to Read and Why, p. 24.
34 Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, “Ranting against Cant”, Atlantic Magazine
(July 2003), no page number.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/07/ranting-against-
cant/303095/ [Accessed 16 February 2013].
35 Bloom, The Western Canon, pp. 24–5.
36 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practising New
Historicism, p. 12.
37 Ibid., p. 13.
38 Ibid., p. 68.
39 Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, p. 411.
40 Ibid., p. 717.
41 Bloom, The Western Canon, p. 524.
42 Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, p. 26.
43 Ibid.
44 Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, p. 664.
45 Ibid., p. 663.
46 Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, pp. 19, 32–3.
47 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 24.
48 Bloom, Shakespeare, p. 665.
49 Roberto Fernández Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays, trans. Edward
Baker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 14, 16,
45.
50 Bloom, The Western Canon, p. 29.
51 Ibid., pp. 7, 29.
52 Roberto Fernández Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays, p. x.
53 Paula Burnett, Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics (Gainesville:
University of Florida Press, 2001), p. 3.
54 Fite, Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision, p. 5.
55 Harold Bloom, Sylvia Plath (New York: Chelsea House, 2001), p. 9.
56 Ibid.
57 Lillian Robinson, “Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon”, in The
New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory, ed.
Elaine Showalter (London: Virago, 1989), p. 105.
58 Ibid., p. 110.
59 Ibid., p. 112.
60 Harold Bloom, “Introduction to Modern Critical Views: Sylvia Plath”,
in Modern Critical Views: Sylvia Plath, ed. H. Bloom (New York:
Chelsea House Publishers, 2007), p. 9.
61 Linda Bundtzen, “ ‘Ariel’ as Plath at Her Most Triumphant,” in
Modern Critical Views: Sylvia Plath, p. 70.
62 Allen, Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflicts, p. 141.
63 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of
Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988), p. 12.
64 Jerome McGann, Are the Humanities Inconsequent?: Interpreting
Marx’s Riddle of the Dog (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2009), p. 39.
65 Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, p. 3.
66 Bloom, The Western Canon, p. 28.
67 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to
Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), pp. 2, 9.
68 Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 6, Greenblatt, Learning to
Curse, p. 221.
69 Bloom, The Western Canon, pp. 30–1.
70 Ibid., p. 16.
71 Christopher Rollason, “On the Stone Raft: Harold Bloom in Catalonia
and Portugal,” in The Salt Companion to Harold Bloom, eds. Roy
Sellars and Graham Allen (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2007), p. 160.
72 Bloom, The Western Canon, p. 16.
73 Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life,
Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1966), p. 31.
Chapter 5
1 Adam Begley, “Colossus among Critics: Harold Bloom,” New York
Times (25 September 1994), no page number.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/01/specials/bloom-colossus.html
[Accessed 16 February 2013].
2 Peter Morris, “Harold Bloom, Parody, and the ‘Other Tradition’, ” in
The Salt Companion to Harold Bloom, eds. Roy Sellars and Graham
Allen (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2007), p. 439.
3 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 348.
4 Ibid., p. 347.
5 Sansford Pinsker, “Jewish Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in
Cynthia Ozick: Modern Critical Views, p. 121.
6 Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence, p. 23.
7 David Mikics, “Harold Bloom is God,” Tablet (2 January 2003), no
page number. http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-
culture/books/120455/harold-bloom-is-god [Accessed 25 March
2013].
8 http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/157968-1/Harold+Bloom.aspx
[Accessed 22 May 2013].
9 http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2225/the-art-of-criticism-no-
1-harold-bloom [Accessed 9 May 2013].
10 Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence, p. 7.
11 Bloom, Genius, p. 181.
12 Harold Bloom, “The Glories of Yiddish,” New York Review of Books (6
November 2008), no page number.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/nov/06/the-glories-of-
yiddish/?pagination=false [Accessed 28 May 2013].
13 Moynihan, A Recent Imagining, p. 167.
14 William Deresiewicz, “The Shaman,” New Republic (14 September
2011), no page number. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-
and-arts/magazine/94947/harold-bloom-the-anatomy-of-influence#
[Accessed 17 May 2013].
15 Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence, p. 30.
16 Harold Bloom, “The Jewish Question: British Anti-Semitism,” New
York Times (7 May 2010), no page number.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/books/review/Bloom-t.html?_r=0
[Accessed 28 May 2013].
17 Susanne Klingenstein, Enlarging America: The Cultural Work of
Jewish Literary Scholars, 1930–1990 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse
University Press, 1998), p. 80.
18 Ibid., p. 81.
19 Abrams, Doing Things with Texts, pp. 287–8.
20 Ibid., p. 293.
21 Bloom, The Breaking of the Vessels, p. 13.
22 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, pp. 395, 403.
23 Bloom, Novelists and Novels, pp. 3–4.
24 http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/157968-1/Harold+Bloom.aspx
[Accessed 22 May 2013].
25 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 319.
26 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 46.
27 Harold Bloom, “Introduction to Musical Variations on Jewish
Thought,” in Musical Variations on Jewish Thought, ed. Oliver Revault
d’Allones (New York: George Braziller, 1984), p. 7.
28 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 351.
29 Harold Bloom, Agon, p. 325.
30 Ibid.
31 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 353.
32 Ibid.
33 Bloom, The American Religion, pp. 30, 32.
34 Harold Bloom, “Review of Gerschom Scholem: Kabbalah and
Counter-History,” New Republic (23 June 1979), pp. 36–7.
35 Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh, p. 42.
36 Bloom, The American Religion, p. 81.
37 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York:
Schocken Publishing, 1995), p. 74.
38 Robert Alter, “Introduction to Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism,” p.
xviii.
39 Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. 465.
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2225/the-art-of-criticism-no-
1-harold-bloom [Accessed 9 May 2013].
40 Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans. Ralph
Manheim (New York: Schocken Publishing, 1996), p. 19.
41 Bernard McGinn, “Introduction to On the Kabbalah and Its
Symbolism,” p. ix.
42 Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 236.
43 Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, pp. 14–15.
44 Bloom, The Book of J, p. 3.
45 Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking, p. vii.
46 Ibid., p. 4.
47 Ibid., p. 3.
48 Ibid., p. 57.
49 Ibid., p. 59.
50 Ibid., p. 65.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., p. 66.
53 Ibid., p. 69.
54 Ibid., p. 71.
55 Ibid., p. 235.
56 Ibid., p. 233.
57 Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. 20.
58 Ibid., p. 21.
59 Ibid., p. 31.
60 Ibid., p. 128.
61 Ibid., p. 138.
62 Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 123.
63 Ibid., pp. 190, 242.
64 Ibid., pp. 367, 378.
65 Ibid., p. 52.
66 Ibid., p. 95.
67 Ibid., pp. 358–9.
68 Reed Way Dasenbrock, “Review of Yeats, Ireland and Fascism,”
Comparative Literature 97, 5 (December 1982), 1262–5.
69 Harold Bloom, “Yeats and the Romantics,” in Modern Poetry: Essays
in Criticism, ed. John Hollander (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1968), p. 503.
70 Bloom, Yeats, p. 7.
71 Ibid., p. 103.
72 Ibid., p. 6.
73 Sandra Seigal, “Prolegomenon to Bloom: The Opposing Self,”
Diacritics 1, 4 (1971), 36.
74 Bloom, Yeats, p. 68.
75 Ibid., p. 7.
76 Ibid., p. 183.
77 Ibid., p. 78.
78 Ibid., p. 181.
79 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 35.
80 Bloom, Agon, 92. Allen, Harold Bloom A Poetics of Conflict, pp. 22–3.
81 Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 13.
82 Moynihan, A Recent Imagining, p. 34.
83 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 118.
84 Ibid., p. 21.
85 Ibid.
86 Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, p. 90.
87 Bloom, Deconstruction and Criticism, p. 12.
88 Ibid., p. 3.
89 Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. 81.
90 Bloom, Yeats, p. 188.
91 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 39.
92 Ibid., p. 38.
93 Ibid., p. 37.
94 Ibid.
95 Elaine Shepherd, Conceding an Absence (London: Macmillan, 1996),
p. 1.
96 Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh, p. 193.
97 Fite, Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision, p. 79.
98 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 37.
99 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 26.
100 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 60.
101 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. xii.
102 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. xxii.
103 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. x.
104 Ibid., p. 28.
105 Ibid., p. 31.
106 Ibid., p. 32.
107 Ibid., p. 15.
108 Ibid., p. 17.
109 Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages,
trans. W. T. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. viii.
110 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, pp. 4–5.
111 Ibid., p. 5.
112 Ibid., p. 42.
113 Ibid., p. 44.
114 Ibid., pp. 45–6.
115 Ibid., p. 47.
116 Ibid., p. 51.
117 Ibid.
118 Ibid., p. 54.
119 Ibid., pp. 6, 55, 101.
120 Ibid., p. 62.
121 Bloom, Agon, p. 3.
122 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 5.
123 Ibid., pp. 6–7.
124 Ibid., p. 9.
125 Ibid., p. 16.
126 Ibid., p. 9.
127 Ibid., p. 14.
128 Ibid., p. 24.
129 Ibid., p. 25.
130 Ibid., p. 28.
131 Ibid., p. 29.
132 Ibid., p. 30.
133 Ibid.
134 Ibid., p. 31.
135 Ibid., p. 33.
136 Ibid., p. 34.
137 Ibid.
138 Ibid., p. 35.
139 Ibid., p. 38.
140 Ibid., pp. 37–8.
141 Bloom, Novelists and Novels, pp. 211–12.
142 Ibid., p. 46.
143 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 235.
144 Ibid., p. 237.
145 Ibid., p. 239.
146 Ibid., p. 244.
147 Ibid., p. 245.
148 Ibid., pp. 245–56.
149 Bloom, Agon, p. 158.
150 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 246.
151 Ibid., p. 247.
152 Ibid.
153 Ibid., p. 348.
154 Ibid., p. 349.
155 Ibid.
156 Ibid., p. 350.
157 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 252.
158 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 351.
159 Ibid.
160 Ibid.
161 Ibid., p. 352.
162 Ibid.
163 Ibid.
164 Ibid., p. 353.
165 Ibid.
166 Ibid., p. 354.
167 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 254.
168 Ibid., p. 248.
169 http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-
culture/books/120455/harold-bloom-is-god [Accessed 25 March 2013].
170 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 354.
171 Ibid., p. 355.
172 Bloom, How to Read and Why, p. 245.
173 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 357.
174 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 254. Bloom, Poetics of
Influence, p. 356.
175 Ibid., p. 262.
176 Ibid., p. 257.
177 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 407.
178 Ibid.
179 http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-
culture/books/120455/harold-bloom-is-god [Accessed 25 March 2013].
180 Bloom, How to Read and Why?, p. 28.
181 Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 5.
182 Ibid., p. 10.
183 Ibid.
184 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 335.
185 Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 18.
186 Ibid., p. 20.
187 Ibid., p. 22.
188 Ibid.
189 Ibid., p. 97.
190 Ibid., p. 121.
191 Ibid., p. 146.
192 Ibid.
193 Ibid., p. 148.
194 Ibid., p. 149.
195 Ibid., p. 152.
196 Ibid., p. 154.
197 Ibid., p. 162.
198 Ibid., p. 164.
199 Ibid., p. 167.
200 Ibid., p. 186.
201 Ibid., p. 166.
202 Ibid., pp. 166–7.
203 Bloom, Novelists and Novels, pp. 277–8.
204 Ibid., p. 291.
205 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 35.
206 Bloom, Novelists and Novels, p. 293.
207 Ibid.
208 Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 192.
209 Ibid., p. 278.
210 Ibid., p. 283.
211 Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh, p. 42.
212 Ibid., p. 50.
213 Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 45.
214 Bloom, The Book of J, p. 10.
215 Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh, p. 50.
216 Ibid., p. 14.
217 Robert Alter, “Harold Bloom’s ‘J’, ” Commentary 90, 58 (November
1990), 28.
218 Ibid., p. 18.
219 Ibid., p. 19.
220 Ibid., p. 23.
221 Bloom, The Book of J, p. 29.
222 Ibid., p. 30.
223 Ibid., p. 31.
224 Ibid., p. 42.
225 Ibid., p. 259.
226 Ibid., p. 46.
227 Ibid., p. 44.
228 Ibid., p. 178.
229 Ibid., p. 183.
230 Ibid., p. 185.
231 Ibid., p. 210.
232 Ibid., p. 229.
233 Ibid., p. 233.
234 Ibid., p. 239.
235 Ibid., p. 244.
236 Ibid., p. 255.
237 Ibid., p. 262.
238 Ibid., p. 268.
239 Ibid., p. 282.
240 Ibid., p. 288.
241 Ibid., p. 293.
242 Ibid., p. 294.
243 Moshe Idel, “Enoch and Elijah: Some Remarks on Apotheosis,
Theophany and Jewish Mysticism,” in The Salt Companion to Harold
Bloom, p. 347.
244 Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 28.
245 Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh, p. 3.
246 Ibid., p. 78.
247 Ibid., p. 79.
248 Ibid., p. 82.
249 Ibid.
250 Ibid., p. 62.
251 Ibid., p. 64.
252 Ibid., p. 70.
253 Ibid.
254 Ibid., pp. 90–1.
255 Ibid., p. 114.
256 Ibid., p. 97.
257 Ibid.
258 Ibid., pp. 97–8.
259 Ibid., p. 98.
260 Ibid., p. 115.
261 Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh, p. 102.
262 Ibid., p. 104.
263 Ibid., p. 119.
264 Ibid., p. 131.
265 Ibid., p. 149.
266 Ibid., p. 148–9.
267 Ibid., p. 138.
268 Ibid., p. 146.
269 Ibid., p. 182.
270 Ibid., p. 169.
271 Ibid., p. 185.
272 Ibid., p. 191.
273 Ibid., p. 206.
274 Bloom, Omens of the Millennium, p. 178.
275 Ibid., pp. 16–17.
276 Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh, p. 218.
277 Ibid., p. 210.
278 Ibid., p. 213.
279 Ibid., p. 233.
280 Ibid., p. 214.
281 Ibid., p. 211.
282 Ibid., p. 155.
283 Ibid., p. 175.
Chapter 6
1 Bloom, “Introduction to American Religious Poems,” p. xxxii.
2 Trevor Eppehimer, Protestantism (New York: Marshal Cavendish,
2007), pp. 9–43.
3 Quoted from Michael A. Mullet, Martin Luther (London: Routledge,
2004), p. 134.
4 Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. xviii.
5 Ibid.
6 Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 286, 373.
7 http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/157968-1/Harold+Bloom.aspx
[Accessed 22 May 2013].
8 Bloom, The American Religion, p. 38.
9 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, pp. 131–3.
10 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, pp. 413–14.
11 Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. xviii.
12 Bloom, The Shadow of a Great Rock, p. 7.
13 Bloom, The American Religion, p. 37.
14 Ibid., Bloom, “Introduction to American Religious Poems,” p. xxvii.
15 Ibid., Bloom, pp. xxviii, xxix.
16 http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/157968-1/Harold+Bloom.aspx
[Accessed 22 May 2013].
17 Ibid., Bloom, p. xxxiii.
18 Ibid., p. xxxiv.
19 Ibid., p. xxxv.
20 Ibid., p. xxxvi.
21 Ibid., pp. xxxviii, xliv.
22 Ibid., p. xliv.
23 Bloom, Agon, p. 327.
24 Harold Bloom Interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel,” Queen’s Quarterly
102, 3, (Fall 1995), 609–19.
http://www.cbc.ca/writersandcompany/episode/2012/06/29/harold-
bloom-interview-from-1995/ [Accessed 28 May 2013].
25 Bloom, Novelists and Novels, p. 26.
26 Ibid., p. 27.
27 Allen, Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflict, p. 128.
28 Harold Bloom, “Who Will Praise the Lord?,” New York Review of
Books (22 November, 2007).
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/nov/22/who-will-
praise-the-lord/?pagination=false [Accessed 22 May 2013].
29 Bloom, The Shadow of a Great Rock, p. 22.
30 Ibid., p. 264.
31 Ibid., pp. 257, 261.
32 Bloom, Novelists and Novels, pp. 198, 202.
33 Bloom, The American Religion, p. 264.
34 Bloom, Agon, p. 145.
35 Ibid., p. 151.
36 Adam Begley, “Colossus Among Literary Critics: Harold Bloom,” New
York Times on-line (25 September 1994).
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/01/specials/bloom-colossus.html
[Accessed 28 May 2013].
37 Bloom, The Visionary Company, pp. xvii–xxiii.
38 Ibid., p. xvii.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid., p. xxiii.
42 Ibid., p. 464.
43 Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language, pp. 58, 62.
44 Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking, p. 114.
45 Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. xix.
46 Ibid., p. xxiv.
47 Ibid., p. 7.
48 Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. 128.
49 Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 129.
50 Ibid., p. 31.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., p. 20.
53 Ibid., pp. 25–9.
54 Ibid., p. 407.
55 Ibid., p. 272.
56 Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 132.
57 Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 32.
58 Ibid., p. 17.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid., p. 16.
61 Ibid., p. 19.
62 Ibid., pp. 28–9.
63 Ibid., p. 26.
64 Ibid., p. 23.
65 Ibid., p. 19.
66 Ibid., p. 22.
67 Ibid., p. 26.
68 Ibid., p. 21.
69 Ibid., p. 31.
70 Ibid., p. 19.
71 Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, p. 416.
72 Ibid., p. 242.
73 Ibid., p. 117.
74 Ibid., p. 29.
75 Ibid., p. 81.
76 Ibid., p. 363.
77 Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 123. Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, p.
95.
78 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 96.
79 Ibid.
80 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 53.
81 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 96. See also Fite, Harold Bloom, p.
78.
82 Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, p. 28.
83 Ibid., pp. 367, 378.
84 Ibid., p. 402.
85 Ibid., p. 367.
86 Fite, Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision, p. 9.
87 Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, p. 160.
88 Ibid., p. 125.
89 Ibid., p. 128.
90 Ibid., p. 426. Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence, p. 4.
91 Ibid., pp. 289, 297.
92 Ibid., p. 252.
93 Ibid., p. 392.
94 Bloom, Yeats, p. 7.
95 Ibid., p. 57.
96 Ibid., p. 88. Bloom, “Yeats and the Romantics,” p. 517.
97 Bloom, Yeats, p. 73.
98 Ibid., p. 216.
99 Ibid., p. 215.
100 Ibid., p. 189.
101 Ibid., p. 471.
102 Bornstein, Yeats and Shelley, pp. 33, 35.
103 Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 162.
104 Bloom, Yeats, p. 60.
105 Ibid., p. 63.
106 Bloom, “Yeats and the Romantics,” p. 502. Bloom, Poetry and
Repression, p. 206.
107 Bloom, “Yeats and the Romantics,” p. 501.
108 Ibid., p. 519.
109 Bloom, Yeats, p. 12.
110 Ibid., p. 68.
111 Ibid., p. 179.
112 Ibid., pp. 179–80.
113 Ibid., pp. 23–4.
114 Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 186.
115 Ibid., pp. 185–94.
116 Bloom, Agon, p. 150.
117 Bloom, Yeats, p. 24.
118 Ibid., p. 35.
119 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 44.
120 Ibid.
121 Bloom, Yeats, p. 25.
122 Ibid., p. 181.
123 Ibid., pp. 32, 34.
124 Ibid., p. 33.
125 Ibid., p. 37.
126 Ibid., p. 35.
127 Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, pp. 136–7.
128 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 113.
129 Ibid.
130 Ibid., p. 125.
131 Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 138.
132 Ibid., pp. 131, 134.
133 Ibid., p. 139.
134 Ibid., p. 148.
135 Ibid., pp. 185–6.
136 Ibid., p. 187.
137 Ibid., p. 186.
138 Ibid., p. 187.
139 Ibid., p. 189.
140 Ibid., p. 190.
141 Ibid., p. 193.
142 Ibid., p. 187.
143 Ibid., p. 68.
144 Ibid., p. 166.
145 Ibid., p. 160.
146 Ibid., p. 164.
147 Ibid., p. 171.
148 Ibid., p. 173.
149 Ibid., p. 182. See also John Ruskin, Modern Painters, “Of the Pathetic
Fallacy,” 3, Pt. 4, § 8. (1856).
150 Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 182.
151 Ibid., p. 176.
152 Ibid., p. 190.
153 Ibid., p. 339.
154 Ibid., p. 340.
155 Ibid.
156 Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1999), pp. 646, 669. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the
Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), p. xxii.
157 Robert Nisbet, History and the Idea of Progress (New Brunswick:
Transaction Publishers, 1994), p. ix.
158 E. H. Carr, What is History? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), pp. 38,
43.
159 Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence, p. 4.
160 Ibid.
161 Bloom, Agon, p. 215.
162 Ibid., p. 216.
163 Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, pp. 341–2.
164 Ibid., p. 343.
165 Ibid., p. 214.
166 Ibid.
167 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 164.
168 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 251.
169 Ibid.
170 Ibid., p. 243.
171 Ibid., p. 242.
172 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 63.
173 Ibid., p. 47.
174 Ibid., p. 48.
175 Ibid.
176 Ibid., p. 51.
177 Ibid., p. 52.
178 Ibid., p. 53.
179 Ibid., p. 54.
180 Ibid., p. 55.
181 Ibid., p. 57.
182 Ibid., p. 60.
183 Ibid., p. 64.
184 Ibid., pp. 50–1.
185 Ibid., p. 56.
186 Ibid., p. 70.
187 Ibid.
188 Bloom, Agon, p. 146.
189 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, pp. 67, 70.
190 Ibid., pp. 72–3.
191 Ibid., p. 73.
192 Ibid., p. 74.
193 Ibid., p. 99.
194 Ibid., p. 69.
195 Ibid., p. 80.
196 Ibid., pp. 102, 109.
197 Ibid., p. 100.
198 Bloom, Agon, p. 148.
199 Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, p. 1.
200 Ibid., pp. 2–3.
201 Ibid., p. 51.
202 Ibid., pp. 51–2.
203 Ibid., p. 56.
204 Ibid., pp. 61–5.
205 Ibid., p. 76.
206 Ibid., p. 70.
207 Ibid., p. 74.
208 Ibid., p. 95.
209 Ibid., p. 98.
210 Ibid., p. 103.
211 Ibid., p. 120.
212 Ibid., p. 130.
213 Wallace Stevens, Wallace Stevens: Collected Poems (London: Faber,
1984).
214 Ibid., p. 132.
215 Ibid., p. 147.
216 Ibid., p. 163.
217 Ibid., p. 168.
218 Ibid., p. 170.
219 Ibid., p. 175.
220 Ibid., p. 194.
221 Ibid., pp. 189–90.
222 Ibid., p. 204.
223 Ibid., p. 208.
224 Ibid., p. 258.
225 Ibid., p. 266.
226 Ibid., p. 270.
227 Ibid., p. 280.
228 Ibid.
229 Ibid., p. 281.
230 Ibid., pp. 282–3.
231 Ibid., p. 306.
232 Ibid., p. 307.
233 Ibid., p. 328.
234 Ibid., p. 335.
235 Ibid., p. 336.
236 Ibid., p. 346.
237 Ibid., p. 350.
238 Ibid., Bloom, p. 381.
239 Bloom, Agon, p. 331.
240 Ibid., p. 332.
241 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, pp. 213–14.
242 Bloom, Agon, p. 9.
243 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 221.
244 Ibid., p. 214.
245 Ibid.
246 Bloom, Agon, p. 6.
247 Ibid., p. 7.
248 Ibid.
249 Ibid., p. 8.
250 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 212.
251 Tertullian, The Writings of Tertullian II: Ante Nicene Christian Library
Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to AD 325 Part
Fifteen, eds. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Whitefish:
Kessinger Publishing, 2004), p. 124.
252 Bloom, Agon, p. 17.
253 Ibid., p. 80.
254 Ibid., pp. 104–5.
255 Ibid., p. 125.
256 Ibid., p. 127.
257 Ibid., p. 93.
258 Ibid.
259 Ibid., p. 62.
260 Ibid., p. 114.
261 Ibid., p. 52.
262 Ibid., p. 74.
263 Ibid., pp. 63–4.
264 Ibid., p. 57.
265 Ibid., pp. 30–2.
266 Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 240.
267 Ibid., p. 239.
268 Bloom, Agon, pp. 119–120.
269 Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 183.
270 Bloom, Agon, p. 121.
271 Ibid., p. 178.
272 Ibid., p. 150.
273 Ibid., p. 149.
274 Ibid., pp. 155–6.
275 Ibid., p. 67.
276 Ibid., p. 154.
277 Ibid., p. 170.
278 Ibid., p. 165.
279 Bloom, Omens of the Millennium, pp. 48–9.
280 Ibid., p. 49.
281 Bloom, Agon, p. 186.
282 Ibid., p. 195.
283 Ibid., p. 194.
284 Ibid., p. 189.
285 R. W. Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays & Lectures (New York:
The Library of America, 1983), p. 119.
286 George Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Barbarism (New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), p. 198. Quoted from The
Poetical Works of Robert Browning, XV Vols., ed. Ian Jack (Oxford:
Clarendon, 2000), IV, pp. 323–4.
287 Ibid., p. 26.
288 Ibid.
289 Ibid., p. 29.
290 Elias Hicks, “A Declaration,” &c., published by order of the Yearly
Meeting of “Orthodox Friends,” held in Phila., in the year 1828.
http://www.quaker.org/pamphlets/hicks.pdf [Accessed 14 July 2013].
291 Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), pp. 164–5.
292 Elias Hicks, Letters of E. Hicks (New York, 1834), p. 213.
http://www.quaker.org/pamphlets/hicks.pdf [Accessed 14 July 2013].
293 Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays & Lectures, p. 395.
294 Harold Bloom, Modern Critical Views: Whitman (New York: Chelsea
House Publishers, 2006), p. 2.
295 Ibid., p. 3.
296 P. J. Keane, Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason: The
Transatlantic ‘light of all our day’ (Columbia: University of Missouri
Press, 2005), p. 211.
297 Elias Hicks, The Letters of Elias Hicks (New York, 1834), p. 25.
http://www.quaker.org/pamphlets/hicks.pdf [Accessed 14 July 2013].
298 Harold Bloom, “Introduction to Walt Whitman: Selected Poems,” in
Walt Whitman: Selected Poems, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: The
Library of America, 2003), p. xx.
299 Harold Bloom, The Best of Poems of the English Language: From
Chaucer through Robert Frost (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), pp.
23–4.
300 Bloom, Genius, p. 307.
301 Ibid., pp. 307–8.
302 Ibid., p. 308.
303 Ibid., p. 309.
304 Ibid., p. 310.
305 Ibid.
306 Ibid., pp. 312–13.
307 Bloom, The American Religion, p. 35.
308 Ibid., p. 21.
309 Ibid., p. 22.
310 Ibid., p. 52.
311 Ibid., p. 22.
312 Ibid., p. 24.
313 Ibid., p. 25.
314 Ibid.
315 Ibid., p. 26.
316 Ibid., p. 52.
317 Ibid.
318 Ibid., pp. 51–2.
319 Ibid., p. 27.
320 Ibid.
321 Ibid.
322 Ibid., p. 29.
323 Ibid., p. 31.
324 Ibid., p. 32.
325 Ibid., p. 38.
326 Ibid., p. 39.
327 Ibid., p. 48.
328 Ibid., p. 49.
329 Ibid., p. 63.
330 Ibid., p. 191.
331 Ibid., p. 83.
332 Ibid., p. 105.
333 Ibid., pp. 84, 107.
334 Harold Bloom, “Will This Election Be the Mormon Breakthough?,”
New York Times (12 November 2011), no page number.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/will-this-election-
be-the-mormon-breakthrough.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0 [Accessed 24
May 2013].
335 Bloom, The American Religion, p. 107.
336 Ibid., p. 114.
337 Ibid., p. 115.
338 Ibid., p. 128.
339 Ibid., p. 116.
340 Ibid., p. 265.
341 Ibid., p. 13.
342 Ibid., p. 265.
343 Ibid., p. 271.
344 Ibid., p. 265.
345 Ibid., p. 199.
346 Ibid., p. 202.
347 Ibid., p. 204.
348 Ibid.
349 Ibid., p. 205.
350 Ibid., p. 208.
351 Ibid., p. 213.
352 Ibid., p. 211.
353 Ibid., p. 221.
354 Ibid., p. 230.
355 Ibid., p. 233.
356 Ibid., p. 263.
357 Ibid., p. 43.
358 Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, p. 415.
359 Ibid., p. xviii.
360 Ibid.
361 Ibid., p. 726.
362 Ibid., p. 272.
363 Ibid., pp. 271–2.
364 Ibid., p. 272.
365 Ibid., p. 273.
366 Ibid., p. 277.
367 Ibid., p. 278.
368 Ibid., p. 296.
369 Ibid., p. 286.
370 Ibid., p. 383.
371 Ibid., p. 385.
372 Ibid., p. 387.
373 Ibid., p. 389.
374 Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 54.
375 Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, p. 394.
376 Ibid., p. 395.
377 Ibid., p. 400.
378 Ibid., p. 401.
379 Ibid., p. 722.
380 Bloom, Genius, p. 7.
381 Ibid., p. xi.
382 Ibid., p. xviii.
383 Ibid.
384 Ibid., p. 2.
385 Ibid., p. 3.
386 Ibid., p. 246.
387 Ibid., p. 247.
388 Ibid., p. 135.
389 Ibid., p. 137.
390 Ibid., p. 140.
391 Ibid., p. 141.
392 Ibid.
393 Ibid., p. 140.
394 Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh, p. 174.
395 Bloom, Genius, p. 142.
396 Ibid.
397 Ibid.
398 Ibid., p. 136.
399 Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays & Lectures, pp. 453, 459, 463.
400 Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose,
p. 834.
401 Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays & Lectures, pp. 386–7, 394.
402 Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language, p. 550.
403 Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, p. 38.
404 Ibid., p. 52.
405 Ibid., pp. 38, 51.
406 Ibid., p. 48.
407 Ibid., p. 38.
408 Ibid., p. 48.
409 Ibid., p. 147.
410 Ibid., pp. 136, 147.
411 Ibid., p. 140.
412 Ibid., p. 152.
413 Ibid., p. 146.
414 Ibid., p. 200.
415 Ibid., pp. 227, 229.
416 Bloom, Genius, p. 85.
417 Ibid., p. 86.
418 Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self, pp. 161–3.
419 Bloom, Genius, p. 129.
420 Ibid., pp. 22, 24.
421 Ibid., p. 24.
422 Ibid., p. 29.
423 Ibid.
424 Ibid., p. 49.
425 Ibid., pp. 49, 51.
426 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. xliv.
427 Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, p. 278.
428 Ibid., p. 191.
429 Ibid., p. 175.
430 Ibid., p. 282.
431 Eric Hobsbawm, “The Myth of the Cowboy,” Guardian (20 March
2013). http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/mar/20/myth-of-the-
cowboy [Accessed 28 May 2013].
432 Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking, p. 185.
433 Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, p. 48.
434 Bloom, Shakespeare, p. 288.
435 Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, p. 86.
436 Bloom, Shakespeare, p. 294.
437 Ibid.
Index
Nietzsche, Friedrich 1, 19–20, 38, 44, 47, 50, 54, 60, 62–3, 67, 70–1, 73,
75–7, 94, 98, 100, 109, 115, 118, 123, 141, 169–70, 175, 179, 184–5,
201–2, 206, 209–10, 218
Norris, Christopher 65, 78
Parrish, Timothy 7, 8
Pater, Walter 46, 49–50, 117, 161–6, 169, 178
Paul 3, 13, 26, 42, 48, 69, 77, 86, 100, 103, 107, 109–10, 138–9, 145–6,
150, 153, 180, 188–90, 192, 195, 209–11, 213, 215–17
Philo of Alexandria 37, 133, 135
Pinsker, Sansford 98
Plath, Sylvia 92–3
Plato 9, 16, 25, 38, 54–6, 60, 63, 66, 70, 103, 113–14, 116, 121, 145, 149,
162, 179–80, 205–6, 213–14, 216, 218
Plotinus 113–14, 216
Pope, Alexander 44, 57, 146, 151
Popper, Karl 87
Pottle, Frederick 99
Preyer, Robert 39–40
Ransom, J. C. 37
Retamar, R. F. 91
Richards, I. A. 37
Richardson, Samuel 150
Ricks, Christopher 44, 92
Rieff, Philip 109–10
Robinson, Lillian 93
Rousseau, J. J. 55, 80–1
Ruskin, John 50, 163, 165–6, 173
Said, Edward 30
Santayana, George 187, 197
Satan 3, 21, 32, 40–1, 46, 91, 105–6, 109, 113, 126, 130, 135, 152, 154–5,
158, 181, 192, 200, 216–17
Scholem, Gershom 56, 97, 101–3, 111, 113–14, 118, 128–9, 138, 143
Schopenhauer, Arthur 120, 174, 182
Shakespeare, William 2, 7, 24, 31–2, 36–8, 41, 45, 49, 72, 86, 88–92, 94,
111, 119, 124–5, 127, 132, 135, 139, 145, 163, 165, 178, 182, 191,
196, 202–8, 210, 213, 215–18
Shelley, P. B. 8, 11, 31, 38, 47–8, 50, 79, 86, 104–5, 107–8, 151, 153–5,
159–60, 165, 172–4, 177–8, 184, 191, 214
Smith, Joseph 198–200
Socrates 54–5, 70, 73, 77, 195, 205, 213–14, 216
Soper, Kate 78
Spengler, Oswald 29
Spenser, Edmund 45, 63, 67, 151, 160
Spivak, G. C. 64
Stevens, Wallace 2–3, 31, 45, 50–1, 117, 120, 122, 124, 127, 145, 151, 159–
60, 163, 165, 168, 171–8, 191, 216–17
Swift, Jonathon 27, 49, 83, 169
Valentinus 5–6, 8, 17, 20, 28, 102, 114, 123, 180–1, 183
Vico, Giambattista 6–7, 49, 62, 75, 182
Virgil 85–6, 124, 216
Yahweh 10, 13–18, 20, 22–7, 32, 40, 58, 61, 63, 68, 72–3, 76, 104–5, 118–
19, 123, 125–44, 175–6, 186, 209
Yeats 2, 14, 31–3, 46–8, 50, 75, 77, 80, 86, 107–8, 111, 145, 151, 159–63,
165, 167, 169, 173, 179–81
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