The Anatomy of Bloom: Harold Bloom and the Study of Influence and Anxiety 9781628926828, 9781441120779, 9781441183460

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For Lauren

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Acknowledgments I would like to thank Harold Bloom for granting me permission to quote from his books. I should also like to thank Stephen Jones for allowing me to pursue my research at the Beinecke Library. A big thank you must also go out to James Prosek, Fred Burwick, and Jim McKusick. I cannot thank Vitana Kostadinova and Vadim Banev enough; a more circumspect thank you is directed to Jonathan Bate. I thank my parents for their support, while many thanks should be expressed toward Alan Rawes, Philip Shaw, Bernard Beatty, Jonathan Shears, Emily Bernhardt Jackson, and Michael O’Neill. Rebecca Ferguson, Lyudmilla Kostova, and Marilyn Gaull are most worthy of commendations, as is Agatha Bielik-Robson. Haaris Naqvi, James Tupper, and Grishma Fredric deserve the biggest thanks of all.

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Preface “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 William Bradford describes the Pilgrim Fathers as quieted spirits; his Of Plymouth Plantation lies at the beginning of American history. The quietude of the Pilgrims figures an instant of repose, when the power and grandeur of their Atlantic crossing, if you will, their shooting of the gulf, their darting of an aim, had been accomplished. This quietus constitutes a provocative place to start my book because it reminds of the very passage that first inspired Harold Bloom to play Plotinus to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Plato. The Emersonian clinamen away from Europe represents the origin of a significant portion of Bloom’s rhetoric but I wish to suggest that the latter’s belief that Emerson founds an American religion adumbrates the limit of Bloom’s opacity, the flaw in his gem of transparency. To comprehend why requires a short introductory examination of Bloom’s treatment of Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, in order to demonstrate the importance of the figure of iconoclasm in his work. Therefore, I want to contrast Bradford’s pacific

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pilgrims with the iconoclastic disquiet of later arrivals, who felt cramped under theocracy and, as W. C. Martyn underlines, “sustained with intense fanaticism the paramount authority of private judgment.”1 Martyn records that the settlers would not let “I would” wait upon “I dare not,” a phrase that has unexpectedly pacifistic connotations. I write this because a most truculent passivity is to be found in the aftermath of the English Revolution and in chiasmus that saw George Fox swap the Lion’s war of Cromwell for the Lamb’s war of meekness. Stephen Marx outlines that, while the founding father of the Quaker movement began a covenant of peace, he advocated speaking truth to power: “In 1654 Fox wrote to Cromwell, ‘My weapons are not carnal but spiritual and “my kingdom is not of this world,” therefore with a carnal weapon I do not fight’. ”2 The figure of peaceful rebelliousness is one that teases Bloom in this meditation upon Ahab’s war-like vitality, “There has to be . . . some peculiar inverse ratio between the trope of whiteness in this book and the horrible paradox that these killers—including the gentle Starbuck, still the best lance out of Nantucket . . . and the fearful Ahab—are Quakers: opposed to war, to this day, opposed to conscription.”3 A potential answer to Bloom’s conundrum is provided in Abiezer Coppe’s visionary Fiery Flying Rolls where the carnal room of the body is progressively depopulated of temptations: “Upon this the life was taken out of the body (for a season) and it was thus resembled, as if a man with a great brush dipt in whiting, should with one stroke wipe out, or sweep off a picture upon a wall, &c. After a while, breath and life was returned into the form againe.”4 Andrew Collier interprets this ranting passage from the Interregnum as deriving in Isaiah, “though your sins be scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” (1:18), and then adds that it “suggests the practice of contemporary iconoclastic vandals in whitewashing over the pictures of church walls.”5 He goes on to propose that this swapping of material hardness for the purity of spiritual metaphor resembles “the mystical practice of clearing one’s mind of thoughts and images, the ‘inner silence’ essential to Quaker worship.”6 The peaceful puritans that Bradford celebrates vandalized Anglican churches on their way to Plymouth and Southampton, leaving in their wake a trail of destruction, as they left the depravations of Europe for the American strand. If the laws of England did not follow them to the ends of the earth, then a truly radical soul might begin to struggle against selflimitation, since did not a law-giving God make the world, coin Adam in his own image, and place man in the belly of Leviathan? Bloom insists that “Ahab is an Emersonian who has broken beyond all limits into the Terrible Freedom of a hunt for the absolute adversary, the sanctified king over all the children of pride.”7 Ahab strikes at the white whale because it symbolizes the tyranny

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of the sun and a Creator; therefore, I complement Bloom’s insight with the further observation that the anti-hero of Moby Dick represents the iconoclast in Melville’s Quakerish background. As Collier argues, in the silence of the Quaker meeting-house, worldly icons must be carefully removed by tranquil reflection: “the all-importance of the inner light is incompatible with outward observances, which form the chief obstacles to its pre-eminence.”8 Collier is peculiarly insightful into the spiritual alterations of what Karl Marx would unconvincingly figure as the meekness of opium visions: “The Quaker form of worship corresponds closely to this inner iconoclasm: silence, particularly inner silence . . . because thoughts are necessarily directed towards outward particulars.”9 In this extreme version of Protestantism, outward thought equates to idolatry because the mind has to be emptied of its exterior idols, so that quiet, inward belief in Christ might triumph.10 Collier’s perspicuous insights into Quaker religious practice open casements on the dawning American poetry of Walt Whitman and in particular, “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life.”11 Whitman was a Hicksite Quaker and we find the figure of silence in arguably the most mysterious passage of spontaneous Quaker confession in his poetry: O baffled, balk’d, bent to the very earth, Oppress’d with myself that I have dared to open my mouth, Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I have not once had the least idea who or what I am, But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach’d, Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and bows, With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written, Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath.

Whitman’s arrogant poems are idolatrous creations and the real Me disparages them as a form of selfishness, castigating them as “Held by this electric self out of the pride of which I utter poems.” Leviathan is the king of all the children of pride and Whitman, though more meek than Ahab, is nonetheless stung by nature, and all the blab of outward observances that quarrel with inner light. Whitman has dared to utter poems and the outside world’s echoing recoil opposes what roughly equates to a far-withdrawn silence that baffles his displaced individualism that once heard the Word of the Lord but which now dares be lordly. The symbolism of the tide-smoothed shore would seem the greatest triumph of the poem, since it figures not only the never-to-be-touched untold richness that needs to be cleansed of

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the dross of outward earthly backwash, but also the clearing away of the influence of idolatrous Old England. Whitman is mothered by the Atlantic and falls upon the shore as if it were his father; the sands are teraqueous; Whitman’s sexuality was just as ambiguous. There is more than a hint of self-disgust at Whitman’s stand-up-to-speak autoeroticism in the phrase, “See, from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last.” But this image can usefully be compared with lines from Coppe: No psalm shall be sung but the Lord our Song. No Holiness,—but the Lord our Holiness. No righteousness,—but the Lord our Righteousness. Reprobate silver shall all other be called, as it is; yea, dung, dross, dogs meat —Menstrous rags,—worse than the filth of a Jakes house.

Collier comments on the ambiguity between saying that all is pure sacredness and then that all is reprobate foulness; in contrast, Whitman loves too much what he should hate and more often preaches that what is good is perfect and what is bad is just as perfect. The same kind of listed flotsam and jetsam is to be found in Whitman’s poem, albeit his inventory of tide-dumped odds and ends has a certain lascivious musicality: Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea-gluten, Scum, scales from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce, left by the tide, ...

Whitman displays a material spiritual sublime, the division between descriptive lists of detritus washed up on the scummed sands that almost seem to ooze with the same fleshly yet fascinated disgust at outward things that the poet later describes as “dead” and the distant but very much alive peals of laughter of the real Me. Inner silence is golden but the poet’s breath profane. The word “real” is here an inversion of corporeal and invisible, poetic breath that ironically reveals the untold since “there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known” (Mt. 10.26). Whitman’s father was in real estate and presumably could easily reckon the worth of a thousand acres of grass; Hicksite Quakerism was agrarian and schismatic against the perceived materialism of orthodox Quakers. The white whale, as Bloom never tires of telling, symbolizes the universal blank, Melville’s version of the Emersonian ruin of created nature: “That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.”12Ahab’s intemperance vividly contrasts with Whitman’s temperate, almost antithetically compassionate, loving words,

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since the blank canvas of creation is figured by the washed clean shore of rippling Paumanok waves, where Whitman Was seiz’d by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot, The rim, the sediment that stands for all the water and all the land of the globe.

To populate this blank with tropes is to manufacture icons: to create like God the Father, when the earth was without form and void, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Iconoclasm means to break religious images and, in the Quaker tradition, to clear a silence for inner worship, or what it means to know Jesus within, a gnosis that Bloom christens the American Religion; it means to replace the God of the Hebrews with the living water of Christ. There can be no more contentious subject to write criticism about than iconoclasm; in 2006, the secular world was rocked by world-wide protests against the depiction of the Islamic Prophet in Danish cartoons. Although a book on Bloom is no place to rehearse all the arguments associated with the Islamophobia of this controversy, it is worthwhile to note that Christopher Hitchens thought the iconoclasts vandals: . . . nobody in authority can be found to state the obvious and the necessary—that we stand with the Danes against this defamation and blackmail and sabotage. Instead, all compassion and concern is apparently to be expended upon those who lit the powder trail, and who yell and scream for joy as the embassies of democracies are put to the torch in the capital cities of miserable, fly-blown dictatorships. Let’s be sure we haven’t hurt the vandals’ feelings.13

The mocked-at protestors in the Muslim world are perfectly antithetical to the balked American poetic persona of Whitman but nevertheless share something in common with American religionists. Whitman states that he feels oppressed (just as the Danish artist fears for his life), his feelings hurt by the mocking real Me. Whitman’s self-deprecation is reminiscent of a biblical passage from John that occurs just after the behold-the-man mockery of the King of the Jews: “The Jews answered him, We have a law, and by that law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God” (19:7). The incarnation of Jesus as a co-substantial God is viewed as blasphemous by the Jews because such a claim breaks the jealous injunction of the Second Commandment, that is not to make graven images. My final point draws from personal experience of sharing some “good news” with regard to a recent publication in a poetry magazine with an ex-student who had himself

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published two books of poetry. The budding young poet bowed in just such a mock-congratulatory fashion as described by Whitman; he was envious and obviously thought me boastful. In Whitman’s poem of psychological introspection, the clash between the upright heart and pure and that element of superbia, that in Bloom’s Miltonic allegory of the modern poet challenges the God of cultural tradition, throws the would-be national poet into disconcertion. He is caught between the selfish devil of back-handed, strongas-a-buffalo-but-wanting-good-morals compliments and the mothering deep blue sea of Emersonian congratulation, the welcoming of a gentle but genuinely American poetic and the protestant suspicion of this hardening into an icon representative of a priestly caste. What follows attempts to trace just such radical undecidability—not of America’s primal shore ode—but as reflected in the dark glass of Bloom’s prose, because I believe that similar dialectic lurks therein; or at least what sometimes seems like a refusal to acknowledge that American poetry is more Christian than Judaic. My book of Bloomian fresh starts is divided into seven sections. The first explores the influence of Judaism and Protestantism upon Bloom and defines his Gnostic response. The second looks at the influence of the same on Bloom’s Scene of Instruction. The third compares Bloom’s work to that of Jacques Derrida. The fourth contrasts Bloom’s criticism with that of Paul de Man’s legacy. The fifth grasps the nettle of Bloom’s response to the so-called School of Resentment. The sixth charts Bloom’s writings on Judaism and Kabbalah. The seventh examines what Bloom has written on the topic of Protestantism, Post-Protestantism, and displaced Protestantism. Bloom’s answer to Derrida turns on his speculation that Derridean discourse substitutes the Judaic word davhar for the Greek logos. My treatment of de Man suggests that the detergent of deconstructive irony attempts to bleach clean the sins of misspent youth by scourging the philosophical fabric of totalitarianism. Such a reading implies, but cannot be sure, that de Man experienced deep feelings of guilt with reference to the Holocaust. The ticklish subject of resentment casts Bloom as an Abdiel refusing to join what he figures as the rebel hordes of deserting angels. Here I again ponder the aftermath of Puritanism and the question of free speech: whether we are over-determined by societal energies and historical background, or whether it is possible to express dissent and speak one’s mind freely without fear of reprisal. All in all, Bloom’s criticism is read as a form of spiritual autobiography that I recapitulate as dialectic between Christian and Jewish civilizations.

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Introduction: Bloom’s Gnosis

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

Much if not all of Bloom’s writing can be accurately classified with reference to this palpably incongruous Kulturkampf that ever leans toward Dr Johnson’s judgment that fathers aim for power, while sons struggle for independence.2 One could almost write Europe aimed for power and America for independence, since Johnson’s definition of power is activated by struggle, which is why I see Bloom as Mr Self-Invention, a questing critic from a poor background, who came to the ivory tower of Yale, an iconoclast who left behind the Orthodox Judaism of his Bronx family background to redefine himself as an American Gnostic. I wish to outline those elements in Bloom’s work that explore his Gnostic relationship with important Protestant and American figures like Blake, Whitman, and Emerson. I suggest that many of the parallels that Hans Jonas draws between Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nietzsche’s remarks on the death of God influenced Bloom’s reception of this ancient heresy. The Gnostic Religion seems richly scattered with gems that Bloom cuts in his own idiosyncratic way, and hence it is fascinating to ask the question: to what extent does Bloom’s gnosis interrogate Orthodox Judaism, Pauline Christianity and especially later American versions of Christianity? For me this question revolves around arguably the three most central works of

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Bloom’s career, which I take to be The Anxiety of Influence, The American Religion and The Book of J. Such a claim is not meant to devalue his work on Blake, Shakespeare, Stevens, Yeats, or any of the myriad authors he has written short treatises on, but instead crystallizes the proposition that the anxiety of influence is a Gnostic formulation that can be broken up into Jewish and Gentile narratives, as a short consideration of the inspiration for The Anxiety of Influence reveals: “On my 37th birthday, I woke up from a terrible nightmare, something almost out of Blake’s Four Zoas. It featured a covering cherub pressing down upon me. . . . I spent the next three days writing a ferocious dithyramb, which . . . became the first chapter of The Anxiety of Influence.”3 The dream was an amalgam of imagery drawn from Blake’s Gnostic usage of Hebrew figures which were themselves tapped from an idiosyncratic Protestant reading of the Bible, or as Bloom outlines with specific reference to the winged creatures that guarded the Ark of the Covenant: “In Genesis he is God’s Angel; in Ezekiel he is the Prince of Tyre; in Blake he is fallen Tharmas, and the Spectre of Milton; in Yeats he is the Spectre of Blake.”4 The Covering Cherub cannot be dissociated from Bloom’s nostalgia for his Orthodox Jewish upbringing because as Bloom baldly states: “the cherubim . . . symbolize the terror of God’s presence; to Rashi they were ‘Angels of destruction’.”5 This reference to the nightmare of God’s presence could not be more significant because I believe the very heart of Bloom’s work, the concept of the anxiety of influence, to be based upon the prohibition of the Second Commandment: You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents. . . . (New American Standard Bible, Exod. 20.3-4)

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

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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

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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

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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

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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 Freudiansounding 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 godmaking, then we have a vision of the outrageous ambition of the native strain

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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

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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 antiJudaism” 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.

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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 nineteenthousand 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, For fear that someone might escape nevertheless, three warehouses, which were filled mainly with women and children, were set on fire. Those who were not killed by the flames sought to escape through the holes in the roof, or through the windows; these were met with hand grenades or machine-gun fire. Many women went mad and threw their children out of the windows.41

A further ten thousand Jews were deported from Odessa to three concentration camps established near Golta; ultimately, in January 1942 a last remnant of approximately twenty thousand Jews were sent in cattle trucks to the same

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camps.42 The fate that befell the Jews in Brest-Litovsk was no less thorough. On 15 September 1939 (immediately after the partition of Poland) the Germans rounded up five thousand Jews, supposedly for laboring purposes, but instead massacred them in cold blood. The town was re-taken by the Nazis in June 1941 at which juncture the Germans spirited away some ninehundred Jews, again under the pre-text of exploiting them for forced labor. The rest of the remainder, approximately thirty thousand, were secured in a ghetto and finally liquidated on 15 October 1942. My intention is to point out that Jewishness seems to be the lynchpin of Bloom’s identity, and absolutely central to an understanding of his literary criticism; the death of God reduces to the Holocaust. If the Covenant with Yahweh is taken as the central tenet of the Jewish faith, then we immediately confront the severe existentialist paradox that, as Bloom confesses, a God that can allow the Holocaust is not much of a Deity: “You don’t have to be Jewish to be oppressed by the enormity of the German slaughter of European Jewry, but if you have lost your four grandparents and most of your uncles, aunts and cousins in the Holocaust, then you will be a touch more sensitive to the normative Judaic, Christian, and Muslim teachings that God is both allpowerful and benign.”43 Personal rather than universal tragedy can also spark severe crises of faith; one of Bloom’s two sons suffers from schizophrenia; Bloom’s personal reaction to this family tragedy amounts to a further crisis in faith, “a cosmos this obscene, a nature that contains schizophrenia, is acceptable to the monotheistic orthodox as part of the ‘mystery of faith’. ”44 To Bloom blind faith seemed totally unacceptable since age 35, 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

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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 sixtyfive, 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,

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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

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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

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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.

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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,

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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

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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: What makes us free is the Gnosis Of who we were Of what we have become Of where we were Of wherein we have been thrown Of what we are being freed Of what birth really is Of what rebirth really is

My immediate focus is on Fite’s assertion that Bloom’s reading of the Valentinian excerpt in Poetry and Repression is illusory, “a grand enabling fiction, a ‘something evermore about to be’.”85 Fite interprets Bloom’s understanding of Valentinus from the perspective of Bloom’s literary criticism; thus, Fite writes, “it is the poetic battle proper, the drive towards an illusory freedom, that is the great glory . . . of strong poetry.”86 Fite’s eloquent reading of Bloom proposes that poets desire originality, but begin by imitating precursor poets, then wrestle with this influence, until they develop their own original style, which is always at some level indebted to precursive writing. The obvious objection to Fite’s reading is that Bloom does not take Valentinian Gnosis to be a grand enabling fiction; there is strong evidence to support the view that he believes, or at least involuntary halfbelieves, in a religion of Gnosis, and that his subsequent writings present many illuminating parallels with existential philosophy. In an invaluable review of Jesus and Yahweh, Jonathan Rosen underlines the latent theism in

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this Bloomian statement, “My Orthodox Judaic childhood lingers in me as an awe of Yahweh” and Rosen comments that while Bloom’s “mother trusted in the covenant with the Jewish God . . . he cannot?”87 The point here is that Bloom cannot quite dismiss his belief in the sublimity of the Jewish Deity even if he no longer trusts in the Orthodox Jewish faith, and this despite confessions like, “I still recall my childhood awe at the wineglass set aside for Eliahu ha-navi at every Passover seder, with my sleepy fantasies that indeed he had come to drain it.”88 Bloom will instead argue that the phrase “I am that I am” means “I will be here when I will be here,” and hence sometimes Yahweh is present and sometimes not. I want to argue that Bloom finds evidence of Yahweh in the sublimity of canonical literature; for instance, he once said to me that “I don’t believe in Yahweh,” but on another occasion emphatically enunciated the words, “Whitman will always remain a mystery!” In this light, the Wordsworthian phrase “something ever more about to be” seems proto-existentialist; it pertains to finding a transcendent sense of being within time that ever slips away beyond man’s perceptual grasp. Bloom singles out the Valentinian phrase “have been thrown” and writes “there is an exhilarating dynamism in our condition, but this does not prevail, and is not the norm of our existence.”89 The norm is death-in-life and with regard to the Gnostic formulation, “if you do not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty”; Bloom explains “‘poverty’ is exactly what . . . Emerson founder of our American Gnosis, named . . . imaginative lack or need.”90 In particular, Bloom was drawn to Emerson’s idealist apothegm, “That is always best which gives me to myself. The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself. That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen.”91 This fortifying spirit is best understood as the reader’s sublime or the point when a text augments the reader’s consciousness; Bloom often mentions that you should read books that find you, and by this he means the instances when an author grabs your attention for whatever duration. Bloom comments that in Jonas and Emerson, “the moment of Gnosis is the mind’s direct perception, a pure movement and event that simultaneously discloses the divine spark in the self, and a sense of divine degradation even there, in the inmost self, because the Gnostic Fall is within the Godhead.”92 This movement would seem to be the joy and vaunting flight of the imagination when stimulated by literary sublimity of a kind that helps the reader know himself or herself better. However, every writer is necessarily a reader first, and if the concept of Godhead were to be swapped for that of tradition, then Bloom’s analogy is that the modern writer owes his inception to a fall into an inter-textual relationship with previous writing that Bloom sometimes figures as a compound precursor, who stands in for the force of tradition. Gnostic selfhood is here my main interest in relating

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Bloom’s agonistic American criticism to his palpably Jewish sensibility; what follows is an existential meditation upon Bloom’s career as a Jewish-American literary critic par excellence. Fite is mistaken in saying that each new poetic style is mere illusory fiction, since this sounds like the meaninglessly ironic world of de Man, or what is here interpreted as existential nihilism by Jonas: “that only man cares, in his finitude facing nothing but death, alone with his contingency and the objective meaninglessness of his projecting meanings.”93 In Fite’s view, Bloom deconstructs each poet’s fiction of originality in order to uncover the lurking bias of precursive influence, because in influential terms death is a form of literal meaning, the empty echoing of a precursor by a poet too weak to break his influential shackles. To return to Bloom’s bad dream, in The Anxiety of Influence, he defines anxiety by recourse to Freud: “Freud’s use of ‘danger’ reminds us of our universal fear of domination, of our being trapped by nature in our body as a dungeon, in certain situations of stress.”94 Bloomian anxiety loosely coheres with what Sartre termed dread, and Kierkegaard angst, “ The name ‘Angst’—‘angustiae’, ‘Enge’ (German and Latin words for ‘narrow place’, ‘straits’, from the same root as ‘Angst’ and ‘anxiety’)—emphasizes the characteristic of restriction in breathing which was then present as a consequence of the real situation and is now almost invariably reinstated in the affect.”95 Freud’s equation of anxiety with the symptoms of hyperventilation becomes interpreted by Bloom as analogous to the readerly inspiration of influence and then its restricted expulsion as poetry, “if the anxiety of influence be imaged as a lack of breathing space, then the voluntary limitation that allows a poem to begin, amounts to a holding-in of breath, until some space is cleared for it.”96 The clearing of space for the self equates to that freedom that Sartre proposes man reclaims for himself when he becomes aware that the transcendent is silent; therefore, I again quote Jonas, who declares “that this freedom is of a desperate kind, and, as a compassless task, inspires dread rather than exultation.”97 Thus, as Fite memorably notes, in his desperation the Bloomian poet, slughorn set to lips, sings in his defeat, a Great defeat that is as American as it is Christian.98 Bloom answers a Heideggerian ironist like de Man by arguing that there is no end to the influence of Yahwistic breath and that the strong poet seeks more life into a time without boundaries; though “more life” to Bloom is death to Heidegger. Like Hillel, Bloom wants, “More flesh, more worms; more wealth, more care; more women, more witchcraft; more maidservants, more lewdness; more menservants, more thieving; more Torah, more life; more assiduity, more wisdom; more counsel, more understanding; more charity, more peace.”99 Jonas concisely explains that Nietzsche indicated the root of the nihilistic situation in the phrase “God is dead” and

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that to Heidegger, “ The phrase ‘God is dead’ means that the supra-sensible world is without effective force.”100 Bloom suggests that the astrological flowing from the stars upon our fate is the prime meaning of influence; and his work upon the earliest Jewish strand in the Bible indicates that although Yahweh is dead or has absconded nevertheless the invisible paths of influence that begin in Genesis are still affective for modern authors, and indeed Bloom himself. Jonas intelligently states that the main difference between Existentialism and Gnosticism is that the Gnostics believe in a Demiurge and an alien God beyond the material cosmos, whereas an existentialist interpreter of Valentinus might well ask, “what is the throw without the thrower, and without a beyond whence it started?”101 But Bloom instead emphasizes the facticity of tradition that makes of latecomers a Gnostic Tantalus, who tries with all his aesthetic might to break free into the realms of epicurean originality. Jonas purveys the Gnostic wisdom that “the power of the world is overcome, on the one hand, by the power of the Savior who breaks into a closed system from without, and, on the other, through the power of the ‘knowledge’ brought by him.”102 If one were to re-interpret this Gnostic catechism as the saving knowledge of genius that allows a writer of startling individuality to break into the canon where the canon is defined by the facticity of ultimate biblical origins, then the further ramification of this inference is that Bloomian analysis of tradition becomes a mode of psychoanalyzing one’s personal relationship with the canon where the canon is a kind of secular Godhead. We must recognize, however, that the word canonical has a dualistic meaning here, insofar as Bloom by no means limits himself to secular authors, and indeed, he sees no real difference between Scripture and secular literature, especially when the texts that constitute the former are read for their aesthetic lusters: “I myself have come to the opinion that it makes sense to assert that all strong literature is sacred, and just as much sense to insist that all of it is secular.”103 For instance, his main argument in The Book of J is that the earliest strand of Genesis started life as a collection of folk tales, but then became redacted and codified as religious matter after the Babylonian captivity. Nietzsche is the best commentator to employ in this context: “there is in fact no other alternative for Gods: either they are the will to power—and so long as they are that they will be national Gods—or else the impotence for power—and then they necessarily become good.”104 The conquest of the Israelites by the Babylonians called into question the status of Yahweh the warriorgod; the Holocaust, I am arguing, had the same albeit antithetic effect on the agonistic (and more subtly agnostic) Bloom, who possesses an almost Israeli fighting spirit.

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Fite is by no means a naïve reader of Bloom, but I cannot agree with his contention that Bloomian Gnosis is one-hundred-percent “contextless” because this would kill off the nightmare of Jewish history.105 To Gnostics the Kenoma squares with historical facticity, and the historical moment that I wish to concentrate upon is a phrase culled from a war-time speech by Winston Churchill: “We are in the presence of a crime without a name.”106 His speech makes no direct reference to the Holocaust because Churchill did not dare let the Germans know that encrypted messages were being decoded; as Martin Gilbert informs us, “The week following Churchill’s broadcast, seventeen separate reports of the shooting of Jews and Russians, in groups of between 61 and 4200, were sent to Berlin by secret radio code from the eastern front.”107 These missives were intercepted during exactly the same time-period in which the Einsatzgruppen were operating near Brest-Litovsk and Odessa. The phrase that needs emphasizing is “without a name,” which has imagistic connotations aplenty in Bloom’s prose statements concerned with the death of God. Bloom notes that Milton’s invocation to the Muse at the beginning of Book VII of Paradise Lost contains the phrase “the meaning, not the name, I call” (VII, 5). Bloom dramatically states that he rose from a nightmare to write The Anxiety of Influence, and it is here that he treats of the death of God in terms of the nameless phrase, 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

This angst-ridden allegory is extended in such a way that Wordsworth and Coleridge enter the debate as Satan and Beelzebub, the strong poet and the good poet, who will now never make it because disquieted at the prospect of re-writing Scripture in lyric autobiographical terms. Bloom argues that poetic sublimity is achieved as a counter-sublime, at which Coleridge trembled because he could not attribute it to the Divine Nature, “The fear of solipsism is greater in him than the fear of not individuating his own imagination.”109 According to Bloom, Coleridge acquired a doubly sublime anxiety of influence, or that of Milton and Scripture: “all things became Milton—the poet ever present to our minds and more than gratifying us for the loss of the distinct individuality of what he represents.”110 Bloom’s allegory

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is a direct development of this passage from “To Reason with a Later Reason: Romanticism and the Rational” and it employs that word “crisis”: “Resolution and Independence” is a poem dealing with the passage from crisis to what will suffice, that place of the spirit from which one can start to live and write. The poet stands almost at the midpoint of his existence—he is thirty-two, soon to be married, and fearful that his vision has fled. He contemplates the acedia and ruin of his brother poet, Coleridge, and sees in him the entire line of the doomed poets of Sensibility, from Chatterton to Burns, the bards who in their youth began in gladness, but who fell one by one into the despondency that preceded total alienation. From this terrible anxiety, this grief without a name, Wordsworth is rescued by a privileged moment that scarcely yields itself even to the later reason of the imagination.111

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

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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

As a hempen knotting of horizon and reason, Urizen represents the tyranny of a rational sky god over nature, not to mention human aspiration; this figure conforms to the Gnostic Demiurge, who confines humans within the cycles of creation. Blake’s expressive poetry has the allegoric meaning within Bloom’s text of signifying the wrestling of Wordsworth with Milton. But this quotation, however magnificent its portrayal of a poetic precursor wrestling with Blake’s figure for rational Godhead, is only a stepping stone toward this celebrated passage in Blake’s Milton: To bathe in the Waters of Life, to wash off the Not Human, I come in Self-annihilation & the grandeur of Inspiration; To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Savior, To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration, To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albion’s covering, To take off his filthy garments, & clothe him with Imagination; . . . . (II.41.1-7)

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 poststructuralist 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

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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

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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 morethan-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

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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

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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: The hero of these anticanonizers is Antonio Gramsci, who in his Selections from the Prison Notebooks denies that any intellectual can be free of the dominant social group if he relies upon merely the “special qualification” that he shares with the craft of his fellows (such as other literary critics): “Since these various categories of traditional intellectuals experience through an esprit de corps their uninterrupted historical qualification, they thus put themselves forward as autonomous and independent of the dominant social group.”136

Another potential definition of culture favored by Bloom is this statement: “the self stands within yet beyond culture, culture being that ideology which helps such a self: coherent, capable of standing apart, yet dutiful and pious toward the force of the best which has been said in the past.”137 Bloom here argues for the Arnoldian model of culture that partly defines his stance as a canonical critic, at least to the extent that a Swiftian term like sweetness and light (meaning the honied sweetness of learning and the beeswax candles of enlightenment) can be compared to the spidery modernist webs of his

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formidable explanatory critical apparatus. But a more revealing insight into Bloom’s background as a critic emerges from his impassioned defense of the canon against cultural materialists and the school of New Historicism: “I myself insist that the individual self is the only method and the whole standard for apprehending aesthetic value. But ‘the individual self ’, I unhappily grant, is defined only against society, and part of its agon with the communal inevitably partakes of the conflict between social and economic classes.”138 Ideology is sometimes lazily taken to mean political persuasion, but initially it meant false consciousness or the factitious imposition of the dominant elite’s ideas and propaganda upon the proletarian multitude. Thus, Bloom is forced to admit the economic consequences of his existential aesthetic pleasures: “Myself the son of a garment worker, I have been granted endless time to read and meditate upon my reading,” and hence he acknowledges that “my passionate proclamations of the isolate selfhood’s aesthetic value are necessarily qualified by the reminder that the leisure for meditation must be purchased from the community.”139 It would be perfect to argue that Bloom’s Gnostic existentialism largely boils down to the physical and mental act of reading canonical literature from J to the present in the hope of locating the unconscious echo of departed Yahwistic breath. But we have to be careful because Bloom sometimes argues in a manner more consistent with that of his orthodox critics: “poetry, unlike the Jewish religion, does not go back to a truly divine origin.”140 Yet, Bloom writes of Wordsworth’s something ever more about to be in Jewish Gnostic terms: “What the Ein-Sof or infinite Godhead was to the Kabbalists, or the Imagination was to the Romantic poets, tradition is now for us.”141 The experience of reading The Gnostic Religion is that of confronting great erudition, since the reader is almost over-powered by the minutiae contained in a dense middle-section. In truth, this is no fault of Jonas’s prose, which is lucid, but rather the result of trying to incorporate the fissiparous and fragmentary religious doctrines (Jonas calls them “ingenious and elaborate speculative structures”) of such Gnostic/Hermetic luminaries as Simon Magus, Marcion, Hermes Trismegistus, Valentinus, and Mani, as one basic myth.142 A remarkably similar dilemma confronts the Bloomian scholar scrabbling for a system that will unite the multitude of ideas and perspectives that Bloom’s ever-growing list of publications presents. I find myself bowled over by Jonas’s opening argument that after Alexander and the Romans began the Hellenization of the Near East, by whip-like recoil, the colonized Persians and Syrians had slow and sensual revenge by introducing the “rational” West to an insidious counter-wave of religious speculation, “the metamorphosis of Hellenism into a religious oriental culture was set on foot.”143 I argue that the geological analogy provided by Jonas captures both the Gnostic influential

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thrownness of The Anxiety of Influence and the historical thrownness of Bloom’s émigré identity as a second-generation American Jew. Jonas borrows Oswald Spengler’s term “pseudomorphosis” in order to figure the spiritual revenge that the ancient orient had upon its rational western counterpart. Jonas defines pseudomorphosis as being akin to the process when “a different crystalline substance happens to fill the hollow left in a geological layer by crystals that have disintegrated, it is forced by the mold to take on a crystal form not its own and without chemical analysis will lead the observer into taking it for a crystal of the original kind.”144 The basic analogy expresses the position of a second-generation Jewish immigrant child growing up within New York society, but one who became the self-invented Gnostic scholar of Yankee Yale. In The Decline of the West, Spengler presents a cyclic theory of history, which Jonas employs to promote this parallel between modern existentialist thought and ancient Gnosticism: “Spengler went so far as to declare the two ages ‘contemporaneous’, in the sense of being identical phases in the life cycle of their respective cultures.”145 According to Jonas, anguish and homesickness are part of the stranger’s lot, the spiritual stranger being the Gnostic adept lost in the material Kenoma, and one wonders whether the experience of Bloom’s family in coming to America, the acculturation of Bloom’s older Jewish and therefore religious familial ties within New York’s capitalist culture, do not represent a form of pseudomorphosis. I write this with direct reference to the fact that Bloom, who admits being a throwback to prior Kabbalists in Hebraic Russia, has somehow managed to bring obscure Jewish Kabbalistic authors like Isaac Luria into the mainstream of critical thought in such books as A Map of Misreading and Kabbalah and Criticism.146 One could easily be more generalizing and utilize this crystalline metaphor for the experience of many families coming to the New World, but this would seldom be consistent with the literary fame that Bloom has accrued. Bloom’s unprecedented career seems a quintessential example of the American dream, and yet it is a dream that has soured in some ways, not least because New Historicist academics (for a time) ruled the academic roost—to a Gnostic critic these opponents must have appeared like Archons, the materialist rulers of the fallen world. In After the New Criticism, Lentricchia argues that the Bloomian poet “believes himself free to make his own unique identity, to create himself out of nothing.”147 Lentricchia gets Bloom almost right, but not quite; certainly, Bloomian poetics are concerned with self-invention, though not creation ex nihilo, which is always associated in Bloom’s writings with the lies of the Creator-God. To give the most striking example, in The Breaking of the Vessels, Bloom quotes this translation of the creation-scene in Genesis 1:1–2:4: “When God set about to create heaven and earth—the world being then a formless

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waste, with darkness over the seas and only an awesome wind sweeping over the water—God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.” Looking over the Priestly Author’s shoulder, the Gnostic critic asks, “What was that ‘then’ prior to Creation? What were those entities, ‘a formless waste’ and the ‘water’ over which the awesome wind swept?”148 Lentricchia notes that an assault on the New Critics would seem central to Bloom’s critical theology; in particular, the commonsensical notion that meaning in a poetic text is self-contained.149 Furthermore, he is right to suggest that “for Bloom, the great hope is for a secular substitute for the God who can no longer be assented to, and for a discourse that will release consciousness from the entrapments of a fallen world.”150 But then Lentricchia represents Bloom as someone who refuses “to recognize any longer the constitutive role of extraliterary forces . . . upon identity.”151 Lentricchia is hardly alone in making this criticism, since Allen writes that to Bloom “the sense of history, or extra-poetic concerns . . . are an irrelevance” and that this constitutes “an evasion of the socio-historical determinants of poetic meaning.”152 In fact, the main criticism that is generally leveled against Bloom by his many cultural-materialist detractors corresponds to Edward Said’s formulation that “texts are worldly . . . even when they appear to deny it, they are nevertheless a part of the social world, human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted.”153 Allen covertly criticizes Lentricchia’s suggestion that Bloom has “succeeded, in returning poetry to history,” and that he works toward a “desperate principle of freedom in history”; thus, Allen outlines that one of the major misconceptions of Bloom’s account of poetic anxiety is that it “supports a form of literary history, and is in itself part of a general reassertion of the historical or contextual understanding of literary texts.”154 He asserts that Bloom’s concern is with an achieved anxiety between texts rather than poets in historical interrelationship, a point that I will return to in my discussion of The Anxiety of Influence. While I cannot quarrel with the accuracy of Allen’s statement that Bloom’s “account of poetic texts” makes “an historicized reading of poetry inconceivable,” there is more to be said on the subject of criticism understood as autobiography and, indeed, history as biography, not to mention the interrelationship of text and psyche, and hence self to society.155 From a religious perspective, Ozick incisively emphasizes, the anxiety of influence would seem to reject Judaism in favor of divination, the religion of the Gentiles. By the logic of Allen’s own employment of Said, there should be a means of reading Bloom for his social-historical determinants; thus, I think that Bloomian existentialism equates to the phenomenology of the canon, since this is what he has spent his life doing—reading, writing, and teaching canonical literature. From his perspective, authentic literature comes into existence when new ways of saying enter literary history; hence,

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authentic being for Bloom becomes a meditation upon so-called mortal gods like Shakespeare and Milton. He honors the gods of the western tribe and yet shows how they wage agons of the spirit for the prize of immortality; they experience an elective anxiety as to their own aesthetic salvation. My intention is to show that there are extrapoetic overtones to be discovered in Bloom theories of reading and that these conform to Judaism and Protestantism. This said, I firmly agree with Lentricchia in the respect that for Bloom “the unspoken assumption is that poetic identity is somehow a wholly intraliterary process in no contact with the larger extraliterary processes that shape human identity.”156 Yet, there is strong evidence to suggest that Bloom’s poetic theories of influence, as laid out in the argumentation of The Anxiety of Influence, correlate with his views in later books like The American Religion and the “Introduction” to American Religious Poems, inasmuch as they all express concerns that are not entirely limited to the intrapoetic reading of poems. By means of a short consideration of Lentricchia’s thoughts upon Bloom, I want to show how theories present within The Anxiety of Influence are manifestly connected with Bloom’s views on American Protestantism. Lentricchia notes Bloom’s romantic fascination with solipsistic subjectivism and morbid self-consciousness, then concludes that in The Anxiety of Influence, “God is an allegory for everything outside the self—nature, society, ‘cultural history, the dead poets’ . . . (and that) the alternative . . . is . . . to ‘accept a God altogether other than the self ’.”157 The important concept here is the Bloomian “self ” that, as Lentricchia indicates, learns its own solitude, and whose freedom corresponds to an assertive discontinuity from tradition (and I would add European tradition). Thus, Lentricchia launches into his criticism of Bloom’s concept of the freedom of the unique self, as pure or absolute consciousness caused by the astral disease of influence to which “we can add . . . the sin against community.”158 The problem with this diagnosis is that it accepts Bloom at his own word, where his word is limited to the earlier books on influence from the 1970s; The American Religion (1992) had not been written in 1982 when After the New Critics was published. Hence, I intend to dwell upon Lentricchia’s focus upon Bloom’s “willful drive deeper into the self, toward solipsistic discontinuity—a drive away from community and toward increasing lyric inwardness.”159 From this Bloomian emphasis upon selfhood, Lentricchia draws the conclusion that “the psychic and social life of the poet as a man in the world count for nothing; history in a big, inclusive sense cannot touch the sacred being of intrapoetic relations.”160 Yet, Bloom’s poetic models are almost invariably Protestant: Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Emerson, Whitman, etc. It needs to be reiterated that even atheists like Shelley, Keats, and Stevens are definable as post-Protestants, while Yeats was a Protestant Irish nationalist turned Gnostic theosophist. The

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poetic selfhood of which Bloom takes Milton’s Satan to be representative of is inescapably derived from a Protestant fixation with reading the Bible without an authoritarian priestly hierarchy imposing its allegorical catechism. In Bloom’s poetic theology, the Quakerish disdain for dependence upon earthly things becomes the disparagement of any god beyond the quickening power of the self. But here we run aground on the paradox that the damned Satan could function as anyone’s figure of an elective poet saving himself from ruin. Athens and Jerusalem are therefore represented as competitive individualism that is agon and the Freudian influence of fathers to whom in the Jewish faith one is meant to be respectful. Of course, Bloom is always syncretic and there are Jewish figures for usurping agonists, but this crystallizes the thought that the phrase “anxiety of influence” is at once an expression for being Jewish in post-Protestant American society and as well the anxiety that, following in the wake of the Holocaust, Yahweh has departed. The Greeks used their nous to escape fate, and if not, then hubris meets with nemesis. The argumentation of this monograph is deceptively similar since the accident of historical background is, for my purposes, reinterpreted as a fate to be avoided. From Bloom’s viewpoint, Hamlet the writer tells us that ethos is not the daemon, that character is not fate but accident, and that eros is the purest accident. In Shakespeare, Bloom unpacks the Player King’s speech thus: “Our ‘devices’ are our intended purposes, products of our wills, but our fates are antithetical to our characters, and what we think to do has no relation to our thoughts’ ‘ends’, where ‘ends’ means both conclusions and harvests. Desire and destiny are contraries, and all thought thus must undo itself.”161 Gnosticism is to the fore when Bloom writes: “There is a breath or spark to Hamlet that is his principle of individuation, a recognizable identity whose evidence is his singularity of language, and yet not so much language as diction, a cognitive choice between words, a choice whose drive always is toward freedom.”162 The problem is that Hamlet’s inward freedom does not escape death, which confirms the Player King’s dark wisdom and Bloom’s open-ended paradox that at the play’s conclusion we have personality’s freedom and the prince’s character as fate. Bloom relates that Hamlet knows himself to be nothing in himself and yet his personality has become the canonical sublime which depends upon a strangeness that assimilates us, even as we wrestle with our own assimilation to its persuasive linguistic inevitability.163 In his essay on Yeats in Poetry and Repression, Bloom treats of much the same ideas but rearranged, according to the peculiarities of Yeatsian sensibility: The evolution of the Daimon in Yeats is curious. In Per Amica, it is clearly a father or precursor-figure, “an illustrious dead man,” but Yeats

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insists that “the Daimon comes not as like to like but seeking its own opposite, for man and Daimon feed the hunger in one another’s hearts.” “The Daimon is our destiny,” Yeats says, thinking he cites Heraclitus, but Heraclitus actually said that character or ethos was fate or the daimon, whereas Yeats’s remark is a powerful tautology.164

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.

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The Scene of Instruction

Erich Auerbach once told Hartman a story of a violinist forced to leave Germany and wishing to take up his profession in America: “Alas, his violin no longer emitted the same ‘tone’ in the new country.”1 My task in this section is not only to detect the timbre of the “violin” that Bloom plays upon, but also to distinguish it from the writings of genealogically related critics in the Yale string section. The starting point is hence Bloom’s championing of the Protestant poetry of the Romantics in the teeth of fierce opposition from the New Critics, or the School of Eliot. The critical followers of Eliot preferred Metaphysical poetry (for instance, Donne’s image of the well-wrought urn) to what the Romanticist M. H. Abrams identified as an expressive kind of displaced Protestant individualism and its lighthouses. Bloom names his precursor proper as Frye; therefore, it is necessary to briefly measure the amplitude of his influence on Bloom and then proceed to an extrapolation of the Scene of Instruction. I shall argue that the Scene of Instruction opposes a form of deconstruction to holistic urns, and that Bloom’s phraseology owes something to Derrida’s Scene of Writing, or, as John Ellis writes, it is “impossible for Derrida and his followers to see themselves as other than, first and foremost, iconoclasts.”2 Yale Deconstruction has to be seen as somewhat Jewish in orientation, not least because Bloom, Hartman, and Derrida were all Jewish, but also because, as Miller suggests, deconstruction resembles the Hebraic temple/labyrinth binary. In this respect, I cannot avoid recapitulating the scandal caused by the revelation that de Man had written collaborationist newspaper articles during the war, including the unsettling anti-Semitic piece, “Les Juifs dans la littérature actuelle.” In cautious mitigation, I argue that de Manian deconstruction was anti-totalitarian and that his autobiography of critical works remains ironically undecidable as a maze of seashells. My deliberation on Yale deconstruction is followed by an analysis of Bloom’s illstarred relationship with what he christens the School of Resentment. The latter phrase seems a nebulous name for what, in The Western Canon, Bloom describes as a motley collection of theorists: “surrounded by professors of hip-hop; by clones of Gallic-Germanic theory; by ideologues of gender and of various sexual persuasions; by multiculturalists unlimited, I realize that the Balkanization of literary studies is irreversible.”3 Balkanization is here a

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metaphor for the dense tangled forest of modern literary studies; thus, the ending of my narrative meditates upon the thorny question of what is worthy of study and what is not and therefore the topic of the secular canon that displaced the religious canons of Christian and Jewish Scripture that in turn replaced the Jewish Temple.4 Bloom’s definition of the canon is Jewish and his method of judgment as to what is canonical would seem agonistic; he collates these two ideas under the umbrella term “western revisionism”: “the deep split between the fact that its religion and its morality are Hebraic-Christian, and its cognition and aesthetics—and therefore its dominant imaginative forms—are Greek.”5 In Literary Revisionism and the Burden of Modernity, Jean-Pierre Mileur provides a lucid discussion of the teleology of Bloom’s Judeo-Christian definition of tradition. My argument differs from his interest in tracing the genealogy of the modernist critical sensibility in the respect that I am more concerned with the extent to which Bloom escapes the tentacles of historical over-determination. Granted that this concern means examining just how religious Bloom’s literary criticism is, Mileur’s interests and mine pleasingly overlap: “the demon haunting the enlightened mind is religion as a response to the secular mind’s own archaic demons, demons which can no longer be acknowledged as such because they are aspects of an outmoded religious sensibility.”6 In terms of Bloom’s critical oeuvre, Anglo-Catholic mimesis is subjected to iconoclasm (thought of as a consequence of the Second Commandment) and which Protestant process leads to the internalization of consciousness, although Bloom finds esoteric Jewish models to figure this phenomenon. In Kabbalah and Criticism, Bloom revises his already welldeveloped assault upon the New Critics into a manifesto that reductively lists risible Anglo-Catholic reading habits:

1. There is the religious illusion, that a poem possesses or creates a real presence.

2. There is organic illusion, that a poem possesses or creates a kind of unity.

3. There is the rhetorical illusion, that a poem possesses or creates a definite form.

4. There is the metaphysical illusion, that a poem possesses or creates meaning.7 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 quasireligious insight affirms the absolute in the sphere of art: “By likening the

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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

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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 Anglicanconvert 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

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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

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The Anatomy of Bloom 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 willo’-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: It is in Collins’ Ode on the Poetical Character that the most daring claim is made. There, not only does the poet in his creation imitate the creative power of God, but is himself a son of God and Fancy, a “rich-hair’d youth of morn” associated with the sun-god, like the Greek Apollo, a prophet and visionary of whom the last exemplar was Milton. This youth is the direct ancestor of Blake’s Orc.36

Job is a sympathetic character because he was unjustly punished, his identification with Milton’s Satan thoroughly revolutionary since it makes Messiah the creator of eternal damnation, or the pit, in which Satan is thrust

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down by the Almighty much like Job is tormented by the Ha-Satan, the restrainer of desire. Blake’s identification of the poet with rebirth of energy as the poetic character, or more strikingly with those who restrain desire because they are weak enough to be restrained, leads to Bloom’s correction of Blake, since Bloom interprets the Orc/Urizen binary as akin to the influential relationship of ephebe and precursor poet. Strong thinkers-forthemselves follow the Orc cycle in their lifetime because they are canonized by the glamor of gaining followers, who are gaoled like Satan in the anxious internalized pit of influential chains: “Orc always ends by becoming Urizen, Jesus by becoming identified with Jehovah, Prometheus one with Zeus.”37 The main strength of The Anxiety of Influence lies in its exquisite marriage of allegory to rhetoric; the switch between a dramatic Blakean reading of Paradise Lost and Bloom’s revisionary ratios is called the Scene of Instruction, since as Kenneth Burke prophesied: “every once in a while a critical fantasy or tour de force turns up, such as a literary manifesto . . . a critic’s way of writing a poem.”38 Bloom’s severe prose-poem explores the pathos all young poets feel at being unable to do anything else other than repeat borrowed images that they fell in love with at a tender age. In the most stirring passage in The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom describes Satan’s fall from the world of eternity into clock-time and hence duality: “There is a terrible pathos in his . . . adopting an heroic dualism . . . a dualism upon which almost all post-Miltonic influence in the language founds itself.”39 Bloom presents a reading of Paradise Lost “as an allegory of the dilemma of the modern poet, at his strongest. Satan is that modern poet, while God is his dead but still embarrassingly potent and present . . . ancestral poet. Adam is the potentially strong modern poet, but at his weakest moment, when he has yet to find his own voice.”40 The Orc Cycle of rebellious Orc and tyrannous Urizen becomes the life cycle of the poet figured as Adam passing into Satan and, ultimately, the creatively dead God of Paradise Lost. It is Bloom’s agonistic archetype, and with it he charts all post-Romantic poetry. Later Bloom was to revise the post-Romantic aspect of this pronouncement since the second edition of The Anxiety of Influence attempts to uncover the anxious relationship between Shakespeare and his precursor Marlowe. In his pocket epic, Milton, Blake describes how “We are not Individuals but States: Combinations of Individuals” (Milton II.32.10). Blake means that the imagination is a state and that his imagination is beholden to Milton in the sense of a Nietzschean rendezvous of persons. It is from this insight that Bloom drew his inspiration for the revisionary ratios that make up The Anxiety of Influence: The Memory is a State always, & the Reason is a State Created to be Annihilated, & a new Ratio Created. (Milton II.32.34-5)

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Bloom encapsulates his six states as the Scene of Instruction, a Jewish allegory that pries into the moment of Protestant creation. Hartman explains the intrinsic Jewishness of the book: “Bloom has seen that Blake is indebted to Pauline revisionism that recognizes the Bible as authoritative yet asserts of the Jews that their moral and theological understanding has been limited by God’s will. . . . Thus it is the Old Testament, not the New, whose strength is the scandal.”41 One of Bloom’s most revealing confessions is that the ratios that make up the Scene of Instruction are based on the Priestly Author’s hymn to spoken light: Six days of creation, via their Kabbalistic interplays, gave me tropes I called “revisionary ratios” and turned into A Map of Misreading. . . . Starting with irony, considered as a Lucretian swerve or clinamen, I went on to synecdoche as the tessera (desire for recognition) of mystery cults. . . . The metonymy/metaphor division of Roman Jakobson, I rewrought as kenosis/askesis, the first an undoing measure and the second a perspectivizing maneuver. Between them came hyperbole, but conceived as a daimonic assertion of individual genius. To conclude the sequence I summoned metalepsis, or the metonymy of a metonymy. . . .42

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

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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 postRomantic 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

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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

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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

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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

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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-theopposite 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

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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

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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

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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

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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 antiChristian 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.

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Bloom and Derrida

Derrida began teaching at Yale in 1975; Bloom responds to his work in A Map of Misreading (1975), Poetry and Repression (1976), and Deconstruction and Criticism (1979). Indeed the caveman analogy from Poetry and Repression seems much akin to the infinite regress that Barbara Johnson wryly observed at work in the constantly deferring and differing Derridean figure of différance: “The caveman who traced the outline of an animal upon the rock always retraced a precursor’s outline.”1 The paradox of such an ever-receding line of temporal inquiry is that the author of The Anxiety of Influence becomes beholden to Derrida; scenes of writing and instruction sound suspiciously similar. Although Bloom asserts that “Nothing is more alien to me than deconstruction,” he admits deconstructionists are “my remote cousins intellectually speaking.”2 The main features that Bloom’s books share with his Yale colleagues are a penchant for discussing rhetoric to the detriment of philosophical truth, a tendency to rely on etymological investigations when deciding the true meanings of words, the reverse-dialectical procedure of inverting accepted hierarchies or binary oppositions, and a marked liking for charting the genealogical histories of concepts and/or verbal figures. Thus, I want to investigate what Bloom’s methodology has in common with Derrida, de Man, and to a lesser extent, Miller. I argue that deconstruction appears Jewish in the sense that it inverts the temple/labyrinth binary such that Derridean discourse is always on the threshold, but never quite discovers a transcendental signified. But I also maintain a healthy amount of skepticism with reference to claims that Derrida’s emphasis upon writing to the detriment of speech means that he was a secretly Jewish philosopher who filled his entrails with the scroll of the law which has become sweet as honey in his mouth, even though the characteristic absence of a godly presence in Derridean discourse seems quintessentially Judaic. But for Bloom, God has merely withdrawn after speaking the prologue to a cosmic psycho-drama and, as the critic of visionary desire, he argues that “if there is a temple at the visionary center, then the circumference may well be a labyrinth,” but characteristically internalizes this figure: “if you inhabit a labyrinth, then you created it.”3 However, there is a Greek as well as a Judaic conception of the labyrinth and the former grants the foremost place to those like Theseus

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who use rationality to outwit animal desire, albeit Derridean playfulness subverts this binary opposition, and hence, conversely, I ask the question to what extent does Bloom internalize the Greek concept of the Daedalian with the “Derridaedalian” consequences of fashioning what Fletcher figured as an endless prolixity?4 The central textual tenet of all deconstructive enterprises is identified by de Man: “A moving army of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms, in short a summa of human relationships that are being poetically and rhetorically sublimated, transposed, and beautified until, after long and repeated use, a people considers them as solid, canonical, and unavoidable.”5 Taking de Man at his word, my purpose is to demonstrate the closeness of the quotation to one by Derrida that purports to undermine the truth claims of Platonic philosophy and, at the same time, to explain the rules of the game that constitutes Derridean playfulness: 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 selfcontained and does not correlate with the object world; therefore, its constant iteration would seem not so much a Falstaffian ruse to corrupt a cryptoJewish 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

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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, LeviStrauss, 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

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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-intobeing 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

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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-assound 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 postRomantic 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 Influenceanxieties 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

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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.

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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: The trace is not a presence but is rather the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself. The trace has, properly speaking, no place, for effacement belongs to the very structure of the trace . . . the present becomes the sign of the sign, the trace of the trace; it is no longer that to which every reference ultimately refers. It becomes a function in a structure of generalized reference. It is a trace and a trace of the effacing of the trace. . . .20

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 dreamthoughts 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

Miller summarizes the mushroom syndrome as the polarity between logocentrism and deconstruction: “One way is referential (there is an origin), and the other the deconstruction of this referentiality (there is no origin, only the freeplay of linguistic substitution).”23 Bloomian analysis attempts to unravel this navel until one discovers where the deeply repressed genesis of a text in the burrows of the nightmare naked lies. Bloom determines that dreams are made from free association of ideas and that Freud borrows from the associationist philosophy of Mill and Locke, which indicates that “all dreams depend upon associative chains of imagery and ideas,” which are

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in turn “modifications upon empirical data.”24 Derridean freeplay refuses to nominate a transcendental signifier, whereas Bloomian analysis is more akin to Nietzsche’s aphorism that consciousness is a fantastic commentary upon an unknown text. In Derridean deconstruction, Being and the Platonic One are displaced by becoming and the many; the constantly deferred threshold of becoming takes the place of the Temple, or for that matter any nationalistic hope of rebuilding Zion. Derrida always deprecated his banally Judaic background, in which French culture asphyxiated any remnant of Jewishness; he even described himself as the “last Jew,” someone who belonged without belonging to a “heritage of amnesia.”25 Another way of putting this is to regard Derridean discourse as the repudiation of totality: If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field—that is, language and a finite language—excludes totalization. The field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite . . . instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions. . . .26

Ironically, the term bricolage begins as an attempt to make sense of the world from the navel point of a specific tribal culture’s temporal and geographic setting but soon mutates into a worn Derridean coinage for the inability of interpretation to totalize the information set before it: “The bricoleur, says Lévi-Strauss, is someone who uses ‘the means at hand’ . . . those which . . . had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used.”27 At first this explanation seems to fit the profile of the bungling Gnostic demiurge, constructing the world from the waste and waters to hand, but then, Derrida introduces an element of skepticism that deconstructs the myth of the immaculate poetic conception: “A subject who supposedly would be the absolute origin of his own discourse and supposedly would construct it ‘out of nothing’ . . . would be the creator of the verb, the verb itself.”28 Derrida’s transcendentally ruined discourses that question the origin of the verb “to be,” or indeed, deconstruct the phrase “Let there be,” remind of the disfigured landscapes of Romantic quest romance insofar as “what appears most fascinating . . . is the stated abandonment of all reference to a center, to a subject, to a privileged reference, to an origin, or to an absolute archia.”29 Frye’s definition of quest romance, which illustrates the Bloomian dream-quest, would seem dream more than reality: “Translated into dream terms, the quest-romance is the search of the libido or desiring self for a fulfillment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality but will still contain that reality.”30

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Pondering the delirium of Derridean imbrications, I am reminded forcibly of what Alethea Haytor named the “Piranesi Effect”: 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

The mushroom thrust up from the mycelium of De Quincey’s hallucinogenic dreams has been identified by the English Bate as originating in the influence of “a Doppelgänger effect whereby Coleridge’s shadow becomes De Quincey’s self-image.”32 In contrast to Derrida, Bloom’s interpretive quest for origins seeks out the central man, the memory of genesis, and a dream; its poetic substance can be illuminated by further comparison with the almost infinite regressions of Derrida. Bloom’s understanding of the sign as grounded in the presence and absence of Yahwistic breath is not exactly what Derrida condemns as logocentrism because Bloom privileges the Jewish word davhar over the Greek term logos; the Bloomian transcendental signifier is not placed under erasure, or Derrida’s curious technique of crossing out philosophical terms because their ostensible meaning has been deconstructed. Yet, Bloom’s supreme fiction is nevertheless a figure that is submitted to a great deal of skeptical inquiry and soul-searching. As a figure, the breath of Yahweh undergoes constant revision. At the beginning of Poetry and Repression, Bloom makes a distinction between his own concerns and those of Derrida: “Derrida asks a central question in his essay on Freud and the Scene of Writing: ‘What is a text, and what must the psyche be if it can be represented by a text?’ My narrower concern with poetry prompts the contrary question: ‘What is a psyche, and what must a text be if it can be represented by a psyche?’”33 His answer, reliant as it is on the creative reconstructions of etymologies, is that psyche means to breathe, but text means to weave, and that etymologically “represent” signifies the verb to be, or the welding together of psyche and text

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as fabrication.34 Bloom then introduces a dichotomy between Jewish honor and the challenge to authority that replicates itself throughout this book: “In Vico’s absolute distinction between gentile and Jew, the gentile is linked both to poetry and history, through the revisionary medium of language, while the Jew (and subsequently the Christian) is linked to a sacred origin transcending language, and so has no relation to human history or to the arts.”35 But in “Poetry, Revisionism, Repression,” the Lurianic cosmology that Bloom employs to describe the act of poetic creation exists only by analogy; the distinction between poetic creation and divine creation remains absolute: “The Lurianic story of creation begins with an act of self-limitation on God’s part that finds its aesthetic equivalent in any new poet’s initial rhetoric of limitation, that is, in his acts of re-seeing what his precursors had seen before him.”36 Bloom is keen to emphasize that “a primal fixation or repression . . . takes us back not to the Freudian Primal Scene of the Oedipus Complex, nor to the Freudian Primal History Scene of Totem and Taboo, nor to Derrida’s Scene of Writing, but to the most poetically primal of scenes, the Scene of Instruction.”37 There is a slight indication of anxiety in Bloom’s remark, “Blake’s London centers itself upon an opposition between voice and writing, by which I don’t mean that somehow Jacques Derrida wrote the poem.”38 Bloom’s reply is ferociously Judaic: “No—the poem is precisely anti-Nietzschean, anti-Derridean, and offers us a terrifying nostalgia for a lost prophetic voice, the voice of Ezekiel and religious logocentrism.”39 In the third essay in Poetry and Repression, Derrida’s influence once more asserts itself but this time as an aid to repudiating Laplanche and Pontalis: 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

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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

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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: Thus in an inquiry into the structure of dreams, the decisive question is whether the symbols and the temporal sequences used are based on contiguity (Freud’s metonymic “displacement” and synecdochic “condensation”) or on similarity (Freud’s “identification and symbolism”). The principles underlying magic rites have been resolved by Frazer into two types: charms based on the law of similarity and those founded on association by contiguity. The first of these two great branches of sympathetic magic has been called “homoeopathic” or “imitative”, and the second, “contagious magic”.49

To define sympathetic magic Frazer employs the ceaseless allegorical motions of the tide to the extent that symmetry predominates, “in the ebbing tide they discern a real agent as well as a melancholy emblem of failure.”50 As an example of contagious magic, Frazer lists how hunters in many different cultures “stab the footprints of game with a sharp-pointed stick” and so to hinder the animal’s escape by interfering with “the fresh spoor of the quarry.”51 Spivak explains that the Derridean trace is a play upon the Heideggarian path in the forest of signification etymologically tracked, “the end of philosophy, according to Heidegger, is to restore the memory of that free and commanding signified, to discover Urwörter (originary words)” and that the French word Derrida

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employs has strong implications of track, footprint, imprint, spoor even.52 Christopher Norris develops this point when he writes that logic and language as illocutionary acts are two fundamentally different ideas, “language serves a great variety of purposes, not all of which are accountable as statements of fact or logical entailment.”53 Derrida pushes these rough correlates into a repudiation of logocentric “fact,” since aporia, or the figure of doubt, derives from the Greek for an impassable path, while Bloom seeks the hidden paths of influence which are often revealed in moments of failure.54 To return to “As I Ebb’d,” Whitman finds that the lines underfoot left by the ebbing tide subdue and yet represent his performative pride and that the constative figure of repentance humbles his poetic persona. Perhaps the best way of providing a supplement to Bloom’s breezy but not in depth adumbration of Derrida is to contrast the usage both make of the mythical Egyptian god Thoth. In The Ringers in the Tower, Bloom provides an extended and almost Platonic myth to illustrate the return of Romanticism in contemporary American poetics as the return of the gods: A parable of Borges tells of a dream in which the gods returned, to occupy a platform in a lecture hall before an audience of the School of Philosophy and Letters. The professors first applauded, tearfully, but then began to suspect that the Gods were dumb and degenerate, “cunning, ignorant and cruel like old beasts of prey.” Lest the gods destroy them, the scholars “took out our heavy revolvers . . . and joyfully killed the Gods”. . . .55

Divination is a gentile trait, and here the philosophers protect a monotheistic conception of God diametrically opposed to being usurped by polytheistic or else generational revaluations of transcendent truth: “the Gods are poets whose auguries all have been fulfilled, men who somehow learned never to die, men who mastered divination.”56 In Bloom’s book Thoth is symbolic of iteration, the passage from Orc to Urizen, and Adam naming animals: “Hermes Thoth, God of commerce and so of all property, invented all names, establishing the certainties of ownership, and so goes on writing all books whatsoever.”57 Derrida, on the other hand, quotes a Socratic retelling of much the same myth, that of Theuth: “it was he who first invented numbers and calculation, geometry and astronomy, not to speak of draughts and dice, and above all writing (grammata).”58 Derrida concentrates upon the linguistic figure that Thoth represents, that is representation and substitution in a field defined by opposites: “He cannot be assigned a fixed spot in the play of differences. Sly, slippery, and masked, an intriguer and a card, like Hermes, he is neither king nor jack, but rather a sort of joker, a floating signifier, a

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wild card, one who puts play into play.”59 If Thoth invents language, then he invents the play of differences as well. As Bloom explains, the play of signifiers in a system is the basic principle of différance: “Writing, as Derrida tropes it, both keeps us from the void and, more aggressively (as against voicing), gives us a saving difference, by preventing that coincidence of speaker with subject.”60 Derrida’s performative rebuttal of the Socratic logic that written words are all too apt to be misprisioned leads Bloom to speculate much in the fashion of Hélène Cixous that Derrida is a secret Jew: “Derrida is substituting davhar for logos, thus correcting Plato by a Hebraic equating of the writingact and the mark-of-articulation with the word itself.”61 Bloom’s response to Derrida is theological; he seeks to reassert the primacy of speech over writing because in terms of poetry writing constitutes a tradition of dead poetic speech. To see why, it is necessary to consider Freud’s “A Note Upon ‘The Mystic Writing Pad’,” since here Freud proposes that memory works according to the analogy of a child’s writing toy similar in kind to the Etch-a-sketch device that I remember playing with as a small child: “I do not think it too far-fetched to compare the celluloid and waxed paper cover with the system Pept.-Cs. (perception-consciousness) and its protective shield, the wax slab with the unconsciousness behind them, and the appearance (becoming-visible; Sichtbarwerden) and disappearance of the writing with flickering-up and passing away of consciousness in the process of perception.”62 Freud’s analogy supposes that through the processes of primary perception, experience is accumulated as “writing” in the mind, and that this process leaves memory-traces that are overwritten by fresh memories ever gathered anew from everyday experiences which for the most part remain actively repressed. Derrida’s interpretation of Freudian memory, as Bloom explains, would seem to depend upon memorized texts that find their way into consciousness via a process of path-breaking: In Derrida’s Sublime trope, we are told that “there is no psyche without text”, an assertion that goes beyond Derrida’s precursor, Lacan, in his grand trope that the structure of the unconscious is linguistic. Psychical life thus is no longer to be represented as a transparency of meaning nor as an opacity of force but as an intra-textual difference in the conflict of meanings and the exertion of forces.63

Derrida’s Scene of Writing belongs to the post-structuralist culture of the text and Bloom’s Scene of Instruction to the culture of the book; thus, de Bolla is an excellent source to consult at this juncture: “Bloom is interested in Derrida’s notion of the primacy of writing because it contradicts what for Bloom . . . is the most obvious and problematic truth, that speech is first and foremost, and that what produces poetry is the interrelationship of speech and dead speech,

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the voice of the precursor poet, the voice of tradition through writing.”64 De Bolla’s intervention underlines that Bloom opposes Kabbalah to Derridean différance, or, as Bloom puts it in Kabbalah and Criticism: “Kabbalah speaks of a writing before writing (Derrida’s ‘trace’), but also of a speech before speech, a Primal Instruction preceding all traces of speech. . . . Kabbalah stops the movement of Derrida’s ‘trace’, since it has a point of the primordial, where presence and absence co-exist by continuous interplay.”65 Derrida attacks the Lacanian concept of the linguistic unconscious taken as the transcendental signifier, but Bloom resorts to a mystical Jewish moment of transcendence that he thinks refutes Derrida’s deconstructive hyperbole, that sublime fall into the abyss of signification. Bloom nominates hyperbole as the Derridean trope of tropes because “Derrida’s keenest insight . . . is that ‘writing is unthinkable without repression’, which is to identify writingas-such with the daemonizing trope of hyperbole.”66 Writing supplements perception; thus, Derrida interprets Freud as borrowing rhetorical models not from oral tradition, but from an internalized script that is never subject to the spoken word, and which path-breaking writerly activity is figured as a symbolic substitute for treading upon the body of mother earth. Derrida’s Scene of Writing reverses or, as Bloom puts it, transumes the fantasy neurosis of Freud’s Primal Scene; the latter indicates that Freud belongs to the tradition of interpretation, or Midrash, because the inhibition of primal repression parallels the injunction not to reveal oral tradition, the hedge around Torah. Bloom’s objection is that God’s instruction of Moses is more primal than the written tradition of Maimonides. He then demonstrates how Derrida evades Freud’s caveat that during the uninhibited process of writing the ego avoids a conflict with the id such that writing flows: . . . for writing to be as primal as coitus—the inhibition of writing would have to come about to avoid a conflict with the superego, and not with the id. But speech, not writing, as Freud always says, is inhibited to avoid conflict with the superego. For the superego presides over the Scene of Instruction, which is always at least quasi-religious in its associations, and speech therefore is more primal. Writing, which is cognitively secondary, is closer to mere process, to the automatic behaviour of the id. . . . Freud, unlike Nietzsche and Derrida, knows that precursors become absorbed into the id and not into the superego.67

It is worth emphasizing that Bloom compares the influence of Spenser and Moses on Milton, arguing that as Milton’s Great Original Spenser was absorbed into the id-component of his psyche, and Milton was inhibited by this influence, while his oral muse, Moses, became an attribute of Milton’s superego which accounts for Milton’s freedom in expanding Scripture in

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Paradise Lost. Bloom wishes to assert the primacy of Yahwistic davhar over Christ’s logos (he describes the depiction of Christ as an aesthetic failure in Paradise Lost), the primacy of poetic utterance over the dead letter of written language where written language here divides into poetry and Scripture and, indeed, Scripture is viewed as redacted poetry. The blind spot for Bloom is that Milton is more inhibited by the Johannine Word than Moses. One obvious difference between Bloom and his deconstructive brethren would seem the influence of Burke. From Burke, Bloom gains his greater fascination with trope-spotting, that is the taxonomical classification of pieces of writing according to their rhetorical category. Bloom defines a trope as “wherever there is a movement from sign to intentionality, whenever the transformation from signification to meaning is made by the test of what aids the continuity of critical discourse.”68 Intentionality has a phenomenological ring to it; the Scene of Instruction attempts to peer into the mental processes that govern composition by means of textual analysis figured as a map of defenses and tropes, except that when applied to an entire career the figure of duration enters the existential equation. Bloom champions his rhetoric of tropes but attempts to distance himself from the “supposed critical distinction between metonymy and metaphor”: “the fundamental dichotomy in trope is between irony and synecdoche or, as Burke says, between dialectic and representation.”69 Bloom continues that metaphor and metonymy level to perspective and reduction and are alike heightened degrees of dialectical irony. Bloom’s Burkean rhetoric distances him from deconstruction per se, since Derrida writes that the history of western metaphysics is the history of redundant metaphors and metonymies for what Derrida posits as the decentered center of Being and presence.70 These figural substitutions for the transcendental signifier belong to a system of differences “in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences.”71 Derrida then adds that the “absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely.”72 Play, we should remember, is for Derrida the disruption of presence; for him, the performative is freedom from cant and not at all nihilistic. Nihilistic despair in Bloom is represented by Iago’s motiveless malignity; his deceptive statement, “I am not what I am” has a certain existential similarity with Bloom’s post-Holocaust interpretation of Yahweh’s message, “I Am what I Am” that Bloom renders: “I will be there when I want to be there and not there when I do not want to be there.” Bloom’s ultimate reply to Derrida might well reduce to the rebuff: nothing is true; everything is permitted!

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Bloom and De Man

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: He insisted that an epistemological stance in regard to a literary work was the only way out of the tropological labyrinth, while I replied that such a stance was no more or less a trope than any other. Irony, in its prime sense of allegory, saying one thing while suggesting another, is the epistemological trope-of-tropes, and for de Man constituted the condition of literary language itself, producing that “permanent parabasis of meaning” studied by deconstructionists.4

Jargon is the bugbear of contemporary criticism; parabasis makes an appearance on the last but one page of Allegories of Reading, where de Man defines it as “a sudden revelation of the discontinuity between two rhetorical codes.”5 This moment of linguistic revelation occurs when one notices a disjunction between the interpretive pathos of performative rhetoric, that

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is when metaphors reference the reality of doing, if not the truth of being, and their grammatical function in the sense of what a syntagmatic chain metonymically means when analyzed from a purely linguistic perspective. Indeed, de Man’s disjunction between literary and linguistic analysis often resembles friendly, if incommensurable, debates that I have had with philologist colleagues on the topic of how to interpret a particular text. De Man explains this disjunction with highly ironical reference to an allegorical understanding of metaphor: “Allegories are always allegories of metaphor and, as such, they are always allegories of the impossibility of reading.”6 Abrams glosses that if the paradigm for all texts consists of a figure (usually metaphor), or a system of figures, then de Man supposes that this forms a second-order narrative, or an allegory in “which the tenor . . . is invariably the undecidability of the text itself.”7 De Man bases his deconstructive understanding of metaphor on a reading of Nietzsche in which the poles of metaphor and metonymy become rough correlates; the categories of the Dionysian world of plastic art and the false Apollonian world of appearances. He praises Nietzsche for being the first theorist of rhetoric adjudged as the will to persuade to fully reverse the “established priorities which traditionally root the authority of the language in its adequation to an extralinguistic referent or meaning, rather than in the intralinguistic resource of figures.”8 De Man records that it is difficult not to see The Birth of Tragedy “as a plea for the unmediated presence of the will, for a truly tragic over an ironic art” and in so doing recounts Nietzsche’s nostalgia for the age of Sophocles over that of Aristophanes, which is an acute context to view de Man’s assertion that philosophy should have a purely literary conception, since the age of Aristophanes was also the age of Plato and, as Bloom notes, Aristophanes was not just the father of literary criticism but also the person who started the rumor that caused the arrest of Socrates.9 Allegories of Reading ends with de Man staking a large claim on behalf of the figure of irony: “Irony is no longer a trope but the undoing of the deconstructive allegory of all tropological cognitions, the systematic undoing, in other words, of understanding.”10 Persuasion depends upon a suspension of disbelief but, when rhetorical figures are spotted, then the orator is revealed to have designs on us; in writerly terms, the linguistic moment means that the reader becomes overcome by skepticism and the inability of words to connect with Lockean reality. In Bloom’s view, the irreconcilable ironies of deconstruction, the clash of rhetoric as system of tropes with the pathos of rhetoric as persuasion, is a form of double-speak: “Philosophers of intertextuality and of rhetoricity usefully warn me that the meanings of an intertextual encounter are as undecidable and unreadable as any single text is, but I discover pragmatically that such philosophers at best teach me a kind of double-entry bookkeeping,

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which as a reader I have to discount.”11 His capitalist metaphor functions as an Abrams-like rebuke on the part of Bloom aimed against the familiar Jakobson rhetorical division between metaphor and metonymy: “I subtract the rhetoricity from both columns, from rhetoric as system of tropes, and from rhetoric as persuasion, and return to where I started.”12 Bloom is effectively saying that the deconstructionists have got things back to front, since deconstructive critics search for Miller’s linguistic moment: “the linguistic moment is the moment when a poem, or indeed any text, turns back on itself and puts its own medium in question, so that there is a momentum in the poem toward interrogating signs as such.”13 The textual self-questioning of ostensibly accepted hierarchical binaries becomes the second-order of meaning or allegory from which evidence de Man claims that texts deconstruct themselves but which ostensible self-consciousness demands the reader’s complicity. He playfully argues that reading is itself impossible, while Bloom will propose that poetic meaning is impossible in a fallen world. In a short but revealing treatment of de Man’s criticism, Miller writes that allegories are always narratives spread on a temporal scale; he picks out this quotation from “The Rhetoric of Temporality” as instrumental: In the world of the symbol it would be possible for the image to coincide with the substance, since the substance and its representation do not differ in their being but only in their extension: they are part and whole of the same set of categories. Their relationship is one of simultaneity, which, in truth, is spatial in kind, and in which the intervention of time is merely a matter of contingency, whereas, in the world of allegory, time is the originary constitutive category. . . . It remains necessary, if there is to be allegory, that the allegorical sign refer to another sign that precedes it.14

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

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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

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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

From Bloom’s perspective the J-Writer specializes in representing “when altogether incommensurate realities juxtapose and clash” and because “J is at once the greatest and the most ironic writer in the Hebrew Bible.”26 Bloom’s incommensurate-realities center on “representation of Yahweh as . . . humanall-too-human,” which breaks the Second Commandment.27 In de Man’s view all texts carry the allegory of their own linguistic moment, akin to what Fletcher calls “the criterion of increasing constriction of meaning, by which we recognize the iconographic significance of the agent,” or the one-trick narrowness of the gibe that boa-deconstruction always results in the same linguistic destruction of humanistic presence.28 Bloom summarizes this as when the causal fictions of humanism become cumulative errors because as linguistic tropes text and psyche are interpreted as ironically reversible: “Influence, for de Man as for Nietzsche, is such a causal fiction but I myself see influence as a trope-of-tropes . . . that surmounts its own errors.”29 In his review of The Anxiety of Influence, de Man asserts that no theory of poetry is possible without a truly epistemological moment, when patterns of error are rooted in reader and text: “from the moment we begin to deal with substitutive systems, we are governed by linguistic rather than by natural or psychological models.”30 Even the interplay between literal and figurative meaning within a single word becomes appropriated by de Man as

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evidence of the deconstructive virtue of Bloom’s manifesto of poetry, since a single stray echo also has a grammatical function within the ephebe’s poem, for example, in Bloom’s Miltonic reading of Tintern Abbey, the possessive phrase “blind man’s eye.”31 Between the mirror and the lamp or tropes of limitation (clinamen, kenosis, and askesis) and tropes of representation (tessera, daemonization, and apophrades) there is a moment of uncertainty; de Man’s definition is that between “rhetoric as persuasion and rhetoric as a system of tropes . . . there falls an aporia, a figuration of doubt, which may be the principle of rhetorical substitution itself.”32 It is as well to recite Bloom’s definition too: “Between theology (system of tropes) and belief (persuasion) there comes always the aporia (figuration of doubt . . . necessity of misreading)”; Bloom classifies theology as ethos and conversion as pathos; to him logos is the potentially godless dynamic between ethos and pathos.33 Allen has persuasively argued that A Map of Misreading answers de Man’s criticism, that language has priority over the subject; therefore, Bloom responds by asserting the interpretive totality of tradition, in which he includes himself and his opponent as well as the text under deconstruction.34 Bloom suggests that for de Man “the linguistic model usurps the psychological one because language is a substitute system responsive to the will, but the psyche is not.”35 The main difference between Bloom and de Man is that Bloom argues that the strong poet or reader starts by misreading and therefore the poet’s willto-power, the clinamen of free-will, functions as a willful re-interpretation of all reality.36 Influence is consequently rendered as a whole range of psychological and tropological relationships between one poem and another; to concentrate upon the latter as an example, Bloom depicts influence as a sixfold trope that subsumes six major tropes—irony, synecdoche, metonymy, hyperbole, metaphor, and metalepsis.37 De Man’s reduction of all meaning to irony ostensibly destroys meaning but apparently not the complicit communicable meaning of each individual statement, or the palpable irony upon which his deconstructive stance depends. Furthermore de Man’s review of influence depends on influence being interpreted as merely metaphorical, a development of his insight that all criticism is a metaphor for the act of reading, the irony that a text refers diachronically to its predecessor text and beyond this toward the agonistic totality of tradition’s abyss.38 But in Bloom’s system, poetry would seem discursive; if the poet fails to repress his origins, then a sense of self-irony afflicts the poet, and like Keats they are liable to give up writing the overly Latinate Hyperion, in other words: “we can never say too often that irony implies the potential defeat of action, defeat at the hands of introspection, self-consciousness.”39 In Allen’s opinion, Bloom’s assertion that a trope is just as much a concealed mechanism of defense, as a defense is a concealed trope, transforms de Man’s focus on the epistemological

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moment in literary texts into a category mistake: “Bloom establishes the interdependence of trope and defense, an interdependence which reasserts the validity of the language of poetic psychology over the deconstructive criterion of language.”40 Because Bloom argues that poetry is a discursive and not a linguistic mode, there is, from his perspective, a psychological as well as a linguistic tension at work in poetry, and therefore only the absenting of the psyche from poetry reduces poetry to semantic tension, to interplay between literal and figurative meanings.41 In his reply to de Man’s criticism that language speaks and not the subject, Bloom turns to Wittgenstein, who reportedly said that the primal scene has the attractiveness of giving a tragic pattern to one’s life, a mythology that has been imposed upon one.42 Bloom responds that the artist, as Nietzsche taught Yeats, is truly the antithetical man, with his personality set against his character, but there is nothing antithetical about the Primal Scene.43 Rather, Bloom sees the primal scene as a solipsism that represses the precursor’s influence, a mirror that selfishly reflects the self and the aporia the converse, or those dramatic moments when the ephebe stares at tradition darkly: “the aporia, is necessarily an epistemological moment, with the authority to deconstruct its own text, that is, to indicate the text’s cognitive awareness of its own limit as text, its own status as rhetoricity.”44 The Primal Scene is the place of the Imagination; thus, the aim of primitivistic imagination is not so much libertarian as to establish fixed limits, “as a psychological protection against the chaos of the surrounding world.”45 Bloom’s Vichian rhetoric produces this somewhat blunt formula: “If you can know only what you have made, then if you know a text, what you know is the interpretation of it that you have made.”46 Bloom asserts the de-idealizing formula that poets actually think in such agonistically reductive terms as “where it, the precursor’s poem, is there let my poem be.”47 Bloom’s stance is here a diachronic position pragmatically identical with de Man’s synchronic insistence on logocentric meaning being dead, and hence Bloom concedes that poetic meaning is radically indeterminate because every reader’s relation to every poem is governed by a figuration of repressive belatedness that clears away the traditional past.48 Bloom is not interested in the arbitrariness of post-structuralist truth as much as the will to truth understood as the play of poetic diction: “the play of the signifier is answered always by the play of the signified” because the “poet’s will over language” is constituted by “endless interchanges of denotation and connotation.”49 Bloom champions the psychological aspects of influence: “influence remains subject-centered, a person-to-person relationship, not to be reduced to a problematic of language.”50 But Bloom insists that he is not “an essentialist humanist,” and that The Anxiety of Influence has been weakly misread because

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“influence-anxiety does not so much concern the forerunner but rather is an anxiety achieved in and by the story, novel, play, poem, or essay.”51 Bloom then states that influence anxiety may or may not be internalized by the later writer, but that this hardly matters since the strong poem is “the achieved anxiety.”52 Again in The Western Canon, Bloom claims Freudian-Oedipal rivalry represents a weak reading of his work and praises de Bolla’s apt summary of his intentions: For Bloom, “influence” is both a tropological category, a figure which determines the poetic tradition, and a complex of psychic, historical and imagistic relations . . . influence describes the relations between texts, it is an intertextual phenomenon . . . both the internal psychic defense— the poet’s experience of anxiety—and the external historical relations of texts to each other are themselves the result of misreading, or poetic misprision, and not the cause of it.53

It is hard not to view this textual emphasis as a hangover from New Criticism, although the distinction I would make is to underline that Bloom’s theories are also a mode of autobiography with the corollary observation that Bloom does not view selfhood as a purely textual matter. Bielik-Robson’s recent reading of Bloom meditates upon willful lying in Bloom’s theoretical writings, but from a perspective that reduces selfhood to a problematic of language, an idea perhaps borrowed ab initio from de Man: “The self which was at first the center of the language as its empirical referent now becomes the language of the center as fiction, as metaphor of the self.”54 Drawing upon Nietzsche, de Man further argues that “by calling the subject a text, the text calls itself, to some extent, a subject. The lie is raised to a new figural power, but it is nonetheless a lie.”55 The Nietzschean illusion that allows selfhood to originate would seem the central point of Bielik-Robson’s account of Bloom: “Having no Vision of one’s own, no inner truth to tell, no ready salvation for the fallen, repetitive world at hand, no background for his individualistic hubris—the subject can nonetheless resort to lying.”56 Nevertheless, BielikRobson discerns the link between painful moaning and linguistic meaning in Bloom’s contribution to Deconstruction and Criticism, wherein Bloom objects to those de Manian “knights of chastity,” who dismiss from their reading processes “all traces of ‘moaning’ from the sterility of ‘meaning’.”57 As a gifted Jewish scholar, Bielik-Robson is concerned with the figure of wrestling Jacob and notes that Yahweh is a “non-mythical deity whose essence is not the crushing power of fate, but the pure energy of will.”58 Unlike de Man, BielikRobson does not combine the death of the author with the death of God, and therefore she finds “anti-Semitic innuendoes” in The Birth of Tragedy, where

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the Judaic myth of the fall exhibits deception, suggestibility, concupiscence, a whole series of feminine frailties with the Nietzschean conclusion that in comparison to the Promethean sin, “The Aryan nations assign to crime the male, the Semites to sin the female gender.”59 Bloom’s response to de Man’s review of The Anxiety of Influence revolves around the Nietzschean irony that “Art treats appearance as appearance; its aim is precisely not to deceive, it is therefore true” and de Man’s parallel irony that “error cannot be distinguished from imagination.”60 Blake would reply that imagination is the human condition or state—and Yeats that it corresponds to the transmundane thirtieth phase of his deterministic lunar horoscope—Bloom synthesizes these two positions as a fiery wrestling match against over-determination. Blake thinks memory should be purged, not inspiration; Bloom, on the other hand, asserts that, technically speaking, memory equates to where the daemon of influence lurks. Blake did not want Roman and Greek models and yet an unusual perspective on influence is provided by Tertullian’s “On Idolatry” where the claim is made that the devil is the father of art, since in his iconoclasm the Church Father found statuary contaminating: “In Greek, eidos means form. It has a diminutive eidolon, like our formula from form. So every ‘form’ or ‘formula’ has a claim to be called ‘idol’.”61 St Paul is cast as the bad guy in Bloom’s writings because he demonizes the divinatory daemon of Socrates as described by Xenophon and advises all good Christians to put on their armor of God against spiritual wickedness; therefore, if daemon is swapped for devil and Platonism for Christianity then everything falls into place, since the daemonic intuitions of the Socratic unconscious would be extirpated by rationality and hence replaced by the unswerving truth of the eternal forms.62 The breaking of form confirms that the anxiety of influence is intrinsically rhetorical, even to the extent that ingenuity and will-power resist the over-determining models against which the artistic unconscious struggles. Bloom demands that we are not complicit in the over-idealization of poems as somehow beyond influence and yet insists that deconstruction is rhetorical complicity itself. Bloom insists the psyche is not a text but is uncomfortable with the idea of essentialist humanism; he writes that to Blake nature is delusive, potentially entrapping and wholly foreign to human imagination and suggests that “Coleridge lay down to sleep upon the Organic analogue as though . . . a Beulah couch.”63 Bloom’s attack on the organic analog has a political dimension; Terry Eagleton writes that Heidegger can be fruitfully contrasted with de Man: “Heidegger never unequivocally recanted his Nazi past. . . . De Man remained silent. . . . It is possible to read de Man’s post-war work as an extreme reaction against the politics of Being. . . . In the later de Man, all notions of language as replete with Being, of signs

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as organically related to things, are denounced as pernicious mystifications.”64 He further remarks that Heidegger’s “apocalyptic conception of teleological time brimming with destiny is steadily drained by de Man to the empty, broken temporality of allegory.”65 Norris suggests that de Man’s later deconstructive work evolved “as a form of ideological critique directed against precisely that seductive will to treat language and culture as organic, quasi-natural products rooted in the soil of some authentic native tradition.”66 Kate Soper’s account of nature and Nazism is equally relevant: “Romantic conceptions of ‘nature’ as wholesome salvation from cultural decadence and racial degeneration were crucial to the construction of Nazi ideology, and an aesthetic of ‘nature’ as a source of purity and authentic self-identification has been a component of all forms of racism, tribalism and nationalism.”67 The theme of degeneration and renewal is clearly visible in de Man’s war-time writings: “‘Leaving aside questions of supremacy . . . things had come to such a point of decomposition and degeneration that the will to change must exist before everything else.”68 The great paradox of extremist right-wing politics is that a too precious love of country should ever be associated with the fool’s gold of hatred for neighboring countries together with the xenophobic persecution of immigrant groups. Eric Hobsbawm adds the endogamous ideal of national purity to the patriot’s paradox and, in so doing, crystallizes one of the main shibboleths of National Socialism. The most notorious of de Man’s writings has to be “Jews in Contemporary Literature.” This latter was the article that caused Derrida to lament “the wound I right away felt . . . an anti-Semitism that would have come close to urging . . . the most sinister deportations.”69 Derrida refers to this “terrifying” passage that does not view Nazism as foreign to Flemish culture: If our civilization had let itself be invaded by a foreign force, then we would have to give up much hope for its future. By keeping, in spite of semitic interference in all aspects of European life, an intact originality and character, it has shown that its basic nature is healthy. What is more, one sees that a solution of the Jewish problem that would aim at the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe would not entail, for the literary life of the West, deplorable consequences. The latter would lose, in all, a few personalities of mediocre value and would continue, as in the past, to develop according to its great evolutionary laws.70

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

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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

In response to the inevitable journalistic squib “deconstruction is fascism,” Derrida answers that deconstructive strategies are being employed “precisely to deconstruct the foundations of . . . totalitarianism or of Nazism, of racisms and authoritarian hierarchies in general.”72 Although Derrida sidesteps an overt definition of deconstruction, he glosses that it is a strategy “for assuming the necessity in which any discourse finds itself to take account of the rules and of the determined forms of this or that rationality which it is in the process of criticizing or, especially, of deconstructing.”73 Derrida’s synopsis is singularly apt, since Bloom’s essay “‘To Reason with a Later Reason’: Romanticism and the Rational” more or less forms the kernel of the present text from which springs my interpretation of Bloom’s bad dream of the covering cherub pressing down upon him like the counterpane; here Bloom argues that poems like “Ode to Psyche” and “Resolution and Independence” conduct their polemics against the rags that masquerade as the rational coverings of imagination: “The enemy within, for both poems, is what Blake called the Spectre, the isolated selfhood, rationalizing its fears of death and deprivation into a morality of natural confinement.”74 Derrida responds to those who accuse deconstruction of being a form of Humean skepticism and hence chasmic nihilism, while Bloom’s rebuttal of the enemy within is directed against what Blake personified as the Idiot Questioner or the soul of rationalism personified as a personal form of despair.75 If you cynically think all roads lead to a Roman triumph, then, and precisely then life triumphs over the individual. In “Shelley Disfigured,” the Bonepartist ideal is one that de Man ironizes and he does so very much in the spirit of a statue of Stalin toppling: “to monumentalize . . . would be to regress from the rigor exhibited by Shelley which is exemplary precisely because it refuses to be generalized into a system.”76 Kierkegaard once wrote that “it can be just as ironic to pretend to know when one does not know as to pretend not to know when one knows that one knows.”77 The first part of this witty reversal might be said to cover the nastiness of those who attacked deconstruction as a form of nihilistic Nazism, while the second part applies perfectly to de Man’s lame excuse that he jacked in his journalism, when Nazi thought-control made it impossible for him to any

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longer express himself freely.78 In rebuke to the latter evasion, Derrida aptly ferrets out the following quotation from Allegories of Reading: “the text can never stop apologizing for the suppression of guilt that it performs.”79 Derrida examines the phrase “nameless avengers” and infers “Nameless? Minus the crime, (almost)” only to project de Man’s putative guilt complex onto a phrase from Rousseau’s Confessions: “If this crime can be redeemed . . . it must be . . . by forty years of upright and honorable behaviour.”80 The nameless crime was Churchill’s dark allusion to the Holocaust, as Derrida well knows. My feeling is that from the perspective of the clement Victor Frankl, de Man’s moral character would not be thought fascist; of the two conflicting de Mans the last one to speak was anti-totalitarian. Derrida compares de Man’s writings to a seashell, and this beautiful image at once alludes to a passage of dramatic irony in a war-time review of a novel written by Montherlant: “When I open the newspapers and journals of today, I hear the indifference of the future rolling over them, just as one hears the sound of the sea when one holds certain seashells up to the ear,” whereas in a passage in The Rhetoric of Romanticism we find the repudiation of the same image: “a beginning implies a negation of permanence, the discontinuity of death in which an entity relinquishes its specificity and leaves it behind, like an empty shell.”81 De Man writes that the image of the shell in Yeats’s The Wanderings of Oisin is granted the “main faculties of conscious mind, and it has received them from a mere figure of speech.”82 The discontinuity of subjectivity and nature and its projection onto the shell of language seems a very beautiful image to apply to Derrida’s dead friend, since seashells haunt the listener with the sounds of the sea. Seán Burke writes that de Man was haunted by harrowing scenes of the Holocaust and waves us toward this passage in de Man’s later prose: “certain scenes or phrases return at times to haunt me like a guilty conscience.”83 Burke ponders whether de Man was trying to “redress and retract the ideology reflected in his war-time journalism,” or “attempting to obliterate his own history.”84 He concludes that de Man has “come to life as a biographical figure with a chilling and tragic intensity.”85 But how anti-biographical it is to wash away the past; to let what is repressed sublimate on the escapist American shore as mockery of language, conceived as a shell devoid of its humanity. The chiasmus of his nationalist writings and his later anti-totalizing/anti-totalitarian stance indicate Prospero intent upon repudiating a thing of darkness. That de Man’s demons were never openly faced down in a public confession is the tragic thing; he probably saw his post-structuralist writings as an attempt to destroy the intellectual foundations of totalitarianism forever. To think so is to respond intellectually and hence to find de Man, the diffident colleague of Derrida, not guilty, but not everyone is convinced; Barbara Johnson’s emotional reaction would seem symptomatic of an

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almost Nazi logic of purification, the vomiting of a name: “It was as though the milk of de Man’s writing, which I had already drunk, had turned to poison.”86 Such nausea reminds of R. S. Thomas’s most notorious poem, “It Hurts Him to Think,” in which the Welsh poet sardonically writes that he sucked in the English language with his mother’s infected milk, “so that whatever/I throw up now is still theirs.”87 A short comparison of Thomas and de Man makes for an intriguing close to this discussion since their posthumous reputations revolve around what Marxists call the national question. Publicly, Thomas propagandized on behalf of Welsh nationalism, but behind the scenes he married an English woman, refused to teach his only son, Gwydion, Welsh, and sent him to Shrewsbury Public School.88 Evelyn Barish accuses de Man of being a duplicitous figure, who cannot be absolved from covering up crimes such as bigamy and antiSemitism; she relates that the younger de Man’s reviews went with the collaborationist flow and were opportunistic.89 Similarly, Thomas’s organic nationalism with its blood-and-the-soil rhetoric played to the gallery and hence pleased extremist sensibilities within the Welsh academy.90 However, Peter Brooks defends de Man by arguing that his ever-changing philological interpretations resist simplifying systematization, but then glosses that de Man’s mature output “is united by a suspicion of ideology as a mystification that takes the seductions of rhetoric as something in which to believe.”91 Unlike de Man, Thomas never made guilty “reparations” for his hypocritically nationalist utterances with their mystical celebrations of Christ-like figures; his autobiography was entitled Neb (No one) and Gwydion states that its third-person narrative was his father’s way of “shedding responsibility”.92 Hartman is circumspect with regard to Derrida’s insight that there is an odd complicity speaking unconsciously from de Man’s almost confessional readings of Rousseau, although he too rejects the journalistic jibes: “ Though many statements in de Man’s later writings echo differently in the mind when read against the disclosed biographical background, I cannot discern a deliberately masked connection, a use of theory to occult virulent or nihilistic ideas.”93 Hartman writes that he had naively considered de Man a refugee scholar and that England was his own first place of refuge where he learned a passion for words. It seems odd that two of the deconstructive quintet, who contributed to Deconstruction and Criticism, were European émigrés, while Derrida was a visitor from France. Bloom himself was a second-generation immigrant, and we should note that three of the five were Jewish wanderers involved in negotiating textual labyrinths and a fourth estranged from his European self. One perceives in this ironic discourse of shatter and piece together the shadow not just of the fallen world, but of the Holocaust as well.

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Bloom and New Historicism

John Harwood begins his book, Eliot to Derrida: The Poverty of Interpretation, with this Swiftian prolegomenon: “I apprehend some curious Wit may object against me, for proceeding thus far in a Preface, without declaiming, according to the Custom, against the Multitude of Writers whereof the whole Multitude of Writers most reasonably complains.”1 Harwood does not refer directly to Bloom but instead to the legions of modern interpretive angels that inhabit the academy, which he supposes are more populous than drops of dew. Bloom studiously rereads A Tale of a Tub every year on the grounds that “Swift audaciously plays at the farthest limits of irony, limits that make satire impossible, because no norm exists to which we might hope to return.”2 Swift’s witticism provides a discursive introduction for easily the most controversial phase of Bloom’s literary life, that is that of his quarrels with Feminist, New Historicist, and Multiculturalist “commissars.” Bloom figures the “Resenters” as Trinculos and Stephanos freeing Caliban from bondage to Prospero.3 Thus, I chart the reefs and sandbanks of Bloom’s tempestuous relations with these new-fangled denizens of the American academy, or as he laments with nostalgia for the Holofernes-like clerics of New Criticism: “I would as soon be surrounded by a secular clergy as by a pride of displaced social workers.”4 My discussion traces the roots of representative New Historicists and then branches out toward Feminism and Multiculturalism; it examines the perceived conservatism of The Western Canon and Bloom’s transformation into the Urizenic defender of the canon. Given that Bloom never specifically refers to his opponents by name or treatise, I briefly explain what it is he reacts against and venture the argument that his response revolves around the dialectic of animalism and abstraction, which is how De Quincey characterized Caliban and Ariel.5 In other words, I oppose Bloom’s interest in unconscious creative energies to the abstract social energies proposed by the doyens of New Historicism. Marjorie Levinson commends Bloom for teaching her generation how to think its subject, but pays him this back-handed compliment: “the defensive tone and polemical tactics of this new historicist criticism confirm the syndrome Bloom himself conceived: the anxiety of influence.”6

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Bloom smashed the New Critical icon by diachronic comparison; Levinson’s ephebes wrote his name on potsherds and ostracized the Callicles of Yale. Levinson famously argues that Wordsworth’s visionary imagination excludes the vagrant-poor as reported in contemporary descriptions of Tintern Abbey, despite the fact that Wordsworth writes sensitively on the topic of vagrants elsewhere in Lyrical Ballads. Nevertheless, I confess a sneaking liking for her reading because she highlights the comforting sense of peace that Wordsworth derives from visiting the ruins of the Catholic faith, a lost sense of European unity that iconoclasm shattered. Thus, those exponents of that branch of Marxism broadly definable as New Historicism compare literary texts to other synchronic texts: letters, journals, manuscripts, memoirs, etc. Biographical material and indeed the means to produce the same became the meat and drink of literary critics from the late 1970s onwards. A huge influence on this shift in sensibility was Raymond Williams, who, in “Culture is Ordinary,” opposes the experiential defense of high culture espoused by the scientifically rigorous criticism of Leavis that art and culture are desperate survivors against the cheapening effect of mass-industrial vulgarity and machine-age barbarianism.7 Another high-profile historicist, Jerome McGann, draws upon Bakhtin’s arguments that works of art do not stand alone in splendid isolation; they participate in the flow of social life, and reflect the economy of interactions that McGann’s Marxist analysis figures as the bibliographical reception of the literary text in society over time. Stephen Greenblatt utilizes much the same rhetoric to justify his documentary usage of historical anecdote; he argues that the anecdote determines the destiny of a specifically historiographic integration of event and context since, as the narration of a singular event, the anecdote is the literary form or historical genre that uniquely refers to the real.8 The socio-economic determinants of meaning became so important that McGann exhorts his readers: “I do not see how we can reciprocate the transcendence of Romantic verse, or feel anything but shame when we read such poetry.”9 Transcendence McGann redefines as false consciousness: “One of the basic illusions of Romantic Ideology is that only a poet and his works can transcend a corrupting appropriation by ‘the world’ of politics and money.”10 Greenblatt goes further than the heartily poetry-centric McGann by promoting “the imaginative force of the non-literary,” and this is because he participates in a Williamsite shift “away from criticism centered on ‘verbal icons’ toward a criticism centered on cultural artifacts.”11 He enthusiastically promotes the historicity of texts and the textuality of history such that ground and figure, text and history continually shift with each anecdote provoking a further contextualization.12

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Greenblatt underpins his notion of criticism by anecdote with reference to Auerbach: 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

He seeks to copy the methodology rather than the spirit of Auerbach’s reading of how Dante appropriates the rational Greek properties of Homer and the elliptical Jewish eschatology of Genesis, insofar as “the fiction of the Divine Comedy is that it is not a fiction.”14 With ever a keen eye for a key quotation, Greenblatt reproduces this absorbing point of comparison from Mimesis that outlines two unlike styles, the Greek and the Hebrew: . . . on the one hand fully externalized description, uniform illumination, uninterrupted connection, free expression, all events in the foreground, displaying unmistakable meanings, few elements of historical development and of psychological perspective; on the other hand, certain parts brought into high relief, others left obscure, abruptness, suggestive influence of the unexpressed, “background” quality, multiplicity of meanings and the need for interpretation, universal-historical claims, development of the concept of historical becoming, and preoccupation with the problematic.15

Greenblatt’s striking phrase “life-world in that moment” comes from a combination of uninterrupted Greek connections and the suggestive Jewish influence of the unexpressed that needs historicist intervention to be understood lest it remains repressed. In this binary-inverting circumstance, of giving the historical losers a voice, it is as well to digest Bloom’s commentary upon Auerbach: Dante could have relied upon Virgil’s Epicurean consciousness of pain, with its deep awareness that the cosmos and the gods were unreasonable, as an intimation that Virgil needed Christianity. Instead, Dante strongly misread Virgil as a believer in a rational cosmos. But Dante, Auerbach,

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The Anatomy of Bloom and Saint Paul, cannot really have it both ways at once. You cannot say that Virgil in Dante’s Comedy is the historical Virgil, but then again is not. . . . As soon as Virgil or Cato, Moses or Joshua, becomes less significant or real than Dante or Jesus or Saint Paul, then the Aeneid and the Hebrew Bible also becomes less significant. . . . Instead of the Hebrew Bible . . . we get that captive work, the Old or indeed senescent Testament. . . .16

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: Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land; Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand; What are all those fish that lie gasping on the strand? (CP, 271)19

Bloom’s diagnosis is more than just aesthetic loss, since he accurately postulates “the temper of poetic imagination is peculiarly and favorably responsive to the thwarting of political hope, and Shelley and Keats and Byron gained immensely by their good fortune of having the era of Metternich and Castlereagh to contend against.”20 What McGann identifies as “an uncritical absorption in Romanticism’s own self-representations” blossoms into a powerful dissection of Abrams’ essay, “English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age,” and by default Bloom’s “The Internalization of Quest Romance.”21 McGann employs the pejorative word “reactionary” because in their work the dashed Romantic hope of social melioration becomes the opium of the masses; thus, the displaced-religious discourse that Abrams and Bloom apprehend is

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likened to the Sugar Candy Mountain of Old Moses, an excuse to postpone revolutionary empowerment until the next life. McGann’s rhetoric is actually great criticism when inverted; he suggests that the Romantic ideology is more symbolic than allegorical because Romantic spiritual freedom comes precisely from symbolic experience, since in allegory we are told what to experience.22 Coleridge explains this dualism well when he writes: Now an allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picturelanguage which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses . . . a Symbol . . . is characterized by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative.23

How brilliantly the phrase picture-language would capture the spirit of Blake’s illuminated manuscripts and their visionary themes were we but to alter Coleridge’s definition of allegory just slightly by amending the phrase the “objects of the senses,” until it read “visionary objects,” then here I think, we would find a suitable description of Blake’s etched-by-acid giant forms. Blake might say to McGann that allegory is addressed to the intellectual powers but hidden from the corporeal understanding, where the latter is an empirical approach that is not open to vision and the former the irony of any reader’s powers of self-integration.24 If literature becomes secular scripture and canonical literature a particular that displays universal qualities, then Bloom’s distinction between period pieces and canonical permanence reads not unlike Coleridge’s preamble minus the illusion of unity. Bloom’s version of aesthetics insists that canonical literary works pretend that they possess originality. But this unprecedentedness is in fact an allegory of their anxious relationship with other works of art that possess universal qualities, which have to be seen as symbolic of their placement within the canon. I cannot conceptualize the dreamt-of proletarian Utopia of Marx as anything other than a recapitulation of Paradise and Elysium, the Fortunate Fields alluded to in Wordsworth’s “Prospectus,” inasmuch as they both represent failed prophecy become the profound anticlimax of the guillotine and the gulag, similar in kind to the dystopian “republics” of modern Iran or Korea. Marxists fall back on Karl Popper’s prediction that there can be no historical generalizations: “the most careful observation of one developing caterpillar will not help us to predict its transformation into a butterfly.”25 Were we to reconstrue the life-cycle of the poet in terms of caterpillar,

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chrysalis, and imago, rather than as contraction, shattering, and restitution, then we would break this Marxist fantasy on a wheel of predictive allegory. McGann and Greenblatt relate their embarrassment that Marx thought the Greeks possessed an eternal charm because they were the childhood of humanity, one that will never return; yet, in so postponing Utopia, Marxists become mired in Promethean ideology and more subtly the Christian myth.26 The desire of McGann to escape the Romantic ideology would seem an intriguing move given that another Marxist historian, Hobsbawm, defines the Romantic period as ending in 1850, in which case the question arises: in what way does McGann’s The Romantic Ideology, modeled on The German Ideology, a text that was written in or around 1845, remove itself from the self-representations of the Romantic era? The concept of the spirit of the age is just as symbolic of the times as Bloom’s canonical crownjewels are said to be metonymic of tradition; the difference is that Bloom dismisses as rhinestone period pieces what Greenblatt covets as anecdotes. This point is well illustrated by the Shakespearean prolegomenon to Fearful Symmetry: Gonzalo: How lush and lusty the grass looks! How green! Antonio: The ground indeed is tawny. (II.i.53-4)27

Antonio acts as a cynical foil for Gonzalo’s appreciations; Prospero’s isle is visionary; it amplifies the personality of the beholder: Bloom celebrates twanglings, Greenblatt political wranglings. New-Historicist critics cannot permit themselves to be univocal propagandizers for an ideology; they delight in unpicking the strands of competitive ideologies; the ground is never just tawny or green, it is always self-reflexively green and tawny, figure and vehicle, skull and ambassador. Gonzalo embarks on his utopian speech on the topic of an ideal commonwealth, in which there would be “No sovereignty,” only for Sebastian to undercut him with the rebuke: “Yet he would be king” (II.i.154-5). The problem is exactly that of conservatism; the phenomenon of the working-class Orc becoming a bourgeois Urizen, since New Historicism would seem a watered-down version of Marxism, “we were from the beginning uncomfortable with such key concepts as superstructure and base or imputed class consciousness, we have found ourselves . . . slowly forced to transform the notion of ideology critique into discourse analysis.”28 In Learning to Curse, Greenblatt mentions surplus value in a similar list of missing Marxist doctrines and this is significant because, as Bloom argues in The Western Canon, “The institution that sustained me, Yale University, is ineluctably part of the American Establishment, and my sustained

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meditation upon literature is therefore vulnerable to the most traditional Marxist analyses of class interest.”29 Bloom turns this self-assessment into class-conscious criticism of his middle-class critical brethren: “I am a proletarian; they are not.”30 He accuses his enemies of liberal self-hatred: “the high bourgeoisie being unable to stand its status as the high bourgeoisie.”31 Bloom’s politics are closer to communism than those of a Delingpole: “If they wish to alleviate the sufferings of the exploited classes, let them live up to their pretentions, let them abandon the academy and go out there and work politically and economically and in a humanitarian spirit.”32 But this is to overlook Greenblatt’s bien-pensant radicalism, his bourgeois-friendly version of Marxism. Bloom preaches that historicism “is a kind of idolatry” because it represents an obsessive worship of things in time, but underlines that we should read by inner light.33 He emphasizes that for the critic, if not the poet, or Irish novelist, “the proper attitude to take toward Shakespeare . . . is indeed awe, wonder, gratitude, deep appreciation.”34 Bloom’s gnosis is nowhere more evident than in the phrase, “mighty Demiurge, economic and social history”; he knows that historicists are inspired by Foucault, who redefines ideology as networks of power.35 Drawing upon Hayden White’s research, Bloom argues that Foucault was blind to his own metaphors; the social energies that Foucauldians find represented in texts are vague metaphors for authority and hence unquantifiable. In opposition to Bloom’s insight that poets write fictions of duration, Foucauldians like Greenblatt propose that “our effort is not to aestheticize an entire culture, but to locate inventive energies more deeply interfused within it.”36 The metaphor of energy intends that anecdotes will carry the past into the present and that, as discourse analysis, the relativistic anecdote becomes a transcendental signifier, as the Neo-platonic reference to “Tintern Abbey” indicates. Gallagher and Greenblatt promote an interest in “tracking the social energies that circulate very broadly through a culture, flowing back and forth between margins and center,” their counterhistories “pressing up from below to transform exalted spheres and down from on high to colonize the low.”37 They propose to rip off the Foucauldian mask of social energies understood as consent showed toward the dominant institutions in civil society and therefore the ideological hegemony of said institutions. Ironically, Greenblatt was attracted to that aspect of Foucault that perfectly describes Bloom’s status in the academy post the publication of The Western Canon: “Foucault presented the anecdotes in the historical archives as residues of the struggle between unruly persons and the power that would subjugate or expel them.”38 His eminent and emanatory theories were opposed by a persecuted gnostic.

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In riposte to Greenblatt, Bloom argues that the Shakespearean self is the given, subject to subsequent mutabilities, and guarantees agency, while for Foucault the self is fashioned by the mask of social energies.39 He argues that hidden behind the mask of intellectual autonomy Shakespeare’s universalism always defeats his critics, “scholars who wish to confine Shakespeare to his context—historical, social, political, economic, rational, theatrical . . . are unable to explain the Shakespearean influence on us.”40 For Bloom, Shakespeare invents the confrontational self: “the self in its quest to be solitary and free ultimately speaks with one aim only: to confront greatness. That confrontation scarcely masks the desire to join greatness to greatness, which is the basis for the aesthetic experience once called the sublime: the quest for the transcendence of limits.”41 For Greenblatt, Shakespeare reflects the discourse of colonialism; he indicates that The Tempest holds up a mirror to empire, in which island-state Caliban is Prospero’s sole subject, “ This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother,/Which thou tak’st from me” (I.ii.331-2). The center-piece of Greenblatt’s “Learning to Curse” would seem Caliban’s retort: “You taught me language; and my profit on’t/Is, I know how to curse” (I.ii.362-3). The main thread conveyed by this quip that forces Prospero to respond with the bullwhip-crack threat of punitive cramps is that Caliban’s faux Indian language was deficient or non-existent, which point is well illustrated by Miranda’s complaint that before she taught him English he would gabble like a thing most brutish. Greenblatt emphasizes that Caliban represents the darkest European fantasies about wild men: “Caliban is deformed, lecherous, evil-smelling, idle, treacherous, naive, drunken, rebellious, violent, and devil-worshiping.”42 Prospero later acknowledges this thing of darkness in a less than repressive Pauline fashion, though Greenblatt intuits: “he is claimed as Philoctetes might claim his own festering wound.”43 Bloom writes not just that historicists ignore the intrinsic beauty of Caliban’s natural poetry, but that “Dryden accurately observed that Shakespeare ‘created a person which was not in Nature’, a character who is half-human cannot be a natural man, whether black, Indian, or Berber (the likely people of Caliban’s mother, the Algerian witch Sycorax).”44 He flatly denies that The Tempest is concerned with colonialism or colonial guilt and interprets Prospero’s decision to drown his books in the bay as an anxious answer to Marlowe’s Faustian reference to burning his grimoires, “Prospero is Shakespeare’s anti-Faust.”45 However, Bloom parallels Greenblatt’s insights in giving Montaigne’s essay on the Cannibals as a likely source text for the play since Caliban is an anagram of Cannibal. Bloom thinks that the play is a visionary comedy replete with a YahooCaliban, whom Bloom relates as the revolutionary anti-hero of modern directors, in spite of the fact that so many poets, Auden and Browning

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among them, have been attracted to what Greenblatt disappointingly calls the “opacity” of Caliban’s language: I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow; And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts; Show thee a jay’s nest, and instruct thee how To snare the nimble marmoset; I’ll bring thee To clustering filberts, and sometimes I’ll get thee Young scamels from the rock. (II.ii.161-6)

Greenblatt means that Caliban’s language has concrete lucidity as a civilized means of communication, that it cannot be dismissed as transparently barbarous in the sense that the Greeks initially used the term, that is to signify babbling mispronunciation.46 Verbally at least, Greenblatt’s terminology reminds of two Blakean categories, the limit of contraction and the limit of opacity, which Bloom recapitulates as the states of Adam and Satan. But I lean toward Greenblatt here because the presumed status of Caliban as a pre-linguistic natural man or unfallen-innocent ripe for colonization, which Bloom tries to belie, marks him out as sharing the status of Tharmas: “the innocence, pre-reflective, of a state without subjects and objects, yet in no danger of solipsism, for it lacked also a consciousness of self.”47 Bloom mentions that Caliban is depicted by Browning as a child: “Caliban’s essential childishness, a weak and plangent sensibility that cannot surmount its fall from the paradisal adoption by Prospero.”48 Browning’s creation monologue with its “he made” refrain, coupled with Auden’s poetic identification with Caliban’s “nightmare of public solitude” in The Sea and the Mirror, hints at the closeness of all these analogs to Bloom’s own anxious allegory, the modern Caliban of letters gloomily cursing the precursor Prospero for making him learn a paradisal but entrapping language: the colonizing force of influential language. In his seminal essay, “Caliban: Notes Toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America,” Roberto Fernández Retamar adopts Caliban’s name, when taken for a misspelling of Carib, as symbolic of Latin American studies. He proclaims Caliban as “our” culture and history, even in the act of asserting that the European university needs to be replaced by the American university, an example of the most sublime Emersonian anxiety of influence.49 Bloom would perhaps underline the world-wide appeal of the bard’s will-to-power here, or else oppose this charisma to the insight that multiculturalists endow their victims with “a sense of their victimization.”50 He refers to multiculturalists dead set against dead white European males, the hackneyed image of quiltmaking feminist cheerleaders, and “African-American and Chicano literary

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activists,” as self-begot Adams, who forget that canonical strength is an amalgam of “mastery of figurative language, originality, cognitive power, knowledge, exuberance of diction.”51 Retamar is absorbing precisely because he asks not only, “Can you do anything else but curse in this alien language,” but also “Have you not thereby already recognized the cultural superiority of the colonizer?” As Frederic Jameson summarizes in his Foreword to Caliban and Other Essays, “the double-bind is reversed in the second essay in this collection, in which the ‘curse’ must itself be dismantled, and the ‘black legend’ of the Spanish conquerors as racist and inhuman is itself stigmatized as what is often today called ‘inverted racism’.”52 In a book that addresses the symbolism Caliban holds for Caribbean writers, Paula Burnett argues that Derek Walcott rejects both “the literature of recrimination (of the descendents of the slave) and the literature of remorse (of descendents of the colonizer) because they remain locked in a Manichean dialectics, reinscribing and perpetuating a negative pattern.”53 Walcott’s vision is a peace-map of good sense that threads the cussed Bloom-Greenblatt impasse of reaction and resentment, an exit from the cul de sac of feeling embarrassed about the privileged status of literary criticism, and hence the pick-sore need to work through colonial guilt. Despite Bloom’s provocative language, multiculturalists and historicists rely on the same basic imaginative leap; they all compare texts, while looking for new parallels. Often the point being made by either Greenblatt and Bloom, or Bloom and Retamar, is surprisingly similar; for example, Ricks argues that Bloom threatens the ephebe with a sense of victimization. Bloom’s influence on The Madwoman in the Attic has been highlighted elsewhere; thus, another point of comparison with Feminist thought is needed.54 To this end, the figure of Ariel from Sylvia Plath’s eponymous poem provides an excellent Shakespearean analogue since the poetess is not one of Bloom’s favored canonical authors: “It is unwise to quarrel with Plath’s artisans, because one can never be sure precisely what the disagreement concerns. I have just reread Ariel, and confess myself moved by the quality of pathos the book evokes. And yet I remain unpersuaded that Ariel is a permanent work.”55 Bloom claims that while Plath was “a touch too anxious to appropriate the Holocaust for her personal purposes . . . for me the issue is elsewhere, and is always aesthetic.”56 The problem is that Bloom’s own sense of cultural allegiance keeps asserting itself. Moreover, I simply do not agree that we should read nothing but well-worn canonical authors like Shakespeare and Austen, since how can we judge unless we first read a text for ourselves? If you do not sit down to read Ariel, then how can you know whether or not to include it on a reading list? Bloom himself champions the obscure writers of medieval Kabbalah, texts that I would not otherwise peruse; he shows a

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marked Jewish bias that is never far below the surface of his library-cormorant reading habits. Can I complain that Feminists like Elaine Showalter thought not enough books by women writers were being taught because such texts are not to the taste of male critics? That said, feminists sometimes speak the same language as Bloom, albeit from an estranged perspective: “Sweeping modifications in the canon are said to occur because of changes in collective sensibility, but individual admissions and elevations from ‘minor’ to ‘major’ status tend to be achieved by successful critical promotion, which is to say, demonstration that a particular author does meet generally accepted criteria of excellence.”57 In the same essay, Lillian Robinson reflects on Nina Baym’s aesthetic judgment that all but forgotten but then resurrected feminine authors are sometimes substandard aesthetically speaking: “re-examination of this fiction may well show it to lack the esthetic, intellectual and moral complexity and artistry that we demand of great literature.”58 Just as Greenblatt advances an argument for counter-histories, Robinson champions a countercanon based on inclusionary terms and crucially challenges the dominant white-male canon on the grounds that aesthetics are culture-specific: “when we turn from the construction of pantheons, which have no prescribed number of places, to the construction of course syllabi, then something does have to be eliminated each time something else is added, and here ideologies, aesthetic and extra-aesthetic, do necessarily come into play. Is the canon and hence the syllabus based on it to be regarded as the compendium of excellence or as the record of cultural history?”59 Her argument resembles that of Bloom proposing that there is an anxiety of choice when choosing whom to read because so many names present themselves on the bookshelf: “American poetry in the twentieth century is immensely rich in women of genius: Gertrude Stein, Hilda Doolittle, Marianne Moore, Louise Bogan, Léonie Adams, Laura Riding, Elizabeth Bishop, May Swenson, Amy Clampitt, and several living poets.”60 Bloom is not the only critic who makes the point that it is creative energy and not social energy that counts; Linda Bundtzen says “Shakespeare’s Ariel is neither male nor female, so the divine activity of the poet . . . is pure energy . . . when the woman is given over to the apocalyptic fury of her muse, she is not subject to her female roles.”61 Here writerly creative energy counters Foucauldian social energies; Plath’s appropriation of what Coleridge called the Proteus of the fire and flood helps define her obsession with patriarchy in the form of father-substitutes. Ultimately, the colonizing force of totalizing metaphors needs to be emphasized. Allen notes that Bloom’s poetics of conflict would seem conducted “in the name of a strictly poetic power or energy” so strong certain monumental writers function as end-stops that like Shakespeare influence tradition more than tradition influences them.62 Greenblatt would insist

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to the contrary that “There can be no appeals to genius as the sole origin of the energies of great art.”63 Bloom makes the useful distinction between intertextuality and intratextuality to distinguish between historicist poetics and influential poetics; however, McGann would challenge that there is always an ideology to be found lurking behind an aesthetic: “Does anyone think that ‘the aesthetic’ is ‘not among the ideologies?’”64 His daemon Marx lurks in the eye of the revolutionary storm, or as Eagleton argues, the aesthetic lies “at the heart of the middle class’s struggle for political hegemony.”65 Bloom responds that “Marxists are perceptive in finding competition everywhere else, yet fail to see that it is intrinsic to the high arts.”66 According to Greenblatt Renaissance “self-fashioning . . . involves submission to an absolute power,” a control mechanism whose recurrent model was the imitation of Christ, but, if we interpolated Marx for the ideal Christian form, then Bloom’s diagnosis of resentful Modern self-fashioning would seem thoroughly mimetic of the Jekyll and Hyde of puritanical materialism, or else wounded narcissism.67 Foucault writes admirably on the subject of how networks of power perforate modern societies in decussated interstices that he nevertheless clumsily renders as social energies rather than individuals collaborating in the regimes of technological societies. Another Caribbean writer, Aimé Césaire, views Ariel as the archetypal colonial collaborator, a sell-out to the ruling ideology, who chooses to passively reflect the dominant power’s discourse like an automaton, excepting that moment when Prospero’s malignant thing demands freedom with a measure of free-will. Ironically, Greenblatt writes that dissent is possible even without apparent personal autonomy being freed from the over-mastering Frankensteinian agency of social energies: “the apparently isolated power of the individual genius turns out to be bound up with collective, social energy; a gesture of dissent may be an element in a larger legitimation process, while an attempt to stabilize the order of things may turn out to subvert it.”68 Greenblatt’s synopsis repudiates individual agency, not to mention creative genius; it absolves de Man just as readily as the post-structuralist death of the author. But are Greenblatt’s words those of a Marxist-bourgeois intellectual actively trying to subvert his co-opted status as a member of the Coleridgean class, or merely someone passively reflecting the Foucauldian ideas that were around at the time? The differing definitions of the word energy would seem the nub of the matter since, whereas Greenblatt views class divisions as social energies, Bloom is more Nietzschean; his definition of energy refers to individual will-power, the desire for personal betterment, survival even. In a sweeping generalization, Bloom writes that the School of Resentment teaches social selflessness, whereas self-reliant reading is a solitary, elitist, and selfish activity, agonistic writing becomes an act of individuation to augment one’s growing inner self,

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the diary-writing that O’Brien tries to crush.69 Eagleton bewails that solitary reading curbs any disruptive tendency to collective political action, but I have ever found that sedentary toil adorns the mind with ready arguments to oppose the egregious browbeating didacticisms of Marxists. Bloom melodramatically bewails that the American academy has become prey to the ferocious indictments of those who accuse others of being sexist and racist by the Orwellian witch-hunters of words and advises his readers to clear their minds of politically correct cant.70 Christopher Rollason relates that once, while addressing a room full of academics at the University of California, Bloom’s views were deemed so politically incorrect that the whole room started shouting: “Racist! Fascist!”71 I do not think Bloom’s views are racist (he loves Ellison’s The Invisible Man and Cervantes) and certainly they are not fascist, elitist yes, but this is how he is widely viewed by America’s cultural clerisy, an academy he thinks infiltrated by Gramscian Marxists intent upon politicizing their students.72 Still, his detractors are inconsistent. If Bloom asks the sublime agonistic question: is one work better than/less good than another; then this form of qualitative assessment is merely what critics do day in day out, or as Burke adumbrates: “Often, literary criticism is merely advice to customers, as with book reviewing; or it is like the academic grading of examination papers.”73 As to Bloom’s argument that the sheer volume of literary works written means that there is an anxiety of choice, I respond by noting that departments of English have a hard-sell habit of persuading Malthusian numbers of students to take post-graduate degrees, each of these youthful Ferdinand drudges hoping they will thereby gain an elusive academic career, which leads to the all-too-familiar phenomenon of the Marxist Professor delivering set-piece lectures on social problems in Dickens, while his exploited research-students inhabit bedsits in Toxteth.

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5

Bloom and Judaism

It is my intention to catalogue the most salient references that Bloom makes to Judaism starting with a brief consideration of his family background and then proceeding to a chronological reading of his books of criticism thought of as spiritual autobiography. The dénouement of Bloom’s religious development takes us from Orthodox Judaism to atheism, and hence metaphysical materialism to Kabbalistic speculation that Bloom identifies as a form of Gnosticism. Bloom uses his critical nous to escape being overdetermined by his Orthodox upbringing but nevertheless turns to the Kabbalistic scholarship of Gershom Scholem. It needs to be emphasized that this survey is more concerned with how Jewish theology manifests itself in Bloom’s criticism than defining the fundamental tenets of the Hebraic faith; however, near the close of this discussion, I turn to the principles of Maimonides because Bloom calls into question so many orthodoxies in The Book of J. My argument is half-predicted by Lindsay Waters’ observation that “Bloom is always asking what it would mean for America to have a spiritual life that is not identified with or rooted in organized religion.”1 Bloom subjects the writings of those charismatics within Hebraic culture that influenced his psychology and beliefs to rationalistic introspection, and yet his Jewish nostalgias are surprisingly reticent. Despite all the aesthetic posturing, the said referents remain emotionally transcendent. Therefore, I am also halfconvinced by Peter Morris’s assessment that “it occasionally seems—with the early reliance on Buber, later on Freud, then finally on Gnosticism and Kabbalah—that Bloom is trying hard to prove that the canon of English poetry has always been, at heart Jewish.”2 Bloom is bookish and belongs to the culture of the book but also the Yale university library; in terms of his readings of Romantic poetry, he delights in discovering Jewish influences and finding Judaic analogies. Thus, I expand upon Morris’s insight that Bloom’s criticism of Gentile poetry is heavily reliant upon Jewish models, but with the caveat that he picks and chooses and just as frequently discards. In particular, Bloom cherishes those Jewish writers who usurp the authority of the J-Writer and hence redefine what it means to be a Jew in their own terms. Pragmatically, this means Bloom canonizes those writers with the intellectual power to create their own ephebes by means of overcoming a sense of paternal anxiety, the familiar interplay of divination and idol-shunning.

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Bloom figuratively swims as a Jewish Gnostic fish in the sea of American Protestant culture, a problem that has “everything to do with the difficult definition of being American, and the impossible definition of being Jewish.”3 Equitably, he responds to the anti-Semitic commentary of Jung: “the Jew as a relative nomad has never created, and presumably will never create, a cultural form of his own, for all his instincts and talents are dependent on a more or less civilized host people.”4 Deplorable though Jung’s comments are, Sansford Pinsker nonetheless writes that a sense of alienation can be expected from a Jewish intellectual hailing from New York: To be formed by such a world, by its grinding poverty and parochial limitations, its seductive warmth and abiding sense of the past, meant that one looked at mass American culture as an outsider, fully credentialed in marginality and finely attuned to alienation. This saga has been with us nearly as long as our century—sometimes powerfully evoked, but of late growing increasingly threadbare.5

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

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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: If assimilation is defined as a minority’s adoption of the customs, values, and habits of the majority, then American Jews are leagues beyond mere absorption into the cultural diffuseness of their country. I can no longer know . . . which of my many students are more-or-less Jewish. . . . Should this be deplored? Increasingly I am uncertain . . . I am about to commence my fifty-fourth consecutive year of teaching at an institution that once made me uncomfortable because of my social and religious origin.12

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

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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 fallingaway 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

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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”;

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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: All monotheistic religions possess a distinct conception, one might call it a philosophy, of their own history. In this view, the first revelation expressing the fundamental contents of a religion is the greatest, the highest in rank. Each successive revelation is lower in rank and less authoritative than the last. Such a conception forbids a true believer to place a new revelation on a level with the great revelations of the past and obviously creates a serious problem for the mystic, since he imputes enormous value to his fresh, living experience.40

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, Scholem advances a three-stage model of religion . . . he claims that religion begins with a mythical foundation stage in which no gap is discerned between the gods and humans. Religion then moves onto a classical phase which destroys this harmony by establishing a polarity between God and human in which God founds institutional “religion” by addressing humans in revelation and demanding their obedience. The history of institutional religion, however, shows the possibility of

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a third, or “romantic” phase, in which mysticism, understood as “direct contact between the individual and God,” seeks to revive the original unity of mythic consciousness.41

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 recapitulates this point as radical dualism: “Christians call the Hebrew Bible the Old Testament, or Covenant, in order to supersede it with their New Testament, a work that remains altogether unacceptable to Jews, who do not regard their Covenant as Old and therefore superseded.”44 Bloom’s indebtedness to Scholem manifests itself in the 1970s and helps focus some of the most salient examples of Bloom’s Judaic critical leanings, since what begins as a crisis of faith becomes a nascent Jewish gnosis and ultimately a rational critique of normative Judaism and then of Pauline Christianity too. The most obvious evidence for lurking Jewish bias in Bloom’s early works is the presence of Buber’s It-Thou philosophy in Shelley’s Mythmaking. In the preface to the Cornell Paperbacks Edition, Bloom notes a critic who quipped that he wrote with “Buberian spectacles” and another who “deplored the decadence of American education, which had granted a higher degree to an ephebe insufficiently versed in Plato.”45 A committed Zionist, Buber resigned from his professorship at Frankfurt am Main in protest against the rise to power of the Nazis and later fled to Palestine to lecture at the

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Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Buber espoused an interactionist version of existentialism, in which man’s relations with reality are characterized by the concepts of I-Thou and I-It, or as Bloom explicates, “the God of the Jews is an ultimate achievement of mythopoeic thought . . . the Jews went completely beyond all natural religion to the revelation of the myth . . . that there existed a Will of this eternal Thou. The Jewish myth is the I-Thou relationship in which the I is either God or ‘a kingdom of priests and an holy nation’ and the Thou, conversely, either this chosen people or God.”46 Buber speculates that man only displays true being when his I confronts God; the lesser experience of perceiving a secular world of relation is relegated to the status of I-It and away from God. Bloom’s argument is that Shelley abstracts his own mythic structures in the same way that the primitive Jews formulated their concrete I-Thou relationship with God. Bloom later dismissed his reliance on these terms as embarrassing; he argues at one point that the “imagery of myth is thus not allegorical but anagogical.”47 One of my pet criticisms of Bloom’s reading of Wordsworth is that he undervalues the concept of wise passiveness, where passivity allows the nature-worshiper to encounter the shy goddess Nature. Wise passiveness is the very opposite of iconoclasm, or the smashing of a riding-crop through a portrait. It follows that I-Thou allows us to encounter God as long as we allow ourselves to be open to this dialogue, whereas I-It is Kantian and monologic. Buber’s conception of a wisely passive meeting with God contradicts Bloom’s later philosophy that scorns the existence of any god outside the self that in Shelley’s Mythmaking is associated with the Mammon of the world. But in Buberian existentialism any willed dialogue with God would collapse into an I-It relationship because it is counter to the supremacy of Yahweh’s Will. To translate this revision from Wordsworthian into Blakean terms, Buber humbles himself before Urizen, whereas Bloom-Orc cries out against the clyster of this fit and fitted. An extremely early reference to Gnosticism occurs in Shelley’s Mythmaking, when Bloom quotes Kerényi: “ The only parallel to Prometheus would therefore be a Gnostic Urmensch, anthropos or Adam Kadmon.”48 Bloom includes a Jewish pun when mentioning that Prometheus’s double is Zeus and Shelley’s Zeus “is Blake’s Old Nobodaddy, setter of limits and circumsizer of desire.”49 The chapter on “Ode to the West Wind” begins with the information that the King James “prophet” translates the Hebrew word nabi, and that the prophet is not like a Greek oracle “but rather a visionary,” a man who sees ethical consequences of actions most clearly.50 One solution to the puzzle of Bloom’s outspoken political asides is provided by this adumbration of the role of the nabi: “Every honest man is a Prophet; he utters his opinion both of private & public matters.”51 Bloom immediately links Blake and Shelley to Numbers 2:24-9 where Moses

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rebuffs Joshua by saying, “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets.” Bloom quotes Buber on the difference between oracles and prophets: “ The oracle gives answers to a situation which is brought before it as a question by emissaries who ask for information; the nabi, sent by God, speaks unasked into the biographical or historical situation.”52 Bloom searches for what is “intrinsic . . . in the Hebrew tradition” and decides that “Ode to the West Wind” should be placed in influential interrelationship with “Song of Deborah,” which Bloom explains as Shelley’s “analogue.”53 Bloom chooses this biblical text because it treats of the nephesh, or the breath-soul of the singer, “the spirit breathed into his nostrils by God,” while the singer prays for renewal: “the spirit falters he therefore calls upon it to rally.”54 Bloom will later argue that the only figure that is truly non-Wordsworthian in Shelley’s poetry is the figure of the Car of Light in The Triumph of Life. The Chariot possesses a long history; it appears in Ezekiel, Revelations, and Paradise Lost before Shelley and also in Blake’s mythography, although Shelley was unaware of Blake’s existence. Bloom’s constant juxtapositions of Shelley and Blake mimic his correlations between Judaism and Romantic poetry in the respect of trying to detect the presence of the breath of Yahweh almost as if it were a Romantic presence in the landscape. Here is the key that unlocks the conceptual strangeness of Blake’s later mythology: Ezekiel’s vision of the cherubim was taken by Blake as a starting point for the mythography of “The Four Zoas” (four “living creatures,” Zŵa, in Revelation’s version of Ezekiel’s vision). The Four Zoas are the four cherubim, the four faculties of Unfallen Man or divine Enthroned Man, Albion; Blake named them: first, Luvah (Orc in time, as opposed to the Unfallen Luvah, the faculty of Love, the loins of a man’s body, the stars of the fallen universe, the “state” of generation, the season of spring, etc.); second Urizen (Satan in time, faculty of wisdom, the head of a man, the sun in nature, the “state” of Eden, the season summer, etc.); third, Tharmas (Covering Cherub in time, faculty of power, heart of a man, moon in nature, the “state” of Beulah, autumn, etc.); fourth, Urthona (Los in time, faculty imagination, the body of man viewed as a whole . . . the soul of man, mountains in nature, the “state” of winter, etc.).55

Bloom notes that Jewish interpretation sees the cherubim as personifying attributes of God, whereas Blake humanistically imagines a divine man. Meanwhile, Shelley’s imagery also references “the Ma’asah Merkabah, Work of the Chariot” with its long mystical tradition of interpretation “beginning with the Essenes, passing to the Merkabah mystics of Jewish medieval Spain, and climaxing in the Hasidic movement.”56 In Shelley’s Mythmaking Bloom is

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fascinated by examples of Judaism, Gnosticism, and Jewish mysticism that he finds in Romantic poetry but has not yet converted to Gnosticism. In The Visionary Company, Bloom’s reading of Romantic nature poetry is defined by the Blakean concept of Beulah: “the married land, Beulah, is the world of Solomon’s Song, where the contract between the Bride and Bridegroom was renewed.”57 Bloom identifies the married land of Blake with the marriage of Wordsworth’s mind to nature as portrayed in the Prospectus to The Excursion; Judaic syncretism manifests itself to the extent that Bloom adjudges “Blake’s Beulah is Hebraic and Protestant.”58 Bloom’s syncretic attraction to the Romantics is again revealed when he writes that Blake and Coleridge “believed that in Greek religious poetry all natural objects were dead, but that in the Hebrew poets everything had a life of its own, and yet was part of the one life within man.”59 In his poetry, Blake retells the story of Paradise Lost, Genesis, and Isaiah, which Bloom links to his interest in tracing the influence of Jewish thought, and ditto Blake’s invention for his Adam-Kadmon figure Albion an emanation called Jerusalem and a Spectre called Satan. Likewise, Wordsworth competes imaginatively with Milton as revealed in his address to Urania in “The Prospectus to The Excursion,” and hence Bloom writes that “while not so Bible-haunted as Blake, is himself a poet in the Hebraic prophetic line.”60 Bloom’s discussion of Tintern Abbey contains the “morish” phrase, “Its burden is more life, survival, imaginative immortality.”61 In Ruin the Sacred Truths, Bloom notes that “only two books truly mattered to Blake . . . the Bible and Milton,” but concludes, “I now repudiate my youthful efforts to Judaize William Blake in a book called Blake’s Apocalypse and in an earlier work The Visionary Company.”62 Nevertheless, in Blake’s Apocalypse, Bloom remarks that Albion is “the primordial being, faintly resembling the Adam Kadmon or Divine Man of Jewish Cabbalist tradition.”63 Blake’s Apocalypse contains many gestures that claim Blake as a scion of the Old Testament. Let me give two examples from Bloom’s chapter on Jerusalem: “Blake turns in Jerusalem to the re-creation in English terms of the work of Hebraic prophecy” and this “involves a comparison of England and Palestine, and of Albion and Jacob (called Israel).”64 He notes that the rhythms of Blake’s verse “resemble the rhythms of the King James Isaiah and Song of Solomon.”65 Indeed, Bloom nearly claims Blake for Zion: “in the Marriage, Blake declares himself a Biblical poet, in the tradition of the later Milton who repudiated the classical Muses and sought Zion’s springs instead.”66 In this exegesis, the lens of the Holocaust is cleansed: The whole of Milton’s heroic testimony is concentrated in this multiple image, for the garment that must be put off is revealed as only an “Incrustation over my Immortal Spirit,” to be cleansed from every

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human face by self-examination. To cast off the false garment is to become free of “the Idiot Questioner,” the brooder who squats in Ulro and whose doubtings ruin poets. “The Idiot Questioner” is one with the doubts that Wordsworth overcomes in Resolution and Independence, and with the Remorse cast out by Yeats in A Dialogue of Self and Soul. He is the shadow haunting everybody, the Covering Cherub acting as barrier between creative desire and artistic completion.67

Looking back, Bloom could write of Shelley’s Mythmaking that the subject of this book is Shelley’s internalized quest to reach the limits of desire, or the desire of Orc to become Urizen, that of Paul to usurp Moses, which idée fixe represents the limit of Bloomian opacity, even in his later, less-normative prose. Elizabeth Cullingford criticizes Bloom for rejecting the fascist politics of Yeats as revealed in “On the Boiler,” and yet Bloom’s Eastern European relatives were murdered in the Holocaust. In his review of Cullingford’s Yeats, Ireland and Fascism, R. W. Dasenbrock notes that Yeats consistently had complimentary things to say about Fascist regimes from 1922 to his death in 1939, and that he was intimately involved with the abortive Irish fascist movement.68 I find myself in agreement with Bloom’s prophetic-inthe-Blakean-sense political stance with regard to Yeats’s right-wing and potentially anti-Semitic allegiances: “The Yeats who wrote eccentric essays about eugenics, who composed marching songs for an Irish Fascist brigade, and who loved to go about his house brandishing a Japanese ceremonial sword—this Yeats can be safely ignored.”69 Bloom writes that quest romance defines Yeats’s most typical poem: “a dramatic lyric that behaves as though it were a fragment in a mythological romance, as though the poet himself as quest-hero undertook continually an odyssey of the spirit.”70 It cannot be said that Bloom’s stance is insensitive to Yeats’s status as an Irish poet: In the Anglo-Irish myths of the hero, Yeats had chosen to find a model for what he hoped would be a new kind of antithetical quester, closer to the communal experience than Shelley’s Poet, Keats’s shepherd-prince or Browning’s Paracelsus. Where Browning recoiled from the Shelleyan subjectivity, the internalization of the quest, Yeats entered it, embracing the quester’s natural defeat as a victory, not of Prometheus or Blake’s rebel Orc, but of a man divided against himself, natural against imaginative, neither capable of victory over the other.71

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

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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”

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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

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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

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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 canonformation 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

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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 bookculture 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-ascatastrophe. 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

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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

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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: 1) Concealed before manifestation within the preceding Sefirah; 2) Actual manifestation in the preceding Sefirah; 3) Appearance as Sefirah in its own name; 4) Aspect that gives power to the Sefirah above it, so as to enable that Sefirah to be strong enough to emanate yet further Sefirot; 5). Aspect that gives power to the Sefirah itself to emanate out the other Sefirot still concealed within it; 6). Aspect by which the following Sefirah is in turn emanated out to its own place, after which the cycle of the six behinot begins again.125

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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-ascreation 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

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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, imageborrowings 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

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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: In the first, Form is inferior to Content; Form is under-determined, for the Idea is undeveloped or unspecified, and so imagistic representation is not wholly appropriate, for such representation must be specific. In Classical Art, Form and Content are perfectly fitted, and a determinate idea is represented by a determinate image. In Romantic Art, the relation between Form and Content breaks down, almost completely, because the Idea can no longer be conveyed by appropriate images.140

From Bloom’s perspective the poems of Stevens refer more to poetic precursors and metaleptic word-associations than to the object world; hence, tradition as received by the poet is internalized in a parallel fashion to abstract metaphors for God undergoing a series of catastrophe creations like in Luria’s version of Kabbalah. It is worth mentioning here that Bloom would later castigate Joseph Conrad for the vapid sin of “involuntary obscurantism” and for writing through the mouthpiece of Marlow that Kurtz smiled with “indefinable meaning,” even though he praises Conrad for exceeding “Pater in the reduction of impressionism to a state of consciousness where the seeing narrator is hopelessly mixed with the seen narrative . . . awareness that we are only a flux of sensations gazing outwards upon a flux of impressions.”141 Bloom’s great strength is that he has the intellectual acumen to unpack difficult works of literature written by aesthetes; his great weakness is that the technical jargon occasionally makes his prose obscure, coupled with the fact that his theories are not as relevant for concrete or primary poetry. Bloom believes that as tradition progresses the language of modern poetry becomes ever more over-determined, and hence literal meaning is lost in the wandering of signification that he ultimately associates with Stevens: “Every poetic trope is an exile from literal meaning, but only homecoming would be

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the death of figuration and so the death of poetry, or the triumph of literal meaning.”142 But he also means that he is an exile from Jerusalem, and just as European Jewry turned away from historical events governed by Gentiles, so Bloom turns his back upon historicisms in one direction and the otiose failure to be precisely abstract in the other. Much reference has already been made to Poetry and Repression, so what follows is limited to those remaining examples that are of interest from a Jewish angle. Specifically, this means venturing the argument that Bloom’s treatment of American poetry is decidedly Jewish with the contrary pendulum swing that American-Jewish poetry seems too Jewish to be outstandingly American. Even though Bloom speculates that Jewish-American culture is becoming ever more diluted, his own reading of American poetry would seem sublimely Jewish. Bloom’s celebrated essay “The American Sublime” appears syncretically Jewish because Yahweh is exiled from our cosmos in Bloom’s cosmogony, and when Bloom admires Emerson’s agonistic figure “I against the abyss” that vacuum corresponds to the absence of Bloom’s god. We find echoes of Bloom’s Jewish-American sublime in Nietzsche’s cosmic parable, “Those thinkers in whom all stars move in cyclic orbits are not the most profound: whoever looks into himself as into vast space and carries galaxies in himself also knows how irregular all galaxies are; they lead into the chaos and labyrinth of existence.”143 But this labyrinth of internalized galaxies swiftly becomes recognizable as the cosmos of Whitman’s poetry, but not without the introduction of the figure of cleared creative space since “poetic repression brings about the Sublime wildness of freedom.”144 Though this repression is refigured as a fortuitous fall that renders the precursor clear as mud, Scholem’s periodization of religion has become allied to Emerson’s complaint that foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face: . . . we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived in what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us.145

Blake would have written cleansing the doors of perception, Coleridge—of stripping the film of familiarity—but Bloom’s iconoclasm sloughs off the snakeskin of English lenses; he reads for the self-reliant power of God within, and hence Emerson begets his own father in a process of “self-rebegetting.”146 The first idea becomes an initial repression of the primal scene; this Freudian wisdom is welded to Moses Cordovero: “it is from a son that a father takes

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the power, that in turn will enable the son to become a father.”147 Bloom’s American difference turns out to be an intrinsically Jewish difference: “This is where I would locate the difference in the Emersonian or American Sublime, which is closer to the Kabbalistic model of Cordovero in its reversal between the roles of the fathering force and the new self of the son . . . the fathering force . . . tends to disappear into the poetic self or son, rather than the self into the image of the fathering force.”148 The sublime English latter reminds of Henry IV Part 1, when Hal apes his father; here the image of the father becomes the same substance as the son’s immediate self. Or, to take an antithetical example, the former resembles when John’s Jesus usurps the J-Writer’s Yahweh, and yet in his ecstatic solipsism Jesus, the Son of Man, cries out that his Father has deserted him.149 The canon is an essentially Judaic concept in Bloomian tape-measuring terms; his exemplum from Emerson is Hebraic: “those Hebrews, and through their lips spoke oracles to all time, shall speak in the West.”150 Bloom notes that in Boman “the Hebraic image of transparency, as a trope for God, sees the divine as being neither in the world nor over the world, but rather through the world, not spatially but discontinuously.”151 This distinction fits not just the discontinuous prose style of Emerson and Bloom’s apprehension of Yahweh as only discontinuously manifest, but also, Emerson’s will to subordinate nature to imagination in expressive emulation of Shakespeare and Wordsworth, the handle of being out of doors. Emerson was described by Henry James as a man without a handle and Emerson himself thought that we are always out of doors with Shakespeare; Bloom is adamant that the American poet should overthrow even Shakespeare and that Emerson’s transparent eyeball metaphor figures the abyss because in this moment of sublimity all that the self knows is vision and hence becomes discontinuous with history. Bloom notes Anna Freud’s argument that the sublime obscurity of repression is reversed as a transparent action, which becomes the return of the repressed, as in Emerson’s vision: “I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and parcel of God.”152 In Whitman the cut leaves of grass becomes an almost boyish oneness with the universe of death as symbolized by the uncut hair of graves, though instead of transparent-eyeball transcendence, there is odorless atmosphere and the transparent summer morning of Bloom’s evening land. Whitman attains discontinuity with the real world by emptying his mind of outward sensations; he appropriates Emerson’s visionary metaphors in a Quaker fashion that swaps illusory happiness for real happiness because Whitman’s material-spiritual sublime merges the poetry of heaven with the poetry of earth; in moments of vision he blesses the good and the bad. Song of Myself would seem a declaration of poetic originality; according to Bloom it afflicts

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Stevens’ poem The American Sublime, where Stevens bitterly figures the abyss of the American climate: But how does one feel? One grows used to the weather, The landscape and that; And the sublime comes down To the spirit itself, The spirit and space, The empty spirit In vacant space . . . (CP, 130)

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: Solitary at midnight in my backyard, my thoughts gone from me a long while, Walking the old hills of Judaea with the beautiful, gentle God by my side, Speeding through space, speeding through heaven and the stars, Speeding amid the seven satellites and the broad ring, and the diameter of eighty thousand miles, Speeding with tail’d meteors, throwing fire-balls like the rest, Carrying the crescent child that carries its own mother in its belly, . . . . (“Song of Myself,” 788–93.)

Bloom writes that this passage from Whitman is reminiscent of Schopenhauer on the sublime, where lost in the contemplation of the infinite greatness of the universe, the heavens at night actually bring before our eyes innumerable worlds and so force upon our consciousness the immensity of the universe, until the vastness of the worlds which disquieted us before is annulled by their transcendent dependence upon us. Whitman fills his cosmological emptiness, and hence Bloom’s Kabbalistic analogy, with the solitude of American selfhood. Figures of Capable Imagination boasts an essay entitled “ The Sorrows of American-Jewish Poetry” that I would like to discuss in tandem with certain ideas in “Jewish Culture and Jewish Identity” from Poetics of Influence.

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We have seen that in “Jewish Culture and Jewish Identity,” Bloom quotes Jung, who asserts that the nomadic Jew will always play the guest to a host people. Surprisingly, Bloom accepts Jung’s thesis and advocates that Jewish culture, to the extent that the Jewish Diaspora can still be considered a people, are to be defined by a text-centered tradition of literary culture, “if by ‘literary’ one means Biblical and post-Biblical written tradition.”153 Bloom writes that the concept of study as salvation was imported into Jewish culture from Hellenic sources, in fact, Plato, and consequently, he reveals his unease as concerns the difficult-to-impossible definition of being a Jewish American. Nevertheless, if we accept that Bloom’s study of literary texts is part of the Jewish culture of the book, then this melds with the American Protestant tradition of reading by inner light. But this turning aside from outward culture toward inward regions is problematized by Bloom, when he quotes Trilling: “ This intense conviction of the existence of the self apart from culture is . . . its noblest and most generous achievement. . . . We can speak no greater praise of Freud than to say that he placed this idea at the very center of his thought.”154 Trilling’s definition of culture needs to be sandwiched next to Arnold’s aesthetic definition: “a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know on all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.”155 Bloom even uses the Arnoldian word “touchstones” to describe Freud and Kafka, whom he elects as modern standard-bearers for Jewish cultural greatness, pseudomorphic gems inside the seam of German literature: “I grant the apparent absurdity of touchstones for Jewish culture whose own Jewish culture was essentially so peripheral, but American Jewish culture is at least as much an oxymoronic phrase as German Jewish culture was.”156 Bloom figures America as the land of the westering sun, which oppositional quality is well-captured by Charles Reznikoff: “My heart in the East/And I at the farthest West.”157 Bloom comments that all Jewish identity in the Diaspora is a permanent enigma: “Why do we think of their cultural achievement as having been Jewish, and what about those idiosyncratic spirits was incontrovertibly Jewish?”158 Bloom opposes Peter Gay’s argument that Freud offered only German wisdom by asserting that “Every close reader of Freud learns that ‘they’ are the Gentiles and ‘we’ are the Jews.”159 Kafka, by contrast, wrote, “What have I in common with the Jews?”160 But six years hence this changed to formulations like “we Jews are not painters. We cannot depict things statically. We see them always in transition, in movement, as change.”161 I cannot help noticing the similarity of this statement to Bloom’s comparative, diachronic interpretation of tradition as an active series of faux isolated texts as opposed to the New Critical approach which understands texts statically and in splendid

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isolation from other texts. When Bloom suggests this parable as a prooftext of Kafka’s Jewishness and yet universality, he refers to the Jewish uncanny: He is thirsty, and is cut off from a spring by a mere clump of bushes. But he is divided against himself: one part overlooks the whole, sees that he is standing here and that the spring is just behind him; but another part notices nothing, has at most a divination that the first part sees all. But as he notices nothing he cannot drink.162

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-thatcan-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

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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 guntoting 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 selfdeceptive 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: In the Heideggerian “hermeneutics of facticity,” our understanding of the world and of ourselves is limited by tradition and by our factual circumstance in our history. Instead of the narcissistic ego of Freud, or the transcendental ego of Husserl, we have the factually existing ego, a thrown-clear fragment of Being. My own sense of “facticity” is a blend of the Freudian narcissistic and partly unconscious ego with a Gnostic or Kabbalistic pneuma or spark, which has been thrown all right, but not clear or into a possible clearing.177

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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: Max Brod, responding to Kafka’s now-famous remark—“we are nihilistic thoughts that came into God’s head”—explained to his friend the Gnostic notion that the Demiurge had made this world both sinful and evil. “No,” Kafka replied, “I believe we are not such a radical relapse of God’s, only one of His bad moods. He had a bad day.” Playing the straight man, the faithful Brod asked if this meant there was hope outside our cosmos. Kafka smiled, and charmingly said: “Plenty of hope—for God—no end of hope—only not for us.”202

Bloom believes that poetic-meaning is impossible in a fallen world. However, he remarks that “in Kafka’s world as in Freud’s, or in Scholem’s, or in any world deeply informed by Jewish memory, there is necessarily sense in everything, total sense, even though Kafka refuses to aid you in getting at or close to it.”203 Jewish sense dominates Bloom’s reading of the figure of Odradek too much; he misses that the uncanny paterfamilias, which he interprets as a return of the repressed, would seem constructed from a Jewish star and a Christian crossbar. The narrator describes the figure as a broken-down remnant of threads, but he finds the thought of acculturation surviving him painful. Bloom reads Kafka’s characters as being trapped in the Kenoma and menaced by a Gnostic dread of Archons, or those petty bureaucratic officials who rule the primary world. The best example of this is to be found in Kafka’s parable “Before the Law,” a dark Jewish saying that almost explodes the narrative of The Trial. Bloom offers the comparison that just as “Freudian man nurtures the desire to destroy the father, so even Joseph K has his own unfulfilled wishes against the image of the Law.”204 Kafka writes that the man who is excluded from the Law perceives in the darkness of the guardian’s doorway a radiance that streams immortally from the door of the Law, and this reminds of Bloom’s vignette in which the ephebe poet experiences the baleful otherness of the Covering Cherub as a burning brightness against a framing darkness, since these are visions of the Creation gone malevolent and entrapping.205 My suspicion is confirmed, when Bloom ends his chapter on Kafka by writing, “no other

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modern Jewish author troubles us with so strong an impression that we are in the presence of what Scholem called ‘the strong light of the canonical, of the perfection that destroys’.”206 Thus, Joseph K is deemed another jackdaw, “another Kafkan crow in a cosmos of crows . . . waiting for that new Torah that will not be revealed.”207 Bloom argues that traditional questers suffer ordeal by landscape, whereas Joseph K is menaced by officious time-servers encouraged by the remnant of the radiance itself.208 He makes much of the biographical information that, while writing The Hunter Gracchus, Kafka was studying Hebrew in a doomed effort to firmly ground his identity by journeying to Palestine: “we may call the voyages of the dead but neverburied Gracchus a trope for Kafka’s belated study of his ancestral language.”209 Gracchus means crow in Latin, and so the impossibility of crows means the impossibility of hope, of a loving Pleroma, or of the carrion-hunter reaching Zion. A brilliant example of this impossibility of analysis is contained in the aphorism: “what is laid upon us is to accomplish the negative; the positive is already given,” which negative Bloom interprets as Judaism, or “the spiritual form of Kafka’s self-conscious Jewishness,” while the positive signifies the pastness of the Law in comparison to the lateness of Kafkan evasiveness.210 Fearfully, the thought of helping Gracchus is one that makes ordinary people take to their beds, and Kafka relates there is sense in that, even though the enormity of the nationalistically self-conscious German negative snuffed out the lives of his sisters. The Book of J is divided into three main sections, the life of the authoress, a new translation of the J strand of Genesis, and a commentary upon the putative book by Bloom. It lies at the heart of my narrative because here Bloom deconstructs the template of normative Judaism and hence his own religious background. The problem instantly arises of how to define Orthodox Judaism in the sense of showing what Bloom reacts against. Maimonides’ thirteen principles of faith provide a necessarily brief introduction to these hallowed matters. The first principle is that God is the creator and the guide; Bloom argues that Yahweh is a literary character and that one should read by inner light. The second principle is that Yahweh is alone God and is One, whereas Bloom thinks that the cult of Yahweh wins an agon with other gods, and that monotheism was introduced after the Persian captivity. The third principle states that Yahweh is immaterial and without body; Bloom catalogues humanoid manifestations of Yahweh. The fourth principle emphasizes that Yahweh is first and last; Bloom imagines earlier textual versions of Yahweh and delights in tracing further genealogies of Yahwistic gods stretching down to the perpetual present. The fifth principle asserts that Jews must pray to Yahweh alone; Bloom instead recites poems at times of trouble. The sixth principle grants the status of truth to the words of the

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Prophets; Bloom recounts that the Bible is literary fiction of an exuberant kind and therefore gives equal weight to the aesthetic utterance of nonJudaic prophets. The seventh principle refers to Moses as a Prophet and as a repository of God’s truth; Bloom rationally denies the Mosaic covenant with Yahweh but feels guilt. The eighth principle outlines that Torah is the work of Moses but dictated by God; Bloom champions the Documentary Hypothesis and implies that Moses is a literary creation. The ninth principle adumbrates that Torah cannot be exchanged for another document; Bloom substitutes The Book of J. The tenth principle indicates that Yahweh reads men’s thoughts and comprehends all their actions; Bloom believes gods were written by men in opposition to the idea that gods write in men’s hearts; we have free-will. The eleventh principle articles that Yahweh rewards or punishes those who keep or break his commandments; Bloom’s entire career is obsessed with breaking the Second Commandment and asserting that priests manufacture mind-forged manacles. The twelfth principle predicts the coming of a Messiah; Bloom quotes Jesus as saying, “Get thee behind me, Satan,” when Peter proclaims him Messiah, but nowhere identifies Yeshua, or anyone else, as God’s anointed, the Davidic deliverer of the Jews. Akiba proclaimed Ben Kochbar as Messiah, and Bloom reflects that this “terrible mistake” caused a Holocaust even more severe than the German one.211 Maimonides associates the Messiah with the rebuilding of the Temple, while Bloom warns that Al-Aqsar Mosque must never be destroyed.212 The thirteenth principle has faith in the revival of the dead; Bloom hates the idea of the rapture in the context of Christian America, for him immortality comes from literary ability and its canonical reception. There are other core elements of Judaism that Bloom seems to doubt; his interest in canon-formation means that he questions the presence of poems and wisdom literature in the canonical books of the Bible, and this obstinacy undermines Akiba’s judgment in assembling the canon. Bloom exercises great skepticism with regard to Yahweh’s covenant being a blessing: “I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing” (Gen. 12.1-2); Yahweh’s interventions are more often figured as personal disasters for those concerned. As a Nietzschean, Bloom philosophically prefers the will-to-power to being a do-gooder; his supreme fiction is a warrior-god. Above all, Bloom argues that Yahweh is a literary creation because men invent gods from that portion of eternity that exists in their imagination. Bloom champions the Documentary Hypothesis, the theory that Genesis was authored by a number of now nameless writers, whose efforts were homogenized at the time of Ezra the Scribe and subsequently assigned to Moses. Perhaps drawing on the disguised male voice of The Song of Songs, Bloom claims that an anonymous great lady called Gevurah and/or

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Bathsheba wrote the J strand of Genesis; since Ezra preached endogamy and Jewish descent is matrilineal, J’s identification with a Hittite woman seems ironic. Her work is compared to children’s fiction with the result that J’s Yahweh is read as being at times rather temperamental. The consequence of this biographical speculation is that the earliest strand of the Bible becomes de-sacralized; a secular product of the Solomonic Enlightenment that followed the heroic age of David. Bloom notes that the court of David was essentially a military society “with the hero-king presiding,” whereas the age of Solomon was cultured and urban, but still locating its ideal in the charismatic David.213 Bloom’s Gnostic reading is revealed by his first thought, one over-determined by Blake: “Blake . . . taught us that a crucial aspect of religious history is the process of ‘choosing forms of worship from poetic tales’.”214 Bloom speculates that J was influenced by prior writings on the cult of Yahweh that in all likelihood would reveal to us a grotesquely primitive form of worship that the enlightened Gevurah satirized. His argument is that the J-Writer was someone of great originality in the representation of inter-personal struggle, and that the Solomonic enlightenment was a kind of Pleroma from which the later Kenoma of Scriptural redaction produced the building blocks of normative Judaism. I want to consider Bloom’s controversial invention of J as an authorial identity before moving onto a consideration of his commentary upon The Book of J. Tradition Bloom thinks arbitrary; therefore, he lists salient differences between the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, such as the Judaic differentiation of Scripture into teachings, prophets, writings, or Torah, Nevi’im, and Kethuvim, respectively. He tuts at the less than arbitrary ending of the Christian Bible with Malachi proclaiming Elijah’s return (as John the Baptist) rather than the rebuilding of the Temple in II Chronicles.215 Nevertheless, the first five books of the Bibles of both faiths are the same, but with different names; the Jews chose to call their Torah chapters by the first words in each book; thus, Genesis is christened “In the Beginning,” Exodus—“Names,” Deuteronomy— “Words,” Leviticus—“And He called,” while Numbers is rendered “In the Wilderness.” Bloom emphasizes that chapter and verse divisions in the Bible are purely arbitrary, the divisions first occurring hundreds of years after their inception, and hence they tell us nothing with regard to the intentions of the original authors. What Bloom designates “The Book of J” was composed between nineteen-hundred years and twenty-three-hundred years before chapter divisions were imposed upon the source material. According to the Documentary Hypothesis popularized by Graf, Vatke, and Wellhausen, the earliest books of the Bible were not written by Moses but by a number of different authors at different periods in time. Thus, J stands for the Jahwist, while what Bloom calls later censorings of J are entitled E after the Elohist.

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Bloom includes the information that J only utilizes Elohim to refer to divine beings plural and that the word Yahweh was rendered secret because of its magical potential. P equates to the Priestly Author who wrote Leviticus, D for the Deuteronomist, and R for Redactor. R would seem the villain of Bloom’s narrative, since he did the most editorial damage to J’s artistic purpose. Bloom is fundamentally opposed to Robert Alter’s thesis that the Pentateuch is a work of composite artistry.216 The strangeness of Bloom’s hypothesis has been severely criticized by Alter, who maligns Rosenberg’s translation. For example, Alter criticizes Rosenberg for multiplying non-existent puns on the word “boundary,” which contends with Bloom’s thesis that J was a playful ironist.217 The entire slant of Bloom’s Gnostic reading is that J was a Great Original and that poetic earliness is aesthetically superior to priestly belatedness. Bloom identifies J as a highly sophisticated female member of the Solomonic elite, who entertained a friendly rivalry with the Court historian who wrote 2 Samuel. He readily admits that his reading is mostly imaginative surmise and yet dismisses other attempts to place J as either scholarly fictions or else religious fantasies. The kernel of Bloom’s reading is that J’s Yahweh is a literary character; Bloom compares this representation with other literary characters and, in particular, King Lear; Hamlet he likens to Mark’s Jesus. Blasphemous as it sounds, Bloom imagines an all-too-human Yahweh, a god who devours roast beef and curds, whose hands seal Noah’s ark, who walks in the cool of the Eden evening. For Bloom, J’s characteristic style is that of the sublime irony of god’s incommensurability, when dealing with biblical characters, which is akin to Kafka’s Gracchus. He rejects the post-exilic Deity as a safely transcendentalized gaseous vapor in order to embrace J’s impish portrayal of Yahweh. Comparisons with Blake yield to Emerson, who is quoted as saying that the mind revolts against the Bible wearing black cloth and, more importantly, that churches are not built on the truth of religion but on tropes and figures of powerful writers. This agonistic idea reduces to an Orc/Urizen binary, as Bloom attempts to unbrick what he sees as an essentially aesthetic enterprise from normative moralists and the didacticism of priests. The argument is advanced, that J escapes genre, and this to nullify David Damrosch’s thesis that Genesis contains too many different styles of writing for collocation under the umbrella of single-authorship: “recent critics of the French variety have joined in, cheerfully destroying what they regard as the capitalistic social myth of individual creativity . . . they want to persuade us that a demiurgical ‘language’ dictates and authors merely serve as a medium.”218 Bloom repudiates the demiurge language and its literary archons; he hails J’s elliptical creation as a work so comprehensive and universal that three of the great world religions were founded there, that is Judaism, Christianity,

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and Mormonism. The result is the Romantic image of authorship, a feminine scribe producing scrolls as texts that reflect a unified consciousness, “a single, magnificent mind, holding reality together in the grand, single image of Yahweh, whom we may call J’s awakened imagination.”219 Bloom writes that he hears in J an ever early freshness and that E represents a revised or censored J, whereas the Deuteronomists numbering three or more provide a history of King Josiah’s puritan reforms. By this means, he champions J against the Priestly P, who composed alternative and pious versions of J’s stories and ultimately R, who, from Frye’s perspective, pulverized the various sources so thoroughly that “we are totally unable to reconstitute any of them, J included.”220 Bloom finds the passionless Platonic antithesis of J’s anthropomorphic Yahweh in the theologizing of Philo of Alexandria, the founder of the idea that everything in Torah is divine because the holy word of God was dictated through His medium, Moses. The liveliness of J’s writing is accounted for by its profane comic potential, which seems closer to dramatic irony, insofar as the words and actions of a character reverberate with readerly meanings lost on the characters themselves. Stylistically, this tragic form of irony is elliptical and provocative in the sense of stirring the normative out of their torpor with defamiliarizing juxtapositions, as in the instance of Esau, who barters his birthright for a mess of pottage. Bloom portrays himself as Falstaffian, but a truer analogy is provided by Coleridge’s insight into the sublime style of Milton, since all things become Bloom. The paratactic J is economical and wields dramatic irony, while Bloom thrives on unsettling his readers by honoring her perceived ellipses, and this to the extent of undermining normative definitions of divinity. J produces no cloven-fictions since the creation of man is monistic, with no division of body and soul, though it might be compared to the Egyptian myth of man’s creation, in which the figure of a potter’s wheel also appears. Bloom compares J’s creation-of-man narrative to a child making mud pies with his hands and grotesquely blowing life into the figurine’s nostrils. In what for me is the most moving part of the book, Bloom sows together a cento of texts from The Psalms and The Book of Job, in order to resurrect what may have been J’s creation scene, the one that the Priestly Author’s account of creation replaced. Bloom’s suspicion is that this creation scene was censored because it bore too close a resemblance to a Canaanite legend, in which the anthropomorphic storm god Baal fought Yamm with the help of his wife and sister, Anat, and hence brought order to the chaos of the sea: “Certainly J knew this story, and probably she knew also the Babylonian epic Enuma Elis, in which the storm god Marduk battles Tiamat, goddess of the sea.”221 Bloom notes that Psalm 74 sings the praises of a God who “didst divide the sea by thy strength: thou breakest the heads

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of the dragons in the waters.” Here Yahweh is interpreted as falling like a rainstorm upon his enemies: 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

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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

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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 heelclutching.”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

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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 implike 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.

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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

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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

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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 ChronosSaturn,” 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

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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 literarycritical methodology to biblical characters, and hence Jesus finds a composite precursor, not just in John the Dipper, but in Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and preeminently 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-toohuman 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

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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: God appears & God is Light To those poor Souls who dwell in Night, But does a Human Form Display To those who Dwell in Realms of Day. (129–32)

Bloom discovers the language of power in Blake’s limpid rhyme, which grants the possessor a heightened sense of linguistic power unrelated to the resentful socio-political definition of empowerment treasured by materialists. Empirically, this feeling of empowerment, or rather of transcendence (dismissed by materialists), is described as an “elevation, a mounting high on no intoxicants except incantatory language,” but spiritually, Bloom figures it as an “awakening to a knowledge of something in the self that cannot die, because it was never born.”275

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Bloom provides a most unexpected insight when he compares Whitman’s Myself, Soul, and real Me to the Kabbalistic trio of nephesh, ruach, and neshamah. Here the nephesh corresponds with God’s persona, while the neshamah symbolizes the soul that is even a mystery to Him, and the ruach Yahweh’s vital inner breath.276 These distinctions indicate the essential Jewishness of Bloom’s thought that seeks to yoke American poetry to Scholem’s interest in mystical speculation. The perpetually growing inner self in Wordsworth’s verse almost seems to mirror the Bloomian macrocosm that is consonant with tradition, “a perpetual process going on in God, taking place with each inhalation and exhalation of the divine breath” that becomes mortal, or as Bloom advises: “try to imagine that every time you hold your breath, and then release it, you create and ruin another world.”277 Whether or not Wordsworth is a god that he might stand alone, Bloom apprehends “a God without end, limitless in his self-sufficiency.”278 At the last, Bloom abandons mysticism for a more pragmatic on-going present: “Yahweh, who still feels homeless after his Temple’s destruction” seems “to have exiled himself . . . until he returned in 1948.”279 There are two faces to Bloom’s writings on Jewish authors, secular or otherwise. In the first place, he argues that aesthetic writings have to impose themselves on tradition and, in the second, he proposes that his interpretations of tradition, including the Hebrew Bible, are always done in an aesthetic fashion. My objection is that Bloom’s definition of tradition corresponds to the religious to the ironic extent that he suggests the J-Writer contains all later tradition; thus, to apprehend Bloom as an American Dr Johnson is also to convert the latter’s infamous truculence into a scarcely concealed form of Zionism. Despite asserting Torah is no different to a novel by Tolstoy, he believes that Yahweh is himself Torah and yet is unknowable: “Yahweh remains the hidden God, hedged about by Tanakh, the two Talmuds, and Kabbalah. And since Yahweh himself is Torah, the Talmuds, the Zohar, and the entire Oral Law from Moses to Isaac Luria, all of them are finally unknowable as he is.”280 As an Apophatic theologian, Bloom asserts that without a negative moment in the act of creation, God and the cosmos would fuse as one, which should remind of his praise of Derrida’s treatment of the negative linguistic moment that does not cohere with its writerly creator.281 Bloom emphasizes that Yahweh “is a name and so a word, and he is always the essence of act, and hardly to be described as a supreme thing in a cosmos of things.”282 This apothegm indicates that tradition is directly analogous to the breath of Yahweh, if the writing in question is authentic enough to break into tradition. From an ethical perspective, Bloom criticizes Yahweh for demanding love without returning the love of the Jewish people

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and, consequently, Bloom rebels against “endless barrages of praise, prayers, hymns of gratitude, and immense love, unceasing love.”283 Since Yahweh, in Bloom’s words, should be shot for desertion, the act of fighting for the Jewish people must be considered sacred. Such is the religious moment in the writings of Bloom that his interpretation of American aesthetics becomes overdetermined by Judaic considerations; he has a Kabbalistic understanding of the mystical in the writings of Whitman. To complete the chiasmus, there is a strong case to propose that Bloom honors his father by imposing his own highly agonistic definition of tradition on Jewish culture.

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6

Bloom and Protestantism

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

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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 Nonconformism. 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

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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 NewWorld 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

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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, fullscale 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

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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

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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 selfreliance 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

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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 MiltonicRomantic; 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

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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

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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

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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 questromance 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

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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: Prometheus is the poet-as-hero in the first stage of the quest, marked by a deep involvement in political, social, and literary revolution, and a direct satirical attack on the institutional orthodoxies of European and English society. . . . The Real Man, the Imagination, emerges after terrible crises in the major stage of the Romantic quest, which is typified by a relative disengagement from revolutionary activism . . . so as to re-center the arena of search within the self.66

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

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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: I have analyzed this dramatic opposition as a parallel to a momentary alliance of the ego and the id in protection of the libido against the wily arts of the superego. As a rough bringing-together of Blake and Freud this has some suggestive value, but it now seems to me another unnecessary reduction of Blake’s poetic mythology into mental figures less imaginative than Blake’s own very subtle ones. Tharmas, like the id, is the regent of bodily appetite, and Luvah-Orc is a life-force rising from bodily appetite. But Freud located reason in the ego, separating it from the moralizing function of the superego. Blake assigns both reason and social morality to Urizen, and splits up the ego into Los and the Spectre of Urthona, the “I” as potential creator and the “I” as selfhood, fearful and time-obsessed.72

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

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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

Bloom argues that in spite of formal divisions into stanzas, “a remarkable number of central poems in Romantic tradition divide argumentatively and imagistically into three parts.”78 The beginning, middle, and end of Bloom’s version of creation, fall, and redemption is constantly reiterated: . . . first an initial vision of loss or crisis, centering on a question of renewal, or imaginative survival; second, a despairing answer to the question, in which the mind’s power, however great, seems inadequate to overcome the obstacles both of language and of the universe of death, of outer sense; third, a more hopeful, or at least ongoing answer, however qualified by recognitions of continuing loss.79

Bloom confirms the intrinsically Christian pattern when he writes that this “de-idealized vision of Romanticism reveals that the super-mimesis of nature generally turns out to be the simpler act of imitating Milton.”80 He borrows this patterning from Abrams’ Natural Supernaturalism, as is revealed by the phrase, “historically, this is certainly a displacement of a Protestant pattern.”81 Bloom finds this discourse analogous to the Lurianic pattern of Zimzum, Shevirath ha-kelim, and Tikkun, which can be rendered into the displaced Christian scheme as contraction, catastrophe, and restitution. Bloom calls this triadic patterning that mirrors the Psalms and Prophets the internalization of quest romance: “Since the desire and fulfillment alike come from the Poetic character . . . the next step must be to identify the Poetic character with the true or real Man who is also the source of the true God.”82 Bloom later repudiated his desire to Judaize Blake’s Jerusalem: “the re-creation in English terms of the work of Hebraic prophecy . . . involves a comparison of England and Palestine, and of Albion and Jacob (called Israel).”83 Nevertheless, Bloom draws the British analogy: “Blake begins Jerusalem’s third chapter with an address to the Deists, or what he takes to be the religious orthodoxy of his own time. The address is in fact made to State Christianity or the established religion of any nation at any time, and is perfectly applicable to European and American society right now.”84 The precedent for what I am arguing comes from Isaiah and is present in Blake and, indeed, Bloom’s reading of Blake: “The books of Ezekiel and the other prophets are essentially collections of public oratory, poems of admonition delivered to a wavering people. The poems are interspersed in chronicles that deliberately mix history and vision.”85 Fite argues that the polished Bloomian

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aside undercuts an emphasis upon imaginative vision, a good example being the synopsis that Yeats fails as a poet because “he does not believe strongly enough in the creative power of the Romantic imagination.”86 When Bloom writes, “Morning in the East means that the fires of the West (the body’s energy and the American Revolution) have now appeared in man’s emotional life and in the French Revolution,” the inference is that just as events in America influenced the French revolutionaries, so does the poetry written by Blake about the French and American revolutions stir something in Bloom.87 America is figured as a revolutionary Orc: “Washington, Franklin, Paine, and the other leaders of revolution, mentioned earlier in the poem as rising up in the night of oppression, now stand ‘with their foreheads rear’d toward the east,” threatening the Urizenic world of England and Europe.”88 Bloom asserts that revolutions always end in Urizenic reaction: “Whether or not Orc is to win (and history and Blake’s poetry alike will prove that he cannot) his effect upon human faculties is a permanent one. Desire shall fail, but the gates are consumed, and man is opened to infinity if he will but see his own freedom.”89 In 1964, Bloom wrote that America identified Urizen and King George, but how close this now seems to Bloom’s voluble opposition to President George Bush and his religious crusade against Saddam Hussein, a case of what Blake described as “Religion hid in War”: “It is scary to reread the final volume of Gibbon these days because the fate of the Roman Empire seems an outline that the imperial presidency of George W. Bush retraced.”90 The American Revolution has merely turned its allegiance from Washington to Bush, or from Orc to Urizen, and is yet another example of organic repetition: “The Orc cycle, the withering of desire into restraint, is the theme of The Mental Traveller” and hence Bloom apprehends: “a world unable or unwilling to rescue itself from a mere round of organic repetitions, a Urizenic mill of meaningless wheels.”91 His reading of Yeats’s Second Coming complements Bloom’s drawing of the British analogy since the horrific image of the Yeatsian Sphinx becomes a belated revision of the Blakean Urizenic image for mechanistic societies and the military industrial complex. Were one to substitute petrol-guzzling car wheels and production lines for steamdriven cotton mills, then Bloom’s Blakean analogy would have great prophetic power; the cyclic historiography of Bloom’s Blakean perspective needs to be emphasized: “Political revolution is just that, revolution, the revolving of another cycle of revolt aging into repression, Orc dying into Urizen’s religion, the French Revolution passing into the despotism of Napoleon.”92 Bloom figures the historical woes that beset Blake’s England in generalized terms that almost seem prophetic: “an age of tyranny and war in which . . . his culture quite properly seemed to him altogether Satanic, and in which he alone seemed to be keeping faith in with imagination.”93

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In Yeats, Bloom’s interest in selfhood and solitude augments when he overturns the New Critical judgment that Yeats was at his best as a Modernist who repudiated Romanticism in order to suggest that the Irish poet’s aesthetic excellence dwells in vestigial signs of solitary quest romance. The Protestant genealogy of questing protagonists that Bloom traces consists of Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Browning, and Yeats, starting with Milton’s magus in Il Penseroso and then passing through Wordsworth’s Solitary in The Excursion, Shelley’s questing poet in Alastor, Browning’s Childe Roland in Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came and then Yeats’s Oisin in The Wanderings of Oisin. The next sentence brings the questing figure home to Bloom’s own library-borrowing doorstep in Brooklyn: “among poets of our own century, Stevens, Lawrence, Hart Crane.”94 Bloom’s argument is that because Yeats chose Shelley’s Alastor for his chief of men the “antithetical solitude of the young Shelley . . . is very clearly the ultimate origin of Yeats’s later theories of the mask and the antithetical self.”95 Bloom is anxious to place Yeats’s The Wanderings of Oisin in the same tradition as the figure of the Solitary in The Excursion, which influences Shelley in Alastor, or the poem of the “phantasm world in which every object becomes an emblem of loss, of the world’s separation from the self.”96 In a throwback to the main argument in The Visionary Company, Bloom argues that the predominant state in Yeats’s poetry is the passive state of Beulah, in which the Yeatsian quest moves between “a solipsistic self-absorption and the merging of that self in the universal mood”.97 Bloom traces the origin of Yeats’s lunar cycles to a commentary upon “The System” of Blake in Yeats’s edition of The Works of William Blake: The mind or imagination or consciousness of man may be said to have two poles, the personal and the impersonal, or, as Blake preferred to call them, the limit of contraction and unlimited expansion. When we act from the personal we tend to bind our consciousness down as a fiery center. When . . . we allow our imagination to expand away from this egoistic mood, we . . . merge in the universal mood.98

This immortal and imperishable fiery center becomes Phase 15 of the moon, while the looking glass of universal thought becomes Phase 1: “the opposition in Yeats between Phase 15 and 1 is the Coleridgean or Wordsworthian contrast between the Secondary, creative Imagination, and the death-in-life of the world without imagination.”99 The influence of Blake and Shelley is nowhere more apparent in Yeats than in the Byzantium poems, in which the poet sails out of nature and apprehends the fires of the eternal. Bloom suggests that the Yeatsian Condition of Fire, with its purifying simplification through intensity, is precisely the Romantic Imagination, and that the fires

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of Byzantium correlate with Blake’s Golgonooza, that is a city of art and the burning fountain of Shelley’s Adonais: “Remembering that Shelley calls our minds ‘mirrors of the fire for which all thirst’ Yeats asks the inevitable question, for Gnostic or naturalist alike, ‘What or who has cracked the mirror?’ ”100 In Bloom’s opinion, meditation upon the broken glass that constitutes a fallen many-colored, or perhaps starlit dome, militates against the one of the imagination; and hence, he compliments Yeats as being “the last of the High Romantics . . . who asserted imaginative values without the armour of continuous irony.”101 Bornstein follows Bloom in suggesting that Yeats was influenced by Hallam’s writings on Shelley and Browning’s essay on Shelley; thus, both Hallam and Yeats see Shelley as the type of the subjective poet: “the image-making power of the imagination” enables him “to by-pass reason and apprehend beauty directly,” and therefore Yeats stresses with Browning “the connection between solitude and vision.”102 Bloom writes this about Browning’s poetic appropriation of the subjective quest: “The landscape of ‘Childe Roland To The Dark Tower Came’, like that of Alastor, is charged by the quester’s own furious, self-frustrated energy, and cannot at last contain that energy.”103 According to Bloom, Yeats’s The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry reveals “the poet’s infinite desire to break through natural barriers and so uncover an altogether human universe.”104 Bloom’s championing of Oisin as a solitary quester overturns the received wisdom that Yeats was a second-rate Romanticist, until later in his career, when he discovered Modernist lyrical force: “Yeats . . . remained always a poet of autobiographical self-recognition, in the solitary tradition that Shelley had founded upon Wordsworth.”105 Bloom’s grand critical purpose in Yeats is therefore revisionist; he seeks to resurrect the place of myth-making Romantic poetry in a tradition that had previously characterized Yeats as a Metaphysical poet.106 This polemical process was first advocated in “Yeats and the Romantics,” an essay published in Hollander’s Modern Poetry: “The best of our modern poets . . . Yeats and D. H. Lawrence in Great Britain, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane in this country, are the legitimate inheritors of this Spenserian or Romantic line of poets.”107 Bloom interprets the mode of this line of poets as anti-natural, the poem as an alternative world to that of nature and identifies the Yeats of poems like A Dialogue of Self and Soul, Vacillation, and The Man and the Echo, as a very human, very Romantic and very Shelleyan Yeats, “existing in the perilous dialectic that witnesses every object of desire disappearing into another experiential loss.”108 Bloom would seem fascinated by the Yeatsian division between the antithetical and the primary, which Bloom correlates with two characters from The Excursion: “The Wanderer is the primary, ‘objective’ man of A Vision, while the Solitary is the quester who is doomed

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to carry subjectivity to its limit, in the search for possible ecstasy, away from a possible wisdom.”109 Thus, Yeats followed Blake “in the dialectical audacity of transvaluing the ancient quarrel between the objective and the subjective man, the Angel and the Devil in Blake’s terms.”110 Bloom seizes upon Yeats’s comment that a poet always “writes out of the tragedy of his personal life, but never directly to the reader, for ‘there is always phantasmagoria’. ”111 He then qualifies Yeats’s statement by attacking the impersonality of the New Critics: “in this age of Eliot, Auden, and the New Criticism . . . there is no escape from or evasion of personality in this phantasmagoria, which is indeed precisely what Blake and Pater called ‘vision’ and the other major Romantics the Secondary or creative Imagination.”112 Yeats is written from within the same revisionary polemic that opposes the New Critics: “Pater, like so many other critics and poets of the nineteenth century, is still out of fashion, having been dismissed by T. S. Eliot to the large Limbo inhabited by those who did not keep literature in its proper relation to Christian belief.”113 The decadent aesthetics of Bloom find a precursor in the appreciations of Pater that sought an alternative to Protestant spirituality in fine art. Thus, Bloom has an eye for beautiful sentences that communicate the eccentricity of Pater’s solitary epicurean subjectivity, “Pater . . . is reputed to have walked the Oxford meadows in the cool of the evening, murmuring that the odour of the meadow-sweet gave him pain: ‘It is the fault of nature in England that she runs too much to excess’. ”114 In Bloom’s view, aestheticism courts new opinions and a fullness of life that gets as many pulsations of the artery into the given time; while the desire for art for art’s sake finds an ecstatic epiphany in the privileged moment.115 We would misinterpret Bloom if we fail to emphasize his preference for aesthetics over Christian symbolism; he draws attention to the fact that, by insinuating the children of this world are wiser than “children of light” (Lk. 16.8), Pater scandalously creates an aesthetic alternative to rival the religion of Christianity.116 Although Yeats began as a disciple of Pater’s passionate aesthetic humanism and hence a student of the lonely ecstasy of creative joy, Bloom argues that Yeats misread Pater, perceiving him to have caused the disaster that ended in the tragic generation of Johnson, Dowson, and Wilde.117 In such a context, Pater bequeaths an almost impossible legacy “an intense consciousness or passion that cannot accommodate itself to experience again.”118 Bloom places this intensity of conceits within Pater’s historical dialectic: 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

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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 PreRaphaelite 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 antiRomanticism.”124 Bloom’s chapter on “Late Victorian Poetry and Pater”

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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

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The Epicurean,” in which Bloom quotes Tennyson’s male muse Hallam on Wordsworth’s crowd: Susceptible of the slightest impulse from external nature, their fine organs trembled into emotion at colors, and sounds, and movements, unperceived or unregarded by duller temperaments. . . . So vivid was the delight attending the simple exertions of eye and ear, that it became mingled more and more with their trains of active thought, and tended to absorb their whole being into the energy of sense.135

Bloom appreciatively remarks that at the center of Pater’s Marius the Epicurean is the flux of sensations; that the good life is awfully brief and, because of this decadent desperation to see and touch, “what we have to do is to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy.”136 He thinks the Beats were akin to Pater: “currently fashionable sensibility, two-thirds of the way through the century, is perhaps another ironic disordering of Paterian sensibility.”137 Bloom states that Pater is the aesthetic hinge between the Romantics and the Modernists, which judgment reminds of Orsino’s dying fall, not least because Pater wrote that all art aspires to the condition of music: 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-evermore-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

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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

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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

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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: . . . in the England of 1819, lay a country and a situation frighteningly like the here and now, a situation of domestic and foreign revolution and middle- and upper-class reaction against both revolutions. Substitute the black people of the United States for the working people of England, and the Southeast Asian revolution for the French, and the situations tend to lose themselves in an identity that may account for the still-emerging cultural parallels.163

He contrasts Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs with Coleridge and De Quincey in order to justify his thesis that, thwarted by the Urizenic American Moloch, the Orcish but quixotically escapist Beat Generation turned to drug culture, just as the world-weary questers among the Romantics became decadent: “frustrated by the societal balking of the new birth of mixed creative and organic energy that had seemed the spirit of the age, many

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Romantics . . . found solace through various modes of internalization.”164 But insert a ditto for Bloom, who finds solace from the nightmare of history (that he frequently complains of in his many anti-Republican asides) by occupying his thoughts with aesthetics. However, his thought is never unqualified aestheticism; Bloom prefers indeliberate parody to the psychedelic abyss of psychoanalysis; his review of Ginsberg’s Kaddish is largely dismissive, though one Blakean apothegm is worth quoting: “His dominant notion as to form derives from Blake’s ‘Exuberance is Beauty’, the belief that the energy embodied in poetry finds only its outward boundary in reason and order, and can make that boundary where it will, at the limit of the poet’s informing desire.”165 The problem is the liquefaction of content: “Ginsberg is ruined poetically by his willful addiction to a voluntaristic chaos, by a childish social dialectic as pernicious as any he seeks to escape.”166 Bloomian aesthetics rely upon the struggle with a malforming precursor, the greater the binding down, the fiercer the internalization, and this dialectic is lacking beneath the decadent mask of Ginsberg’s too-free content. We are now in a much better position to understand Bloom’s Manichean definition of the American sublime which owes a great deal to Emerson’s gnosis: “How came the Individual thus armed and impassioned to parricide thus murderously inclined” to “kill the divine life? Ah wicked Manichee!”167 Protestants can brook no instruction as a catechism and Bloom defines the belated American sublime as a fiercer internalization than any previous national aesthetic. Fite calls “Emerson and Whitman: The American Sublime” Bloom’s most difficult essay. However, the essential axiom of the text reduces to a kind of blotting out of the past defined, either in terms of memories, or as cultural tradition, with the figuration of what is absented as an abyss. But that is an abyss populated by the spontaneity of instinctual American genius untaught by Europeans and thus Emerson gives Bloom his celebrated formula, “I against the Abyss.” To textually ground his point, Bloom concentrates upon Whitman’s intertextual relationship with Emerson and lists three references that form a sliding-scale of denial. In 1863 Emerson is described as “the actual beginner of the whole procession,” but by 1887 we hear the cock crow: “It is of no importance whether I had read Emerson before starting L. of G. or not. The fact happens to be positively that I had not.”168 Bloom shows Whitman writing that “the best part of Emersonianism is, it breeds the giant that destroys itself ” with the poet’s sublimely independent corollary, “Who wants to be any man’s mere follower?”169 Then, Bloom traces the reoccurrence of this gigantic figure of self-reliance in Song of Myself, in which the Emersonian giant goes wherever Walt goes and in An Ordinary Evening in New Haven where Stevens answers the giant part of the uncertain question that is himself. Bloom’s redoubtable memory banks

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pressgang Kierkegaard into work: “When we say that we consign something to oblivion, we suggest simultaneously that it is to be forgotten and yet also remembered.”170 Kierkegaard’s forgotten-to-be-remembered figure becomes Emerson’s apothegm: “When we have no new perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish.”171 Bloom argues that the “true Emersonian dialectic of imaginative autonomy as against Necessity” is also that of “transparency as against enforced opaqueness.”172 Emerson wipes away anxious moonlight like mud in a Protestant askesis: “Every man has his own voice. . . . Let him scorn to imitate any being, let him scorn to be a secondary man.”173 Bloom then turns to what he describes as the essay misentitled “Nature,” which is transcendental to the point of refusing to acknowledge nature as any more than a natural blank created by our own perceptions: “The ruin or the blank that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things and so they appear not transparent but opaque.”174 Bloom’s comment does not yet identify the white whale with this Protestant refusal to come second: “if our own eye contains the ruin or blank we see in nature, then it contains also the joy and color we see there . . . in that ecstasy when the axis of vision and the axis of things coincide . . . we see into the life of things, we behold a transparency that is also ourselves.”175 The perceived Puritanism of Bloom’s Gnostic father was duly denigrated by Yvor Winters, who attacks Emerson for “addressing an audience which, like himself, had been so conditioned by two hundred years of Calvinistic discipline.”176 Winters was doubtless discombobulated by Emerson’s late Romantic pronouncement that the virtues of society are the vices of the saint, and therefore “we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.”177 Bloom concatenates another of Emerson’s morally ambivalent flourishes: “our crimes may be lively stones out of which we shall construct the temple of the true God,” which he notes is similar to Blake’s proverb about the bricks of religion building brothels but also to Nietzsche when beyond good and evil, Pater’s fluctuating sensations and Yeatsian contraries.178 As if over-hearing the growing mind of the nascent American tradition, Bloom dwells upon Emerson’s wisdom that “the one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety . . . in short to draw a new circle.”179 Psychologists call a clickwhirr response what Bloom defines as Swift’s mechanical operations of the spirit; Bloom indicates that Emerson’s meaning is close to the maturing ego progressively displacing the id, the child-animal changing into the teenage human. We are close to the heart of this book since when Bloom repeats that “the daemon is our destiny,” I take him to mean that he confronts the daemon of the American Protestant self.180 Bloom says that Romanticism

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is not “a Napoleonic obsession with titanic forms,” and reformulates his definition as “a humanism, which seeks our renewal as makers, which hopes” that “we—even we—coming so late in time’s injustices can still sing a song of ourselves.”181 Emerson’s circles and circumferences are compared to the Blakean devourer and prolific, such that daemonic influx is regarded as the devouring Emersonian sin of limitation, whereas the prolific half of the contraries was seen by Emerson as the circumference widening delight in pulsating energy. Emerson’s philosophy abandons the fixed point where the stillness is and, according to Bloom, is more akin to the Wordsworthian mode of a possible sublimity that is ever more about to be. He cares about the journey, not the goal, the chase is better for Emerson than the kill; thus, Nietzsche said of him: “he touches on the cheerful transcendency of the worthy gentleman who returned from an amorous rendezvous, as if he had accomplished the mission. ‘Though the power is lacking,’ he said gratefully, ‘the lust is nevertheless praiseworthy’.”182 Whether Emerson is a charming self-deceiver or a prophet who snatches visionary success from the jaws of defeat is the question; Bloom cheerfully ends his essay on Emerson with this quotation: “As long as I am weak, I shall talk of Fate; whenever the God fills me with his fullness, I shall see the disappearance of Fate. I am Defeated all the time; yet to Victory I am born.”183 Bloom defines the discontinuous abyss as the primal American difference and traces this figure to the Rhodopi mountains in Bulgaria: “The Emersonian elevation authentically is shamanistic—it bears all the splendid and barbarous stigmata . . . located in the Siberian shamans who had descended into Scythia and Thrace, and whose egregious raptures lurk in the dark abysses from which Western poetic tradition emerged.”184 He compares Emerson to Empedocles, saying that Empedocles is “an authentic High Romantic ruined quester” like Manfred and Childe Roland, but that Emerson was an “Empedocles-indialectical-reversal, a happy pilgrim whose daimonic drive irradiates every Dark Tower.”185 He finds the figure of Orpheus in Emerson’s essay “The Poet” and defines Orpheus as “a kind of Shaman . . . a master of divination whose quest leads to godhood, if finally also to failure and to a terrible death.”186 His essay “The Native Strain” contains this Gnostic statement with regard to American reality: “Where Greek thought emphasized always the great reality of human mortality, Orphism was not only a doctrine of immortality, but of the actual if latent divinity of the soul.”187 More explanation is required here since the Bloomian self is thrice divided: “deeper than the psyche is the pneuma, the spark, the uncreated self, distinct from the soul that God (or Demiurge) created.”188 The Shaman’s occult self was stimulated by the flyagaric mushroom and induced a kind of trance that resulted in an ecstatic intoxication that is a powerful ingredient in authentic Gnostic experiences.

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Bloom confesses to having had an out-of-body experience while being treated for a bleeding stomach ulcer, which vision reminded him of Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus. He writes that this mystical doctrine was Thracian and Bacchic and, further, that the only gods that matter to the Orphics with their rituals of purification and purgation were Eros and Bacchus, who is to an extent identified with the figure of Dionysius. Due to Emerson’s influence, the only gods that matter to the native poetic strain announced by Tocqueville as having “exaggerated descriptions and strange creations” are the Orphic pantheon of “Eros, Bacchus and Ananke.”189 Orpheus as imagined by Emerson is irrational and Bloom reckons that in his Orphic writings Emerson achieves “an ekstasis, a stepping-out that is truly a wandering beyond limits”; thus, Orphic poetry for Emerson is wild or “freer speech” and is exactly “instinct.”190 There is no place for western philosophical rationalism in Bloom’s Emersonian discourse since “Orphic instinct . . . manifests itself as Dionysiac possession, and also as rival possession that begins as Eros and ends as Ananke, love yielding to necessity.”191 The shamanistic qualities that interest Bloom are those of divination in an oracular sense that would make of American poets liberating gods since Orphism “holds that man is wicked, because descended from the Titans who devoured the child DionysosZagreus, and yet also divine, because descended also necessarily from the grotesquely cannibalized Bacchic babe.”192 American poets are liberating gods because they prophesize the kingdom of man over the sensory world of nature and have a titanic stature that transcends nature thanks to the presence of something older than nature in their being. It is easy to see how the guilty myth of Dionysos-Zagreus and Freud’s primal horde cohere, and then formulate an infinite regress of devouring poetic sons plus prolific poetic fathers, since Bloom believes that the native American strain “must be related to the differences between British and American Puritanism” because both poetries are “displaced Protestantisms.”193 Emerson’s casting out of European influences left Dickinson and the rest with a discontinuous new start: “Dickinson owes more to Emerson than Emerson did to Coleridge, Wordsworth.”194 Bloom usefully quotes Jane Harrison, who writes: “The religion of Orpheus is religious in the sense that it is the worship of the real mysteries of life, of potencies (daemons) rather than personal gods (theoi).”195 The centrally influential Emerson becomes figured by Bloom in the grisly metaphor of an oracular Yankee skull symbolic of American Orphism. Bloom argues that the whole movement of modern poetry is toward the “progressive internalization of every sort of quest,” which uncovers the “solitude at our center.”196 He celebrates those poets like Whitman, Stevens, and Ashbery that record moments of solipsistic bliss as they triumph over the flux of experience, or indeed, as it is in Bloom’s reading of The Owl in the Sarcophagus,

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of “the mind’s power over our consciousness of death.”197 I end this potted survey of Protestant references in Figures of Capable Imagination with Stevens’ apothegm that in the new world all men are priests.198 In Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, Bloom argues that Stevens incarnates as an American poet in the mold of Whitman, and is influenced by the transcendental philosophy of Emerson, but in fact never rids himself of the collective influence, either directly or indirectly, of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley. Sometimes Bloom persuasively demonstrates the direct influence of the English Romantics, powerfully so, in the case of the trope of the leaves that derives in Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” yet in other, more esoteric instances, he argues that the formal hexagonal shape of Romantic odes indirectly imposes itself underneath the veneer of an ostensibly American Modernist poetics. Bloom’s threefold scene of instruction is reduced to the play between ethos, pathos, and logos, although Stevens never moves the reader in the pathetic way that the plight of Cordelia moved Dr Johnson. Pathos in Stevens largely depends upon Bloom’s intuition that Stevens feels belated and that the American Sublime is more belated than any other national literature. Thus, he writes that as tradition advances poetic meaning becomes more abstract, as texts become more over-determined poetic meaning becomes underdetermined; the very abstraction of Stevens is explained away as a consequence of his hauntedness by the influence of strong precursors. As a transcendental poet, the outside, or the not-me, or the dead object world, must come second to the first idea of poetic inspiration. A historicist would object that history comes first, but in the iconoclasm of Stevens’ poetry there is frequently strong evidence to suggest that Stevens lives in his own private and highly imaginative world, a Sunday-morning world of art that Bloom’s Scene of Instruction seems almost specifically invented to deconstruct. The beginning of Wallace Stevens dismantles American tradition to its proposed building blocks in Emerson. It starts with lists of analogues for the categories of pathos, logos, and ethos to illustrate the Gnostic aphorism that in American poetry everything since Emerson follows a triple pattern: “It must be broken; It must not bear having been broken; It must seem to have been mended.”199 Like in “Coleridge: The Anxiety of Influence,” Bloom explicates Stevens’ entire career in terms of his categories of creativity: “what I will call the crisis or Crossing of Election took place in 1915, when his first strong poems were written. The Crossing of Solipsism lasted a long time in him, but its crux was in 1921–22, and it was not resolved until 1934–36. The final crossing, that of Identification, took place in 1942, and gave Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction.”200 Bloom translates his triad of ethos, logos, and pathos into Emerson’s essayistic categories of Fate, Freedom, and Power and, in his chapter on Harmonium, into “The Man

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Whose Pharynx Was Bad,” “The Snowman,” and “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon.” Ethos Bloom equates with nature, or fate, “a universe of death whose cyclic repetitions can be broken through only by transgressive acts of origination, an origination that can be performed only as and by the Will, the pathos or potentia of Power.”201 Thus, in “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad,” the malady of the quotidian is “a badly repressed case of the anxiety of influence,” an inability to be an early poet, and hence the poet’s voice might fail.202 There is a hint that Bloom’s triadic nomenclature derives in Ruskin’s discussion of the pathetic fallacy and that pathos is shorthand for pathetic fallacy, or the imagining of life in the It-Thou of inanimate nature: “Whereas the classical and medieval poets and painters . . . expressed the actual qualities of the thing itself, the Renaissance and modern artists first made the thing itself into an imagined thing and then reimagined that already altered object.”203 Strong poets transform nature or the precursor (often a composite of Emerson and Whitman) by the power of their imaginings, which elide the primacy of nature and the precursor in order to substitute the falsely solipsistic state of originating poetry that is entirely free from the taint of influence. “The Snowman” becomes Bloom’s shorthand for Stevens trying to imagine the thing itself, while “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” represents the poet as the origin of his own imaginings and not an imaginative reduction to the true-seeing of an object as in “The Snowman.” Sadly for Stevens’ putative dream of being an original of the Native American strain, Bloom identifies a submerged echo of Emerson’s transparent eyeball in the snow and Whitman’s fiery beard in the ointment-sprinkled beard.204 Bloom suggests that Stevens’ inability to write between 1924 and 1930 is due to his slow realization that he was not a luxurious poet of earth but more suited for austerities and dilapidations.205 This realization replaces the lush wartiness of repressed autumnal sexuality in “Sunday Morning” with the belated irony of “The Comedian as the Letter C”: “it is bitter almost everywhere, frequently to the point of rancidity, and yet it shares fully the obsessive quest that it ostensibly mocks.”206 The quest Bloom speaks of is the tradition of quest romance as initiated by Wordsworth’s Solitary in The Excursion and continued by Shelley’s poet in Alastor and Yeats’s Oisin. Bloom states that the central irony of the poem is that an imaginative Romantic quest cannot cross the Atlantic: “The Atlantic severs the American Romantic Selfhood from its British precursor, and internalized romance becomes only internalization and insatiable egotism.”207 The deep structures of British Romanticism reach a point of parody and hence desolation from which, after a breathing space of some years, Stevens was to begin his poetic project anew, without the rich Keatsian imagery of “Sunday Morning,” but with the formula that change results in death, which is the mother of beauty.

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Bloom argues the majority of Stevens’ ideas of order are limitations corresponding to fate or tropes of ethos; he emphasizes change and the subtle evasions of the inevitability of change often expressed as wistfulness for a departing sexuality that becomes figured as the anxiety of belatedness, especially in relation to Keats, Shelley, and Whitman. Bloom states that Stevens associates solitude with peace and ideas of order with Emersonian self-reliance; that Stevens attains poetic power when he ceases to fear the solipsism of a self-creation so radical that the poet lived and breathed in a world of his own metaphors. He quotes Schopenhauer to illumine his proposition: “the subjective disposition, the affectation of the will, imparts its own hue to the perceived surrounding, and conversely, the surroundings communicate the reflex of their color to the will.”208 Bloom identifies “Ideas of Order at Key West” as an American shore-ode and crisis-lyric in the tradition of Emerson’s “Seashore.” Cataloguing a number of instances of Stevens’ usage of the word “beyond,” Bloom concludes that beyond means beyond the First Idea, and that there “can be no idea of order in Stevens without reducing to a First Idea and then imagining beyond that idea to a new and heightened solitude of power and will.”209 To do so is to go beyond the limitation of Whitman for whom the muse of the sea represents his mother, while the shore his father. The woman in “Ideas of Order at Key West” becomes the poem’s central metaphor or a single artificer of the world. Whitman’s “Word Out of the Sea” and Stevens’ “Words of the sea” are read as being antithetical; Stevens demonstrating his power over the sea and hence the universe of death.210 Bloom views The Man with the Blue Guitar as the gateway to Stevens’ major phase and Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction as the ne plus ultra of this period. The model for both is a misprisioned Song of Myself and the expected map of misreading re-introduced as “the characteristic ordering of the post-Enlightenment crisis-poem.”211 He speaks of a crisis lurking beneath the poem’s surface-improvisational buoyancy and means that Stevens’ crises are crises of confidence with reference to the family romance of elder poets. But the object world should not be ignored, since “the imagination takes us out of . . . reality into a pure irreality.”212 In the best known passage of The Man with the Blue Guitar, we come across a suspiciously familiar formulation as to the circular logic that poems influence poems: Poetry is the subject of the poem, From this the poem issues and To this returns. Between the two, Between issue and return, there is An absence in reality, Things as they are. Or so we say. (CP, 176)213

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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: . . . an image is an obsession or a haunting, part percept and part concept, or we might say ethos as “haunt,” and so he tries to demystify it by reduction to its First Idea, a fate or reality supposedly beyond further reduction. But, in the next stage of his dialectic, he undergoes a recognition of the First Idea (itself an “imagined thing” or image) and then finds he is in danger of being dehumanized by this Freedom of substitution . . .218

But this substitution is re-imagined, and Stevens moves onto a fresh recognition or retroactive meaningfulness of the First Idea as potentia, or Power and passion. Bloom meditates upon Stevens’ belief that the world has been painted and that most modern activity is stripping the paint to get at the world itself. He adumbrates that Stevens’ supreme fiction must be abstract in order to undo previous poetic jobs of paint and must change or else it will become a single domineering paint job. However, it should give pleasure, and this pleasure is that of priority, although Stevens himself says: “I have no idea of the form that a supreme fiction would take. The Notes start out with the idea that it would not take any form: that it would be abstract. Of course, in the long run, poetry would be the supreme fiction; the essence of poetry is change and the essence of change is that it gives pleasure.”219 Bloom’s supreme fiction, the genesis of the warrior god, Yahweh, is read as a rhetorical

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swerve away from prior figurations of Canaanite deities. Stevens writes of the laborious human, “who lives in illusion and who, after all the great illusions have left him, still clings to the one that pierces him.”220 Bloom’s exegesis adds originality to pleasure, where pleasure is the will-to-power expressed as aesthetic priority and yet in old age could cry for the return of Yahweh. The metaphysical desire to be stripped of illusion forms the clinamen that constitutes the first five cantos of the poem and, in particular, the section “It Must Be Abstract.” The term Nachträglichkeit, defined variously as aftering, after-imaging, after-consciousness, and deferred meaning, would seem clarified by this statement: “the First Idea, though imagined, is a thing; that is, the First Idea is man, the earth, or the sun washed clean by being taken up into the imagination,” but to attain the transparent clearness of originality Stevens’ imagery becomes very abstract and changeable: “As the qualifications keep piling up . . . the reader . . . may grow weary of a prophecy that cannot stop deconstructing itself.”221 Bloom adjudges the center of Stevens’ constantly decentered canon to be the Canon Aspirin of Notes, who is charmingly described as eating lobster Bombay with mango chutney. The Canon is the antidote to the headache of unreality to rival St John’s backache which signifies fallen human history.222 Bloom complains that lobster appears nowhere else in Stevens, although mango does and is tagged as visionary food akin to Coleridgean honey-dew. Bloom intelligibly writes that if “the Canon Aspirin is the Romantic poet in Stevens . . . then his sister is the muse . . . an idea of the moon of the imagination.”223 Unable to accept a First Idea as fate or ethos the Canon dreams heroically enough to redeem himself by inventing a metaleptic fiction of reversal, one that swaps Whitmanian earliness for his own evasions, the supreme fictions of postRomantic poetry which demonstrates the poet’s power over reality and the inevitability of death. Bloom describes The Auroras of Autumn as Stevens’ most directly personal crisis-lyric and one that grants the reader the illusion of closure better than any other poem written in English in the twentieth century. While observing the northern lights Stevens confronts the object world or universe of death, and Bloom mentions from personal experience that the lights do indeed resemble the gigantic coilings of a many-folded serpent. The serpent becomes associated with the First Idea because these flashings were thought to be caused by charged particles of solar origin, and for Stevens the First Idea assimilates to the sun. The figure of Ananke or necessity in Stevens is identified with the serpent, and hence the necessity of change, death and the ageing sexual bitterness of Stevens’ poetry gains representation in the figure of the necessitous snake. The precursor poems suggested are Whitman’s beach-poems, where the American poetic psyche tends to incarnate, and

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Shelley’s Mount Blanc. The First Idea as serpent reduces to the frightening figure of universal whiteness, or the Snowman’s Pyrrhic victory that Bloom often connects to the Coleridgean blank and Melville’s whale. Bloom also draws a comparison with Wordsworth’s figuration of the northern lights as an emblem of his own childhood strength of imagination.224 The here, nowhere, and at once of Wordsworth becomes a better translation of the “I am that I am” than “I will be present when I will be present.” Bloom indicates that we have been slow to see memory as a kind of emblematic thinking in post-Romantic poetry and that Auroras contains a poignant reflection on Stevens’ gentle, ever-more-distant, memories of his mother: “tactile memory of the mother has been emptied out, and the house of the mind therefore crumbles.”225 Pessimism fades to optimism as the image of the mother is replaced by his hearty, yea-saying father, who is figured with reference to Jehovah, but, like his father, God is dead. Stevens attains a belated vision of the sublime; when, according to Bloom, he demonstrates that “any First Idea is finally an idea of an idea, or a new troping of the sun, Stevens seeks to show that the auroras are ‘nothing’ unless and until they are ‘contained’ by being imagined in his mind.”226 Bloom reads the closing lines emphasis upon innocence as a casting out of death, and strangely the image of burning straw at the end of the poem does not ignite (as in Wordsworth) in order to reveal the invisible world as the light of sense goes out with a flash, but to establish that humans experience change and that humans are the origin of the meaning of change.227 Thus, Stevens’ ultimate philosophic father is Epicurus, who said that the “what” was unknowable, and therefore Bloom’s discussion of Auroras ends with the comment that “no other twentieth-century poem in English takes us further or more powerfully into the mode of the Sublime.”228 Bloom outlines that The Owl in the Sarcophagus “defines a vision of three immortal forms—sleep, peace, and the mother—that move among the dead.”229 The owl is not wisdom but “the transformation of our vision of death from merely being swallowed up by the stone of the earth to a realm where a central and humanizing discursiveness can operate.”230 The three immortal forms of sleep, peace, and death that quiet the dead with their humanizing discursiveness are based upon the figure of Whitman in The Sleepers quieting the restless. Stevens’ visionary imagination figures death as it will be rather than the plain fact of death and in so doing refigures Whitman’s elegy for Lincoln in which the knowledge of death and the thought of death are companions for the poet. However, these deathly companions cannot communicate for who can return from that well-traveled bourn? Bloom writes of An Ordinary Evening in New Haven: “New Haven is simply any city that is not home, a city that unsettles the self just enough so that it is startled into meditation, but close enough to home so that the meditation

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keeps contact with the commonplace.”231 Reality in the poem commonly means the not-me of Emerson, that is nature: “That leaves only one’s mind or imagination to set against a reality that comprehends all otherness, in a dialectical struggle without victory.”232 The poem reveals that the poetry of earth is only one part of Stevens; the transcendentalist quester is therefore the dominant part. Bloom argues that a poem is an event and a portentous crying out to one’s fellow citizens and etymologically a dying fall. Yet, a few pages later, the pompous language of this Shelleyan search for reality is defined as parodic and harking back to Crispin: “Creation is not renewed by images/ Of lone wanderers.”233 The poem has so many evasive perambulations upon the nature of reality and perception, that the poem’s narrative ends with the welcome statement that a clearness has returned and Bloom too is somewhat relieved: “After so many dominant blanks, so many staring eyes hatching like an egg, so many parodied transparent eyeballs, as well as eyes’ plain versions, inexquisite eyes, and assorted reflections, we experience a profound sense of liberation.”234 Bloom asserts that the poem terminates with the central Paterian trope of Harmonium, that of “the apprehension of reality as the solipsistic recognition of privileged moments.”235 Bloom admires Stevens’ last phase greatly, but due to lack of space only one comment can be usefully culled from his appreciations and that is the often-quoted phrase “cure of the ground” that he interprets thus: “A cure of the rock is a cure of one’s own reductiveness and, with it, freedom to have a larger idea of what it is to be wholly human.”236 This said, it is irresistible not to mention when an element of American chauvinism enters his argument that The Rock owes Whitman a debt of influence: “Stevens hardly could hymn the night without invoking Whitman, whose visions had established the difference of the American night, a night wider, more fragrant, more vivid and promising, and finally more mothering in its erotic deathliness than even the nights of southern European tradition.”237 Despite his American heritage, Stevens falls squarely within the ethos of another era that he cannot quite escape: “The Romantic image . . . turns out to be neither hyperbolical nor transumptive but purely visionary, an aspiration beyond the limits of art.”238 Wallace Stevens is the top-selling book published by the Cornell University Press: it is Bloom’s masterpiece. Agon represents that stage of Bloom’s career when his major work on Stevens was completed and whose concentrated single-author creativity would again peak only with the writing of his big book on Shakespeare. Nevertheless, I find Agon vital for an understanding of Bloom because it explains much intractable rhetoric that existed as metaphor before and because it comes just before Ruin the Sacred Truths and his turn toward the matter of the canon. It is essential reading for anyone interested in teasing

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out the subtle interrelationship of Bloom’s darkly hidden Jewish identity judged in terms of his larger-than-life American intellectual persona. Transumption was seen originally as a figure of comedy, but in Bloom’s world it becomes an abyss of the unconscious that actively represses what came before, so that the Gnostic late-comer can find fresh creative fields and pastures new. The sublimely American Bloom sets himself against the abyss of European history “urging his American bards to be at once Gnostic and democratic.”239 His iconoclasm is here defined as “an antithetical flight or repression away from art and nature alike, towards the solipsistic grandeur that is a new Gnosis.”240 As early as Poetry and Repression, Bloom offered this definition of Gnosticism that sets out an alternative to Judaism and Christianity: Gnosis, as the word itself indicates, means a kind of “knowledge”. . . . This “knowledge” is itself the form that salvation takes, because the “knower” is made Divine in such a “knowing,” the “known” being “the alien God.” This kind of “knowledge” is anything but what the West has meant by rational “knowledge,” from the Greeks until our time. . . . It is also not what normative Judaism and orthodox Christianity have meant by any human “knowledge” of God, for Gnostic “knowledge” transforms man into God.241

He makes a distinction between Platonic soul and Gnostic spark or pneuma that is more vital than the psyche of Plato; this dialectic informs the most important of his opening remarks in Agon. Often, Bloom’s criticism delights in relaying his discovery of an opposition between a workaday persona and a poetic persona in a poet; the most voluble example being that of Blake’s Spectre of Urthona and Los, though the example used in Bloom’s “A Prelude to Gnosis” is firstly Yeats’s poem “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” and then crucially Emerson’s concept of the social/political self and the remainder, or “that which hovers in gleams.”242 In Poetry and Repression, Bloom draws this distinction: “What Nietzsche called the ‘ascetic ideal’, Yeats called the primary, which he called also the ‘objective’ and the ‘sentimental’, the realm of the soul, and not the Gnostic pneuma or antithetical self.”243 Bloom’s definition of pneuma relies upon Jonas: 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

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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: An ontological self, the daemon, is said by Empedocles to persist from life to life as “the carrier of man’s potential divinity and actual guilt” (Dodds). Both divinity and guilt belonged to what Plato in the Laws was to call “the old Titan nature,” referring to the sin of the Titans in rending and devouring Dionysus (akin to the Dionysiac Maenads’ sparagmos of Orpheus).246

Plato advances the genealogy by identifying the guilty occult self with the rational Socratic psyche and thus Bloom surmises: As in Pythagoras and Empedocles, the shamanistic metempsychosis is intact in Plato. But shamanistic trance became Platonic rational concentration; shamanistic Gnosis, or knowledge acquired in the trance state, became Platonic metaphysics; recollection of past bodily lives became recollection of the Ideal Forms as a foundation for epistemology; shamanistic journeyings through sleep and Hades became the Platonic myth of Er in The Republic.247

It does not entirely surprise me to see Plato reduced to a transformation of the irrational, but it is nevertheless shocking to discover that Paul adopted a Gnostic dualism: “Paul also needed (or wanted) a more radical dualism than Platonism afforded . . . he relied upon a Gnostic . . . distinction, between ‘pneumatic man’ and ‘psychic man’ (or ‘natural man’, as the King James Bible translates psychikos).”248 Christ as Platonic savior emergent from the

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cave-tomb statically transcends natural-man Adam’s mundane opinions that are ever-repeating, whereas the idea of an occult self pre-existent beyond time indicates movement, or in Bloom’s words, a happening. Bloom believes that readers should study texts that find them; hence, in the deep reading of a poem you recognize “your own spark or pneuma” by which momentary happening your workaday self knows the daemon or occult self, and this provides knowledge “of a history, in which it (the pneuma) is itself a critical event.”249 The next two essays in Bloom’s collection, “Lying Against Time: Gnosis, Poetry, Criticism” and “Catastrophe Creation: Gnosis, Kabbalah, and Blake” dwell on Gnosticism and, in particular, Nag-Hammadi references to Valentinus. The unconscious reaction formations of poetry, similar in effect, if not in intellectual outlook, to Yeats’s oppositional daemon, are compared by Bloom to Valentinian error, or the process by which a poet elaborates their own matter in the void.250 In Bloom’s theology the abyss predates the creation and on a microcosmic individual basis repression clears psychic space for the daemon’s poetic antagonist. In Adversus Valentinianos, Tertullian says that Valentinus chose the path of the serpent: Valentinus had expected to become a bishop, because he was an able man both in genius and eloquence. Being indignant, however . . . he broke with the church of the true faith. Just like those (restless) spirits which, when roused by ambition, are usually inflamed with the desire of revenge, he applied himself with all his might to exterminate the truth . . . marked out a path for himself with the subtlety of a serpent.251

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: Since therefore there was nothing, no matter, no substance, nothing insubstantial, nothing simple, nothing composite, nothing imperceptible (non-subjective), no man, no angel, no god, nothing at all that can be named or can be apprehended by sense-perception, nothing of the mental things . . . the non-existent God . . . without intelligence, without perception, without will, without resolve, without impulse, without desire, wished to make a world.253

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It is easy to understand how this form of Gnosis can be allied to Freudian repression and then applied to the ostensibly non-existent influence of a precursor on a poet, since Freud attempted to map the mind and did so by identifying what Bloom sees as his Urizenic definition of the ego with the trait of injured Narcissism such that, as Bloom interprets, eros equals figurative meaning, the immortal wound. Moreover, Bloom writes that Freud proposed a catastrophe theory of creation, in which all life is seen as preparation for ultimate ends, or the absence of irritability: “This catastrophe theory is developed in The Ego and the Id, where two major catastrophes, the drying up of ocean that cast life onto land and the Ice Age are said to be repeated psychosomatically.”254 Freud’s definition of a drive is then said to be that urge to return to an earlier state of things which, if interpreted as literal language, means the dry repetition of a precursor’s language that reduces to a kind of artistic death. The composure to write one’s own words therefore becomes a sublime reaction to the threat or terror of death that is contained in the unconscious, where the memory of the precursor’s words in a repressed fashion is stored. In “Freud and the Sublime,” Bloom compares Schopenhauer to the uncanny force of the sublime mode in Freud’s figure of repression: “these very objects, whose significant forms invite us to a pure contemplation of them, may have a hostile relation to the human will in general . . . the beholder may not direct his attention to this relation to his will which is so pressing and hostile, but, although he perceives and acknowledges it, he may consciously turn away from it . . . he is then filled with the feeling of the sublime.”255 Bloom identifies Schopenhauer’s account of repression as an example of unconsciously purposeful forgetting and yet has the audacity to throw in Van den Berg’s criticism that “the theory of repression . . . is closely related to the thesis that there is sense in everything, which in turn implies that everything is past and there is nothing new.”256 Trilling throws light on the function of Bloom’s revisionary ratios thought of as deep readings of the psychological repressions that characterize poetic influence: “Vico spoke of the metaphorical, imagistic language of the early stages of culture; it was left to Freud to discover how, in a scientific age, we still feel and think in figurative formations, and to create, what psychoanalysis is, a science of tropes, of metaphor and its variants, synecdoche and metonymy.”257 Bloom develops Trilling’s synopsis by suggesting that Freudian psychic defenses are fantasies which are always tropes in that deep structures, such as desires become transformed into surface structures that are symptoms.258 For instance, the Freudian figure of Negation (when the subject denies what is repressed but is nevertheless able to talk about his malady in negative terms) comes to mean in Bloomian discourse the flat denial of influence by a disingenuous aphasiac author, a good example being classicist Byron calling Shakespeare

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the barbarian himself. With powerful rhetoric, Bloom recalls a quotation from Fletcher to clinch his argument: “ ‘negation’ names the process by which, unconsciously, the mind selects terms to express its ambivalence. Extreme dualism must cause symbolic antiphrases . . . the most powerful satirists are dualists, users of ‘negation’, to the point that they become naïve Gnostics. They like Gnostics, hover on the edge of extreme asceticism which can drop off absolutely into an extreme libertinism.”259 This thinking relies on an act of primal fixation or wounding that leaves a narcissistic scar similar to first love in adolescents which Bloom calls an originating catastrophe. Bloom quotes this intriguing passage from Freud’s Analysis Terminable and Interminable: “repression is to the other methods of defense what the omission of words or passages is to the corruption of a text.”260 I find it especially absorbing that Freud chose as a rejected epigraph for The Interpretation of Dreams, a passage from Paradise Lost, in which the rebel angels plot to offend their enemy, his allegory being that the devils symbolize repressed drives. Bloom speculates that psychology, cosmology, and mythology are closely related and that a very good symptom of the Gnostic universe is this mythopoeic extract that has survived from ancient times and which is ascribed to Valentinus. From the serpentine bishop’s myth, Bloom extracts textual anxiety in relation to Platonist writings and as well a psychological parable in which iconoclasts smash statuary out of fear: 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 preexistent man was in Adam. They, the angels, were terrified and quickly concealed or ruined their work.261

The angels spoken of in this Gnostic parable become agents of psychic repression, to the extent that they ruin the cosmos that Adam is thrown into; Adam represents the pneumatic spark that exists before creation, in allegoric terms a Primal Man that the Gnostics named Adam Kadmon, the Divine Anthropos. God becomes a bungling craftsman: “Unlike Jehovah . . . this workman does not make the world out of nothing . . . even as an Athenian carpenter building the public planetarium must use the materials to hand, and like the Athenian demiourgos or public workman he can hope to do only as good a job as is possible within the limitations of

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his material.”262 The fashioning of belated creation becomes an example of lying against time, When the Demiurge further wanted to imitate also the boundless, eternal, infinite and timeless nature of (the original eight Aeons in the Pleroma), but could not express their immutable eternity, being as he was the fruit of a defect, he embodied their eternity in time, epochs, and great numbers of years, under the delusion that by the quantity of times he could represent their infinity. Thus truth escaped him and he followed the lie.263

Hence time is an illusion created by the malign creator-god Ialdaboath: “This progressive movement constitutes the time axis of the gnostic world, as the vertical order of aeons and spheres constitutes its space axis. Time, in other words, is actuated by the inward thrust of a mental life. . . . It is a metaphysic of pure movement and event.”264 Jonas’s existentialist commentary enables Bloom to advance the Gnostic premise that texts lie against time in a Nietzschean fashion, which asserts that only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence “still endurable to us,” which asceticism translates “the condition of the ruins of time, and of the defense against time, the deep lie at every reimagined origin.”265 Before the catastrophe that results in captivity, the Gnostic spark knew a place of rest and “Fullness,” the Pleroma, “a paradoxical world of tensely vital peace, and of a calm yet active ecstasy.”266 The figure of quest romance returns when Bloom tells his readers that the Gnostic quest equates to a return to a perfect knowledge that transcends the repetitive world of time, but which is trapped “by hostile angels called archons.”267 One of the joys of reading Bloom would seem his heaping up of quotations on the same subject, sometimes by the usual suspects, that is Shelley’s “washed in the blood of the mediator and redeemer, time,” or else the unexpectedly Emersonian Heraclitus, “time is a child playing draughts; the lordship is to the child.”268 Gnosticism, to Bloom’s expert eye, is informed by a desperate belatedness; thus, Bloom broods that the originary God saw the abyss transparently, which alludes to Emerson’s figure of the transparent eyeball and which in turn underlines just how much Gnosticism Bloom reads into the person he nominates as the primal American thinker. Bloom claims that Gnosis gives you an audience with a God unknown to and far away from this world, “a God in exile from a false creation” and that “your deepest self was no part of the Creation-Fall,” but part of an antient time when the spark of selfhood was one with God’s fullness.269 But Emersonian anti-Europeanism fades into Nietzsche’s Zoroastrian dualism figured as past versus belated American present: “This, indeed this alone, is what revenge is: the will’s resentment against time and time’s ‘it was’ .”270

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In “Emerson: The American Religion,” Bloom compares and contrasts Emerson with Carlyle in order to identify the discourse of the American Religion. It is hard not to see some of Bloom’s pronouncements upon Emerson as overly enthusiastic: “he is our rhetoric as he is our Gnosis.”271 Bloom’s prognosis is that Emerson would seem essentially a Gnostic writer and the circular formula that for every seeing soul there are just two absorbing facts I and the unconscious/abyss. This dualism leads to the corollary judgment that in Nature: “The freedom to imagine ‘the pure idea in your mind’ is the heretical absolute freedom of the Gnostic who identified his mind’s purest idea with the original Abyss.”272 But Carlyle in Corn-Law Rhymes is interpreted as triumphing over the abyss in a less radical way: “the Abyss is bondage, the production is freedom, somehow still ‘in God’s name!’ ”273 His essay contains the most awful quotation from Carlyle, one couched in sympathy for a potentially impotent man suffering from a bout of racially aggravated sexual hysteria: . . . 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 . . . rumbottle 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

To Bloom those black pumpkin-eaters represent all-devouring time and Carlyle’s never accepted gnosis: “It is a familiar formula to say that failed prophecy becomes apocalyptic, and that failed apocalyptic becomes Gnosticism.”275 We must remember that apocalypse is meant to rescue disappointed revolutionaries from time’s tricksterism, or the return of King Charles. What Bloom calls a pungent phantasmagoria is for him evidence of a demi-gnosis on Carlyle’s part, but one that led him to have an almighty row with Emerson, “I differed from him . . . in his estimate of Cromwell’s character, and he rose like a great Norse giant from his chair—and, drawing a line with his finger across the table, said, with terrible fierceness: ‘Then, sir, there is a line of separation between you and me as wide as that, and as deep as the pit.’”276 Nietzsche thought Carlyle a canting English atheist, and with great American honesty the disputatious nature of Emersonian agon results in Bloom’s diagnosis of Emerson’s gnosis. Emerson could complain that American laws were based on English models but a more powerful symptom is Bloom’s insight that the transparency of Emersonian transcendence opposes itself to the burden of time and objective continuity,

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though this line of thought ever advances gigantic egoism. Whitman wrote of Emerson that the best part of his writing was the idea that no man would want to be any man’s mere follower lurks behind every page, and Emerson himself professed: “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”277 The power of Emerson over Whitman is good health to the American unconscious and ever a ring of Gyges that renders the Wordsworthian eye (of the agitated storm) of nature transparent. Even the blank of nature is seen to be lacking in ultimacy to an American sublime that decries man is a dwarf of himself, and, from this Orphic song, Bloom apprehends that Emerson believes man to be an incarnation of an Albion-like god set above the grandeur of titanic American nature: “America was a larger form than nature, filling nature with an emanative excess.”278 This brings us to Enoch the lesser Yahweh whom, in Omens of Millennium, Bloom introduces as the authentic angel of America and the imaginative center-piece of the millennium. In the Book of Enoch, Enoch is transformed into the archangel Metatron, the Prince of the Divine Presence: “Enoch’s skin is replaced by a fiery garment of Light” and he expands “to the length and breadth of the created world.”279 This astounding apotheosis represents, as Bloom puts it, a point-for-point reversal of the fall of Adam Kadmon, and hence encapsulates imagination because Metatron becomes “the esoteric link” between “the divine and the human, fusing these realms.”280 The latter Kabbalistic insights were Idel’s originally; Bloom finds the American Orpheus, the prophesied Central/Universal man, who resurrects Eurydice as leaves of grass embodied in the Adamic figure of Whitman. “Whitman’s Image of Voice: To the Tally of My Soul” is the essay in which Bloom argues that Whitman’s figure of the tally should be thought of as a sublime measuring rod. Bloom’s exploration of the word’s meaning reveals that it comes from “the Latin talea for twig or cutting,” notches on a stick, or belt to indicate a sexual score and finally “tallywhack” or “tallywags” for the male sexual organs.281 He continues that the carnal image of the tally “notches a restored Narcissism and the return to the mode of erotic selfsufficiency.”282 Even the sprig of broken lilac with which Whitman laments the death of Lincoln becomes a phallic image of auto-eroticism that intuits what is transcendent: “To tally . . . is at once to measure the soul’s actual and potential sublimity, to overcome object-loss and grief, to gratify one’s self sexually by one’s self.”283 Bloom states that by keeping tally with all things Whitman’s self-pollution is “the most productive masturbation since the ancient Egyptian myth of a god who masturbates the world into being.”284 Emerson might respond that “Empedocles undoubtedly spoke a truth of thought, when he said, ‘I am God’; but the moment it was out of his mouth, it became a lie to the ear and the world revenged itself for the seeming

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arrogance.”285 I write this because in Easter-Day Browning divides between Cain and God’s usual tally where Cain’s nature would seem to correspond to man’s selfish, isolating cupiditas, while God’s usual ways represent caritas, or the philia of communal friendship. Browning’s tally is an evaluation of the world in terms of God’s blessedness, or caritas, whereas praising Cain would seem cognate with arrogantly praising oneself, as in Browning’s poem of 1850 that responds to the death of his mother: ‘Cain’s nature thou wast wont to praise, ‘Not tally with God’s usual ways!’

These lines were published in the same time period during which Song of Myself (1855) was being prepared; we do not know if Whitman read them, but they nevertheless help us to unpick the psychic embroidery that Whitman introspects as the flag of his disposition. The purport of my explanation is partly to address Santayana’s gibe that, like Browning, Whitman possessed a barbarous mind full of chaotic sensations because alien to the natural light of reason; indeed, Browning wrote of Easter-Day’s sister-poem Christmas-Eve that he wished for the faith engendered in a white-washed-meeting-house vision to extinguish reason’s pale wavering light.286 But as well, I extenuate Bloom’s argument that Whitman’s poetic genius declines after the Lincoln elegy by suggesting that Whitman throws his laurel-crown, symbolized by the lilac-sprig, onto the coffin of a Christian martyr, while caught up in an out-pouring of national grief. He stops so urgently proposing himself as a Christ-like figure to unify the cosmos of the once more United States. At this juncture, Whitman finds a god outside the self and loses the Emerson/Hicks dialectic that enlivens Song of Myself. Bloom writes that Whitman produces three different personas that he lists as “my self,” “my soul,” and the “real Me” or “Me myself ”; Bloom’s thesis as to what these equate to is “my masculine persona, Walt Whitman, one of the roughs, an American; the American soul (largely as expounded by Emerson); my more ambiguous persona, somewhat feminine, somewhat boyish.”287 He muses that the anachronistic Freudian analogies of the id, ego, and superego do not tally since “the rough Walt is not wholly an id; the quasi-Emersonian soul does not operate like a superego; the real Me is hardly an ego.”288 Bloom proposes that the real Me mocks the subjective self with mock-congratulatory bows because poetic language has failed Whitman, the ephebe-poet, and his subjectivity. This unitary failure is linked to the subtly different stance of Whitman’s ebullient precursor, Emerson, who instead believed that mortal language itself fails his soul, the Over-Soul, “which transcends the dance or interplay of tropes,” but which defeat characterizes “intrepid agonists who never yield up their own recalcitrance.”289 I pause here to remind the reader of my introductory reading of “As I Ebb’d,” which also finds displaced

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Quaker-belief in iconoclasm as an explanation for the aforesaid mockery of poetry in Whitman’s shore ode. Recalcitrance in Paul’s theology occurs in those believers who accept the resurrection-seed, but who still behave carnally; the borrowed Gnostic concept here, as Bloom underlines, is the seed of light. But I suspect Bloom allows personal dislike of Pauline theology to blind him to the possibility that Whitman’s categories partly derive in Corinthians where Paul rhetorically asks if Christ is divided; in which case, the “my-self ” is Walt the natural man, material breath, or psychikos; Whitman’s soul, the sarkinos/sarkikos, or carnal body, that is the believer, who lets Jesus into his heart, but whose flesh sins; and the “real Me,” the internal spirit of the divine, or pneumatikos. It is extremely important to note that Paul often uses the word pneumatikos in the sense of rational soul because Whitman sometimes conflates soul and Me myself, as he does in “Eidolons,” which poem presents a series of images as false shadows of the eternal; it is interesting to learn that Hicks preached: “Most of the worship in Christendom is idolatry, dark and blind idolatry; for all outward worship is so—it is a mere worship of images. For if we make an image merely in imagination, it is an idol.”290 The key to Whitman’s soul lies in Emerson’s Over-Soul essay, where we find a definition of the universal soul as reason and the Over-Soul as Unity, or the rational potentiality within man for a wise holistic silence, in which receptive mood particles become united as the eternal One of the Father. For Puritans, God would be Sovereign, whereas Soul in Calvinism is an analogue for Sola fide or passive reception of Jesus as Savior; yet, in Emerson’s displaced Unitarian belief-system, soul corresponds to character, and is associated with influx of the surges of everlasting nature. As Bercovitch notes, the intermediary between the Transcendentalist and the Over-Soul was the text of America.291 The material-spiritual sublime in Whitman is well-predicted by Emerson’s revelatory sensations invading the enthusiastic soul; Hicksite Quakers did not believe in Original sin and hence Whitman’s displaced spirituality celebrates the body-electric, not least because Hicks abhorred the idea that a merciful God should so punish mankind.292 Emerson associates the passive soul with the convulsions of George Fox and his Quakers; the ebb of the individual rivulet before the flow of life and yet underlines that for Quakers Jesus speaks always from within.293 Bloom portentously figures the metaphorical enigma of Whitman’s tripartite division of self as the central problem in American poetry. Paul’s categories of rational soul and Spirit of God are repeated in the Over-Soul essay and elsewhere in Emerson’s prose but become ambiguous and even antithetical in Whitman’s poetry; Bloom categorizes Whitmanian selfhood as enigmatic: “the self is personality, the soul is character, and again the real me is a mystery.”294 Bloom’s proof for selfhood’s tripartite division depends upon

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a discussion of the following quotations that represent the three intrinsic parts of Whitman’s self; here is the mundane-self part: Walt Whitman, a cosmos, of Manhattan the son, Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them, . . . (“Song of Myself,” 497–9)

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: But they are not the Me myself. Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary, Looks down, is erect. . . . (“Song of Myself,” 73–9)

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 resurrectionseed, 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)

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The ‘I’ here is the ‘Myself ’ of ‘Song of Myself ’, poetic personality, robust and rough. ‘The other I am’ is the Me myself . . . and clearly not suited for embraces with the soul.295

Matthew’s Christ exclaims, “And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that humbles himself shall be exalted” (23.12), then He rounds on the hypocrite Pharisees saying, “ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte” (23.15), which makes me wonder if Kabbalah can encompass the incorruptible. It needs emphasizing that the Quaker emptying of outward impressions in order for inner silence to speak is perfectly antithetical in process, but not affect, to that wise passivity, which humbles the ego so that outward impressions of nature can enter. In P. J. Keane’s recent reading of wise passivity, the poetic self enjoys a mystical reverie, such that it becomes one with the light of setting suns and therefore the central peace existing at the heart of eternal agitations.296 Keane persuasively suggests that Emerson recycles the Wordsworthian passive in the Over-Soul essay as passive silence. The Over-Soul is described as a Unit by Emerson and the real Me is figured as unitary by Whitman; but the real Me will not abase itself to the carnal soul, so Quakerism clashes with Unitarianism. In Paul’s theology, the carnal man is a Christian, who believes in Jesus as Savior, but whose sins are of the flesh; the translucence of the divine is accepted into the believer’s soul, but the sinner is still subject to bodily lusts: sensations, shall we say. Jesus, in the rational Unitarian faith, is merely a messenger, but in Quakerism Jesus represents inner light: “I in them and thou in Me” as John’s Jesus says at 17:23 before being brought before the soldiers and mocked. Bloom underlines that Whitman was his own Christ: “That I could forget the mockers. . . . That I could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion” (“Song of Myself,” 963–5). Whitman’s flesh will pass back to the soil but the mustard-seed of Christ grows plentiful as grass in the kingdom; the soul of America conjoins every atom as a unity that belongs to you, the people, and to him, where the good news is at once Whitman and Christ. Bloom notes the printer’s devil associations of the leaves-of-grass metaphor and augments this with the Homeric allusion to the dead leaves of generations. I always associate Whitman’s national epic with “We are Seven” because of the transcendental grass-growing-on-graves metaphor in both poems and the dialectic of adult wisdom and childish wonder. But it seems more providential to emphasize that Wordsworth’s wise passiveness and Emerson’s wise silence figure the extinction of cupiditas in order to let in outward salvation or caritas, albeit as a kind of displaced Wordsworthian nature-worship that leads to apprehension of the transcendent Father in Emerson’s “The Over-Soul.”

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Whitman’s American difference is a difference in kind rather than degree because Whitman’s emptying of outward impressions would seem a gentle form of iconoclasm; from a Bloomian perspective, he misreads Emerson’s rational Unitarianism as being more material than spiritual. To Whitman the real virtue of Emerson’s God within as presented in “Self-Reliance” is that it has Quaker associations with the spiritual real I, or real Me. Material deity is an icon to Quakers; true Deity, or the true self, the hotter part of the faggot, speaks from within not from without, and again the influence of Hicks clinches the argument: “that which may be known of God is manifest within man, and that not by his reasoning power.”297 The real Me is pure idealism, but, because inner light and therefore part of Jesus, or rather that part of the self that knows love from before the foundations of the world, it enjoys homoousia with the Father, the same Father that Emersonian rational belief apprehends as the Over-Soul. Bloom’s reading runs perfectly parallel to mine but lacks the recognition of Christian theology therein: “Emerson’s ‘The Over-Soul’ is that great nature in which we rest, while the self of his ‘Self-Reliance’ is ‘the aboriginal Self ’ preceding nature and as old as God.”298 He argues that Whitman was more epicurean materialist than transcendental idealist and that Christ is a thought evaded in what he nevertheless describes as the valved trumpeting of the Newest Testament. Bloom wishes to find Stevensian self-creation, whereas I discover an American prayer, not quite ready for the evasive hum of atheism. Because the real Me equates pure idealism, it cannot bow to the soul as the soul represents carnal poetry that recalcitrantly partakes of the material world, a world that cannot be known, except through the untrustworthy senses. Emotional need for belief in life after death and, indeed, from before birth, opposes rational belief in what lies beyond the reach of the senses; thus, Bloom mostly catalogues the visionary images of night, death, the mother, and the sea from “The Sleepers” with the spiritual real Me rather than the material not me. He proposes that the major American tropes of night and death derive ultimately from Hamlet’s sleep of death and that Shelley adds the imagery of the sea and the mother in “Alastor.”299 Whitman would seem estranged as Hamlet from the masculine ethos of the father: forever sanctifying the unregenerate selves of the working Americans that Bloom interprets as role-playing the shattered vessels of logos; writing with pathos about his own irrational imagination that converts the aforesaid. My revision of Bloom is to suggest that Whitman enjoys solitary pleasures (with the tally of a male god of love) from which logos, or Word made flesh, he manufactures an American gospel, or as John writes: “he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him” (14.21). Yet, in the Lilacs elegy, the one that Whitman loved has become Lincoln; the figure

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of Christian resurrection is replaced with Orphic images of birdsong, a bright star and flowers laid at the feet. It is almost as if Whitman abases himself before the murdered father of the nation, who provokes the familiar fourfold imagery of death, etc. To venture one last New-Testament comparison, Whitman’s earlier, far more self-assertive poem begins: I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, . . . . (“Song of Myself,” 1–2)

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

Bloom calls this example of orgiastic individualism frontier loneliness turned into holy rolling; he writes that it was exalted into that state of being-alonewith-Jesus. According to Bloom, the American Jesus was born at Cane Ridge,

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a resurrected version of Christ known one-and-one, a wilderness spirituality disconnected from any church. He further notes that enthusiasm is not part of the gloomy religion of John Calvin; rugged individualism that leaves a trail where there is no path combines with spasmodic exercises in this form of American Orphism as Jesus walks with the repentant sinner, and the sinner becomes saved through knowing Jesus because He knows how to rise from the dead. This knowledge is figured as the internalization of an internalization by Bloom, who charts how an evangelist named Charles Finney pragmatically exploited his own charisma in order to systematize as a technique wherever these spontaneous Pentecostal intoxications might lead. Finney became a popular guru after the Great Disappointment, when William Miller calculated that the end of the world was nigh and encouraged his flock to expect Armageddon on 22 October 1844. Paradoxically, Finney is important to Bloom’s polemical survey because he is the founder of American revivalism as popular spectacle and, as well, the preacher who instigates social crusades, in his case against slavery. I wish to mull over Bloom’s examination of the main examples of the American Religion, and because Bloom describes Mormons and Southern Baptists as his principle paradigms, I mainly concentrate upon these.330 Bloom says he sees religion as a kind of spilled poetry, which inverted antiromantic rhetoric connects with Akiba’s inclusion of The Song of Songs in the Bible because he was so enchanted by its music. Bloom muses upon the fact that Mohammed belatedly describes himself as the seal of the prophets, and yet Bloom lauds the even more belated Joseph Smith as the most authentic religious prophet and, indeed, genius of the American tradition. He quotes from the Wentworth letter, in which Smith records two angels telling him that “all religious denominations” believed “in incorrect doctrines.”331 Mormonism is apprehended as an amazingly strong misreading of the early history of the Jews; Mormons believe they are privileged descendants of the Israelites. Bloom lauds this belief system as the product of the charismatic personality of Smith and the superlative religion-making facility of his imagination. As far as iconography is concerned, there is no crucified Jesus on Mormon crosses; their Jesus is not the Jesus of the crucifixion, as in the Catholic faith. Bloom relates that polygamy was at the heart of this apprehension of a truly American Christ since sexual energy was inseparable from the sacred embodiment of Christ. He fixes upon Smith’s interest in Abraham’s concubines and then stipulates that “Joseph’s implication is quite plain: the function of receiving concubines is to transcend the angelic state and become a god.”332 Bloom argues that Smith’s radical theomorphic portrayal of patriarchs and gods, who are anthropomorphic, represents a return to the J-Writer: “those Latter-day Saints who have the authority to sustain

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polygamy will become gods, and the sons of gods will be reconciled with their fathers, and then become gods themselves.”333 Bloom associates J with Davidic nostalgia, the memory of a warrior-king; therefore, it is with no small astonishment that this Englishman reads Bloom’s speculation about Joseph Smith that he had himself crowned as king of the kingdom of God before he was martyred. Bloom anticipates my consternation, when he writes: “Our political satirists . . . delight in describing the apparent weirdness of Mormon cosmology and allied speculations, but they forget the equal strangeness of Christian mythology, now worn familiar by repetition.”334 Bloom finds in the writings of this authentic genius “the spiritual embodiment of the American sublime” to the extent that right royal American religious writing spills from Smith’s imagination, which quested for Celestial Marriage in the form of marital plurality.335 Bloom quotes Blake’s one law for the ox and for the lion is oppression in order to defend the honor of the bigamous fathers of the Mormon Church. Yet, Bloom admits that while a Mormon man may never be alone with his version of Jesus, he aspires to govern without rivals in his world made with many wives. To prove his point, Bloom adapts Mormon discourse to his own rhetoric: “Each stands in the Abyss before the Fall of Creation, and each experiences the Freedom that is Wildness, the perfect Solitude (itself creative) of the American visionary.”336 Bloom summons to the witness stand Sterling McMurrin, who notes that Smith’s denial of the Priestly Author’s ex nihilo account of creation is very similar to the Platonic Demiurge: “This means that God is a being among beings rather than being as such or the ground of being.”337 Bloom is entranced by Smith, a man more self-creating than Emerson and Whitman and therefore transcendent in Bloom’s imaginative response: “Joseph knew that he was no part of the creation, knew that what was best and oldest in him already was God . . . that despite his prophetic vocation and communal vision, he was essentially alone, and could experience his own spiritual freedom only in prophetic solitude.”338 Setting aside the unsettling account of Mormons baptizing their dead, much of Bloom’s treatment of Mormonism is perplexed by the near certainty that Mormons will take over America due to industriousness and a superior birth-rate. So organized is the Mormon Church that Bloom flirts with the idea of rebranding Mormonism as corporate Gnosticism; thus, the lasting monument to their energy is not their vaunting political power, but the Mountain of Names, a vast record of human beings who have been baptized as Mormons, even though they lived their natural lives as what Mormons like to call Gentiles. Moreover, the Mormons teach that dead spirits beget spirits about to be born despite the fact that Smith never believed in such a doctrine; however, he did hold the paradoxical, passionate and surprisingly Gnostic belief that our spirit, or intelligence, is as old as God. These meditations teach

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that all religions are initially strange and unexpected, while their hardened theology is contrived and arbitrary.339 The belated religion of the American climate is, in Bloom’s prognosis, an internalized quest become externalized, a desire for priority that yields to a sense of superiority: “if your knowing ultimately tells you that you are beyond nature, having long preceded it, then your natural acts cannot sully you.”340 The key to unlocking Bloom’s thinking in The American Religion is the book’s prolegomenon, a quotation by Kierkegaard, “Even now, in 1848, it certainly looks as though politics were everything; but it will be seen that the catastrophe (the Revolution) corresponds to us and is the obverse of the Reformation: then everything pointed to a religious movement and proved to be political; now everything points to a political movement, but will become religious.”341 Were one to substitute the American Revolution for the French Revolution, then Bloom’s intention becomes more perspicuous; what began as a war with the British Empire over taxes and liberty, undoubtedly a political movement, has become religious backwash. The very last sentences of The American Religion contain this oppositional observation made about American foreign policy: “We export our culture abroad, low and high, and increasingly we export the American Religion.”342 Bloom’s intent is that religion dominates the political sphere in American politics: “a belated version of our national faith is moving to abrogate our secular origin.”343 He argues that foreign interventionism will have a calamitous effect: “the twenty-first century will mark a full-scale return to the wars of religion.”344 When Bloom explicates the history and latent schism within the Southern Baptist Church, he defines religion as poetry for the masses. In this instance, the figurative progression of Orc to Urizen is representative of the polarity that exists between soul competency and literalist interpretation. Bloom sees the Baptist faith as baldly anti-intellectual and representative of a deep resentment at the failure of the Confederate cause. Rather surprisingly, the “Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit” ideology of one strain of Southern Baptism is identified as an extraordinary throwback to Sethian Gnosticism. Under this sheep-and-goats division, each one of us is predestined according to whether God or Satan had planted the seed of Seth (who replaces Abel) or the benighted seed of Cain into our soma via the womb of Eve. Bloom elects Edgar Mullins as the Joseph Smith of the Southern Baptist faith, but only in a belated American sense because he was not the originator, he was merely the re-founder of what is a creedless faith.345 Bloom does not find it accidental that Mullins was an avid memorizer of Paradise Lost since the faith that he helped to develop was close to Milton’s maxim of being a sect of one, in the respect of emphasizing a personal relationship with God: “each Southern Baptist is at last alone in the garden with Jesus, to cite one of the

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principal Baptist hymns.”346 The true heart of Southern Baptism is the inner light or the internal Holy Spirit, and this is described by Bloom as most vital, wholly personal, subjective and experiential, while conversion is the act of being born again at the frantic and frighteningly inward center of spiritual life.347 In Mullin’s The Christian Religion, Bloom finds this inwardly tending article of faith: “that which we know most indubitably are the facts of inner experience.”348 In his appraisal, Baptists believe that Jesus is the resurrection and the life, and this he connects to second-century Gnostics, who held that “the general Resurrection had taken place spiritually when Jesus raised himself, a belief inevitable for those who identified their ‘spark’, pneuma, or true self with the risen Jesus.”349 Thus, Gnosticism becomes associable with Mullin’s notion of soul competency, or the singular relationship with Jesus that Baptists possess as their right and which Christian Liberty grants the holder an individualistic vision without limitations. Bloom accuses Baptists of being the carriers of essentially dead beliefs, even though culture is often taken to be the lived part of religious sensibility, and nationalistic enthusiasm the primeval sign of an almost entirely unacknowledged displaced religious sensibility. More persuasively, Bloom elucidates that while Baptists are not dualists, they are in danger of Nietzschean antinomianism, because, in their non-sacramentality, there is no pragmatic boundary between Jesus, as known to the self, and the self. This rhetorical play leads to the inevitable criticism that such an unhealthy monism may have, “rather unfortunate societal and psychical consequences.”350 A Baptist might reply that this special kinship with Jesus represents the basis for intercourse and fellowship, intellectual or otherwise. Bloom notes that “competency” can mean economic selfsufficiency but also to seek together as in its Latin derivation, competere. However, Bloom distils Baptism to a spiritual life of ever growing inwardness, in which Baptists become the subject and object of their own quest because, as Mullins writes on the topic of soul competency, “religion is a personal matter between the soul and God.”351 Then Bloom reveals my kernel of interest in these matters, “I would extend Mullins, but still (I think) stay within his spirit, if I myself personalized soul competency as freedom from every form of over-determination: societal, historical, economic, even psychological.”352 Bloom concludes his chapters on Southern Baptism as he does The American Religion, with a moody meditation upon Fundamentalism and its relationship to modern American politics. His judgment is that Protestant Fundamentalism is similar to Islamic Fundamentalism, and that inerrancy for both movements indicates the repression of all individuality.353 Literalist interpretation of a text turns the Bible, or any other holy book, into an icon and degrades the Protestantism of its traditional strength, which is to read the Scripture by inner light: “Neo-Fundamentalists want a densely

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substantial inerrancy, a truth beyond language, beyond ambiguity, beyond any possibility of refutation.”354 Bloom describes the modern Southern Baptist Convention as Orwellian and a de facto Catholic Church of the South. He figures the hostile corporate-like take-over of the Southern Baptist Convention by triumphant Fundamentalists as a microcosm for the fall of America during the Reagan-Bush era. Religious criticism turns into the vinegar of polemic; Bloom ends his meditation upon religion without mediation (but become Fundamentalism) by considering the conversion of General Noriega, while incarcerated in a Florida penitentiary. Bloom records how missionaries persuaded the Panamanian president to give up his red underwear and scarlet women: “This triumph for the Southern Baptist Convention was fit prelude to the June 1991 meeting, where Oliver North waved the flag and the fetus, followed by George Bush weeping and praying as he stood before his constituents.”355 In The Visionary Company, Bloom’s monumental conception of history as yoked to the Blakean figure of the Orc cycle adumbrates that the nascent libertarian state engendered by the French Revolution gradually became the exporter of imperial tyranny under Napoleon. Bloom, as I read him, is proposing that America has passed from the Blakean state of the revolutionary Orc, until even the Christian discourse of self-exalting rock-and-roll musicians stamps an American imprint on world culture. He suggests that Urizen—representative of political and religious tyranny in Blake—figuratively signifies modern America: “George Bush’s New World Order is a fresh shadowing of the image of American-led Resurrection.”356 I close with the wise words of Frye: “In religion, too, we must keep a critical attitude that never unconditionally accepts any socially established form of revelation. Otherwise we are back to idolatry again, this time a self-idolatry.”357 The English preoccupation with Shakespeare marks him out as the central man of English letters, whereas Bloom indicates that in America this honor is awarded to the reception of the teachings of Jesus; thus, Bloom’s preference for the Bard should be seen as English in this respect. Due to the extravagant length of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, I concentrate upon Bloom’s introductory and closing remarks and upon the two characters that stimulate him most, Hamlet and Falstaff. The prolegomenon attracted controversy and here Bloom translates a passage by Nietzsche as “That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking,” so that it coheres with a quotation from the Player King’s speech in Hamlet: Our wills and fates do so contrary run That our devices still are overthrown, Our thoughts are ours, their ends none our own. (III.ii.199-201)

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Bloom’s Burkean agenda would seem to be that misprisions inevitably occur when we interpret or listen to each other, the rationalization of those emotions for which we sometimes show contempt. The principle argument here is that Shakespeare invents the discourse of the human by demonstrating that humans overhear themselves and consequently reflect upon their own thoughts (and those of others) in a perfectly selfish fashion that is not defined by religious doctrine. Bloom deprecatingly describes himself as Bloom Brontosaurus Bardolator because he maintains that Shakespeare was a genius, who influenced the world more than he was himself dominated by vague historical forces. Bloom argues that the seriation of examples of growing Shakespearean inwardness begins with Falconbridge, Richard II, Mercutio, Juliet, Bottom, Portia, and Shylock, reached a first peak with Falstaff; Henry V, Brutus, and Rosalind then prepared for the second elevation with Hamlet, which hence made possible Feste, Malvolio, Iago, Lear, Edgar, Edmund, Macbeth, Cleopatra, Imogen, and Prospero.358 Bloom believes that Shakespeare invents modern representation of human psychology because literary characters before Shakespeare were relatively unchanging, with the exception, that is, of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, whom Bloom takes to be Falstaff ’s true model. But in Shakespeare’s plays characters change when they over-hear their own thoughts and hence individuate themselves rather than being indoctrinated in a theological relationship with a god of some description. Ironically, Bloom calls Shakespeare a mortal god because his plays represent the outward limit of human achievement and are beyond the mind’s reach because Shakespeare invented us.359 Bloom’s relationship with Shakespeare is that of awe; his criticism of the bard is sublime, to the extent that it concentrates upon Shakespeare’s ability to break boundaries: “there is an overflowing element in the plays, an excess beyond representation, that is closer to the metaphor we call ‘creation’. ”360 He writes that the enigmatic Shakespeare produced an art so infinite that it contains us, and, if Shakespeare does indeed contain us, then individual humanity must grow and flourish within the Shakespearean mold. Bloom asserts that no-one else managed to animate so many diverse persons or so many separate selves. Bloom’s admiration for Shakespeare’s superiority of intellect leads him to the curious revelation that Shakespeare was more intelligent even than Bloom, the best mind since Einstein. Shakespeare justly imitates essential human nature and does so by representing human change, the staged realities of which are imitations of our own painful existential realities, and yet Bloom slyly adds that this imitation may have been more of an inventive lamp than a religious mirror. Bloom says that Hamlet and Falstaff are superior to any other character that they meet in their respective plays. They are so because of their vitality, which Bloom classifies as an intellectual version of charisma, where said characters are defined in terms

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of the Yahwistic blessing of more life into a time without boundaries. The best and most heroically vital characters in Shakespeare are listed as Rosalind, Shylock, Iago, Lear, Macbeth, and Cleopatra, but the true charismatics are Hamlet and Falstaff. In Bloom’s judgment, Falstaff and Hamlet inaugurate personality as we recognize it. Bloom briefly lists Shakespeare’s competitors and then dismisses his Renaissance rivals one by one; Marlowe’s characters are cartoons, Jonson’s are ideograms, Webster’s vanish next to Shakespeare’s, Chapman and Middleton’s do not possess human inwardness. He trounces the ideological contexts of historicist thought that reduces aesthetics to politics and underlines that aesthetics are a matter of perceptions and sensations; this is Bloom’s greatest lesson: humans make history, not vice versa. Shakespeare therefore teaches us to value originality, not the robotic following of trendy critical fashions. Whoever brings his or her self to the bard will be marvelously amplified. Shakespeare became himself by representing other selves and by reminding ourselves of painful memories, since reading Shakespeare would seem a piquant pleasure. Shylock is for Bloom a cause for much ruefulness because a monstrously human caricature of a Jew. Bloom counters Wittgenstein’s annoyed comment that life is not like Shakespeare with Barfield’s intelligent observation, that our feelings are Shakespeare’s meaning, and consequently introduces the oxymoron naturalistic unreality. Shakespeare converts real life into theater and the reason is that we cannot conceive of ourselves without Shakespeare. Shakespeare was as much a creator of selves as of language: “he can be said to have melted down and then remolded the representation of the self in and by language.”361 Ralph Richardson’s performance was the Falstaffian starting place for his lively and life-affirming book; Bloom ruminates that “the greatest of all fictive wits dies the death of a rejected father substitute, and also of a dishonored mentor.”362 Bloom’s identification with Falstaff is such that he has acted the part on at least two occasions, but we imagine that the Falstaff of Yale means that certain students have rejected him: I remember a graduate student in one of my Shakespeare seminars . . . who informed me rather vehemently that Falstaff was not worthy of admiration, whereas the transformation of Prince Hal into King Henry V was exemplary. Her point was that Hal represented rule and that Falstaff was a lord of misrule, and I could not persuade her that Falstaff transcended her categories, as he transcends virtually all our catalogings of human sin and error.363

Bloom himself despairs of ever again seeing a Falstaff to match Richardson’s, since “the Falstaff he played was neither coward nor jester, but infinite wit delighting in its own inventiveness, and transcending its own darkening

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pathos.”364 He identifies Falstaff ’s wit as Shakespeare’s wit at its very limits, “even as Hamlet is the farthest reach of Shakespeare’s cognitive acuity.”365 If there is a relationship between the nobleman of the sonnets and Prince Hal’s rejection of Falstaff, then Bloom surmises that Hamlet and Falstaff illuminate the sonnets more than love poems adumbrate those giant forms. Falstaff is the cause of wit in others, wit is Falstaff ’s god, and like Blake, Bloom admits that Falstaff has a beautiful laughing discourse, which is described as a form of devotion. Falstaff offends only the virtuous and hence combines Aristophanes and Plato to become, in Bloom’s opinion, the Socrates of East Cheap. Thus, Falstaff teaches his pupils freedom or how to be free from society, although he is never alone on stage. Hence, Falstaff is a satirist turned against power and historicisms understood as explanations of history, which Bloom figures as cyclic: “Falstaff knows that history is an ironic flux of reversals.”366 During the rejection scene Falstaff is not permitted to reply; Bloom thinks that to reject Falstaff is to reject Shakespeare. Yet, Falstaff signals that Shakespeare has escaped the influence of Marlowe, “Falstaff, not Marlovian, is quite Chaucerian: he is the son of the vitalistic Wife of Bath.”367 Unlike Hamlet, Falstaff is not elegiac, and very unlike the negative exuberance of Shylock, Falstaff possesses a positive exuberance. Falstaff is Hamlet’s greatest rival, an immense fund of immanence as compared to the morbid transcendence of the Dane. If Hamlet is death’s ambassador, then Falstaff has the Davidic blessing of more life: “I like not such a grinning honor as the dead!. . . . Give me life” (V.III: 58-9). In identifying so readily with this Shakespearean type, Bloom celebrates Bradley’s comment that “the bliss of freedom gained in humour is the essence of Falstaff.”368 But when Bloom draws this Gnostic analogy, “Falstaff . . . is still alive because Shakespeare knew something like the Gnostic secret of resurrection, which is that Jesus first arose and then he died,” Shakespeare’s walking witticism is misprisioned. By building upon Auden’s diagnosis that Falstaff is resurrected at the battle of Shrewsbury, Falstaff becomes a child of the American religion, a portion of human eternity. Thus, Bloom finds spiritual rebirth while reading Henry IV parts I and II.369 The strangest thing about Bloom’s reading of Hamlet is his conviction that the ur-Hamlet was written not by Kyd, but by the fledgling Shakespeare, who ever afterwards smarted to resurrect his first and most absolute failure. To properly appreciate Bloom’s account of Hamlet, it is necessary to put to one side this questionable assertion and instead begin with his observation that a revenge tragedy was too immense a consciousness for Hamlet, the leading Western representation of an intellectual.370 The infinite reverberations of Hamlet are accounted for by the prince possessing the charisma of King David and the Jesus of Mark. Not one of Shakespeare’s other characters could

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stand a quibbling match with Hamlet’s winning and yet losing combination of skepticism and charisma. For Bloom Hamlet is Shakespeare’s ideal son; hence, he adopts Joyce’s insight that Hamlet was named after Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, who died many years before the play was written and the lessconvincing notion that Shakespeare’s father acted the part of the ghost of Hamlet’s father.371 Contained by the earlier Hamlet, which too assiduously followed the folk tale of Prince Amleth, and temporarily dominated by the Marlovian figure of the overreacher, the first Hamlet had the crystallinestructure Shakespeare, but the outward form Marlowe and Saxo Grammaticus. However, in Shakespeare’s revision a ghost fit to be in an Icelandic saga confronts a university intellectual, and it is as if characters from the Edda pit themselves against the solitary skeptical Montaigne.372 Hamlet’s will does not just oppose the forces of Danish society and Bloom deduces that meaning gets started “by a new transcendentalizing of the secular, an apotheosis that is also an annihilation of all the certainties of the cultural past.”373 Thus, Hamlet ails because psychoanalysis is itself the illness of which it purports to be the cure: is his father Hyperion or a satyr? Shakespeare invents internalization of the self as a psychoanalytic agency, Bloom says, only just admitting of the religious inner self that stands alone in Lutheran Protestantism, but which becomes what Aristotle describes as to pathos in the faux virtuous Hamlet’s secular scene of suffering. This new transcendentalizing breaks the containing structure of the ur-Hamlet as postulated by Bloom into shivers; Bloom thinks it Shakespeare’s problem to show a subtler Hamlet inside a grosser one. Bloom argues that Shakespeare represents change by showing characters pondering their own speeches and backs up this claim with recourse to Hegel’s observation that Shakespeare makes his personalities “free artists of themselves.”374 He heralds Nietzsche as someone who “memorably got Hamlet right” since both Hamlet and the Dionysian man have truly looked into the essence of things, and hence, in their nausea, it is not reflection, but “true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth” that “outweighs any motive for action.”375 This leads to a comparison of Bloom’s two Dionysian men; the one, certain in his gentleness that wit must give pleasure, and the other, in his savagery, convinced that it must change because there is only one final form of change.376 Bloom discovers a profoundly elegiac temper to the preternaturally mature Hamlet due to the memorial the name bears to Shakespeare’s son and to the playwright’s recently deceased father. Mourning becomes a kind of metaphysical revisionism since Shakespeare’s seniority required a form of self-revision because of his own morbid temperament, though Hamlet’s verbal verve is such that bitter wittiness transforms gloomy dolorousness. Implicit from this realization is Hamlet’s revisioning of the self in lieu of revenging himself upon his uncle, which becomes the will’s revenge

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upon time, such that speech becomes “agitation, betrayal, restlessness and torment of self and of others.”377 Hamlet does not love those around him; he is sarcastic toward the ghost and ultimately becomes chillingly cold and lets things be. The play becomes a reflecting pool of negatively capable contraries, for Bloom, in which there is no real Hamlet and no real Shakespeare; neither has perceptible identity bar feigning. Shakespeare was said by Keats to exhibit negative capability because he created an Iago with the same facility as an Imogen, which oxymoron of good and bad is the vortex of Bloom’s reading of Hamlet’s progress from Platonist to Renaissance prince: “inwardness as a mode of freedom is the mature Hamlet’s finest endowment, despite his sufferings, and wit becomes another name for that inwardness and that freedom.”378 Hamlet is his own Falstaff, Bloom echoes after Goddard, because his wit acts as a counter-Machiavel, a defense against a corrupt world. Falstaff is wholly immanent and Hamlet supremely transcendent; but Hamlet’s world is the growing inner self and thus we weep for Harold Bloom. Mr Hubris rejects red herrings, weak misreadings of Hamlet as the man who thinks too much, who could not make up his mind, who was too good for his task. His cyclic conception of history is present in the notion that Shakespeare’s plays are the wheel of all our lives; Bloom concludes that Elsinore’s disease is everywhere; that something is rotten at the core of every state and that Hamlet is apt to discover it even in his own personality, which is the tragedy of the piece. Bloom states the case against Hamlet the killer of so many, only to remark that his displaced-religious charisma is still the Western hero of consciousness. The “real Me” in Bloom’s reading of Whitman would seem a nascent poetic new-world inwardness that values solitary freedom, and this conforms to Bloom’s liking for secular transcendentalism; the heart of wit before wit’s impression becomes transformed by another’s psychic misprision. Hamlet is Bloom’s real Me; a literary creation to measure and tally against all agonists, including Mark’s Jesus. Bloom’s Bardolatory is of a winning kind that combines Coleridge’s insight that “Shakespeare is the Spinozistic deity—an omnipresent creativeness” with Dr Johnson’s emphasis upon invention in the sense of Shakespeare as the inventor of the human.379 Bloom’s conception of Shakespeare is not entirely that of an unmoved mover since he writes that Chaucer, Marlowe, Montaigne, and Tyndale influenced his central genius, though that of Luther is largely left unsaid. Thus, he asserts there is no end to influence and, in Genius, that there is no end to genius: There are two ancient (Roman) meanings of the word “genius”—one is to beget, cause to be born, that is to be a paterfamilias. The other is to be an attendant spirit for each person or place: to be either a good

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or evil genius, and so to be someone who, for better or worse, strongly influences someone else. This second meaning has been more important than the first; our genius is thus our inclination or natural gift, our inborn intellectual or imaginative power, not our power to beget power in others.380

Bloom’s argument is that great works of literature influence later works, whereas those that do not are mere period pieces locked into their cultural moment. Eliotic “talent” does what it can, and derives from a Latin word for money, while Bloomian genius does what it must, and actively originates instead of passively duplicating the tastes of the age: “All genius . . . is idiosyncratic and grandly arbitrary and ultimately stands alone.”381 Bloom is adamant that he pursues not a religion of literature, but a Gnostic “knowledge that frees the creative mind from theology, from historicizing, and from any divinity that is totally distinct from what is most imaginative in the self.”382 Bloom writes in Genius that “Jonas . . . said of the ancient Gnostics that they experienced ‘the intoxication of unprecedentedness’, ” then adds that the quality of being without precedence is what strong poets strive for, “freedom for the creative self, for the expansion of the mind’s consciousness of itself.”383 Genius has the primary ability to absorb readers in the sense of grabbing their attention, but secondarily, a genius can assimilate us to their cognitive stance. Bloom states that the word genius plays upon the family fathering force of Roman antiquity, as well as the alter ego, but also states that genius augments tradition and the self by means of the Roman figure of authority, and argues that “upon augmenting the foundation,” the past is carried “alive into the present.”384 Bloom justifies his absorbed appreciation of genius on the recognition of the sublime feeling one gets from reading the very best writers; Emerson’s “it is the God in you that responds to the God without” and Longinus’s “touched by the true sublime your soul is naturally lifted up.”385 For Bloom the ultimate genius is Shakespeare, who contains us at the limit of what we know to be human, a genius who created multiple and entirely believable consciousnesses distinct from the personality of the playwright, whatever that might have been. Despite Bloom’s celebration of Shakespeare as the genius of secular consciousness, there is a contrary view which states that the birth of Protestantism influences the development of the modern self. The code for Bloom’s book on Shakespeare, in which Shakespearean characters are interpreted as mishearing each other and overhearing themselves in order to change within, is said by Bloom to be replicated in Wilde’s “One should never listen. To listen is a sign of indifference to one’s hearers.”386 It naturally follows from this Wildean witticism that “a truth ceases to be true when

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more than one person believes in it” and then finally, “to the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all.”387 Bloom believes in the necessity of misreading titanic personalities and their battles with the mighty dead, which become sincere tussles with spontaneous inspiration from the perspective of cold-blooded editors. For instance, in Acts 16:16-18 Paul casts out a demon of divination in the name of Christ and yet to exorcise divination is to symbolically edit the inspired preaching of Jesus, the apocalyptic revolutionary, into Paul’s antinomian quest to convert the Gentiles to an early form of Christianity still based around the Temple. The shared anti-divinatory message of Kings 17, where the second golden calf scene occurs, means that Pauline faith had not quite made a clean break with the Jewish Law, and yet Paul describes the Law as bondage to schoolmasters (Gal. 4.9, 3.25). The extent to which Bloomian genius, understood as anxious misprision, can be said to depend on his dyspepsia for Paul and John’s relegation of the Jewish Testament to the Old Testament is the extent to which there is a religious element at work in Bloom’s thinking, a Jewish allegiance. Bloom celebrates the genius of Yeshua but writes that “the Jesus of the New Testament is a literary character, just as are the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible and the Allah of the Koran.”388 He argues that Paul, the earliest New Testament author, “had virtually no interest in the historical Jesus, probably because those who had known Jesus were almost all opponents of Paul.”389 For Bloom Jesus is the most charismatic of Jews and a man who died a Jew rather than as Paul’s Christ; thus, Bloom turns to Nietzsche on the psychology of Paul: . . . he had many things on his conscience—hatred, murder, sorcery, idolatry, debauchery, drunkenness, and orgiastic revelry—and to however great an extent he tried to soothe his conscience, and, even more, his desire for power, by the extreme fanaticism of his worship for and defense of the Law, there were times when the thought struck him: “It is all in vain! The anguish of the unfulfilled Law cannot be overcome.” . . . The Law was the Cross on which he felt himself crucified. How he hated it! What a grudge he owed it! How he began to look round on all sides to find a means for its total annihilation, that he might no longer be obliged to fulfill it himself! And at last a liberating thought, together with a vision—which was only to be expected in the case of an epileptic like himself—flashed into his mind: to him, the stern upholder of the Law—who, in his innermost heart, was tired to death of it—there appeared on the lonely path that Christ, with the divine effulgence on His countenance, and Paul heard the words: “Why persecutest thou Me?”390

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Nietzsche would later characterize Paul as a genius of hatred, who nailed Jesus to his own cross and Bloom appends Shaw’s insight that Paul did nothing that Jesus would have done, “and says nothing that Jesus would have said.”391 Luther idealized Paul, and Bloom draws upon Luther’s thesis that the Jewish Christians attacked Paul when he returned to the Temple because, as the very last convert of Christ, he was “a latecomer and is our inferior.”392 Nietzsche made a cunning comparison of Luther with Paul, arguing that “Luther must have experienced similar feelings, when, in his cloister, he endeavored to become the ideal man of his imagination” and that therefore “Luther one day began to hate the ecclesiastical ideal, and the Pope.”393 Bloom bellicosely refers to the genius of Paul and John as misreaders of the Jewish Covenant and hence looks for alternative examples of inwardness in the Jewish tradition and, consequently, discovers fiery inwardness in prophetic Jeremiads: “John hates me and I respond in kind.”394 Bloom does not hate Paul because of his reverence for Gamaliel: “The former Pharisee was a great inventor who transformed Hellenistic Christianity into a new kind of world religion.”395 I find it ironic that Bloom emphasizes that “It is too easy for many Americans to mistake Paul as a revivalist, whose total emphasis is upon rebirth through the forgiveness of sin,” because this is the starting place for the American religion he converted to as portrayed by Whitman.396 Bloom prefers the Jewish branch of Christianity as symbolized by the Ebionite James, who Luther disliked for putatively writing that “faith, if it have not works, is dead, being alone” (James 2.17), to which Paul allegedly replied that a “man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law” (Rom. 3.28).397 I think that by looking within toward his conscience, rather than through a received Catholic catechism, Luther provided Montaigne with the provocation to further argue that conscience was not innate, or God-given, but placed there by custom to ensnare the seeker after liberty. To complete the Bloomian grand gesture, Hamlet’s resolution becomes sickly when conscience makes a coward of him, and hence dialectic between Protestantism and skepticism gave Shakespeare the hint with regard to the internalization of consciousness. James I shouted, “No bishop, no king!” and Bloom studiously ignores the thought that no Luther means no Tyndale, or that dialectic between Luther and Montaigne helped influence the question of whether solid flesh or introspective non-being stands at our center and which dualism Hamlet’s personality nihilistically explores. Though there is a kind of inwardness that the aphoristic Jesus shares with American Protestants, even if this knowledge is alien to the mind of Paul, and this inward knowing is found in Christ’s assertion in the Gospel of Thomas: “the kingdom is inside you, waiting for you to find it,” or as Bloom comments, “the kingdom of God is then an undiscovered tract of the inward self.”398 The succession of the material Catholic faith by its younger but severer

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Protestant offshoot leads to the internalization of consciousness that Bloom identifies in numerous Protestant and post-Protestant writings. Without this troubled askesis of the spirit, and its sometimes tormented relationship to the body of the past, the aesthetic inwardness that Bloom identifies in the most memorable writers simply would not be possible. Bloom’s dislike of Paul means he passes over much that would help us understand the mysteries of Whitman better. If the Me myself references the sanctification of God within, as guided by the Holy Spirit, then justification comes from without and is representative of the conversion experience; we might say, sanctification is through works, while justification is through faith. I want to suggest that the Whitmanian soul should be associated with justification, and hence that “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is not just a poem of confident imaginative triumph, but one of spiritual righteousness. I shall argue that the influence of Emerson is used to rework Pauline Scripture very much to Whitman’s advantage. In Emerson’s “The Poet,” we read that “The Universe is the externisation of the soul,” that “poems are a corrupt version of some text in nature with which they ought to tally,” and that “symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance.”399 I would like to add to this list a quotation from Specimen Days on the symbolic topic of ferries, “What communion with the waters, the air, the exquisite chiaroscuro—the sky and stars, that speak no word, nothing to the intellect, yet so eloquent, so communicative to the soul.”400 By closing the imaginary distances between himself and his fellow passengers, Whitman’s poem ferries the reader from first to second berth. In “The Over-Soul,” Emerson writes that to obtain answers to the question of immortality one must “forego all low curiosity” and accept “the tide of being which floats us into the secret of nature” and that “The soul circumscribes all things,” it “abolishes space and time,” and lastly that from the unity of the possession, all men have an identical and somewhat Wordsworthian “common heart.”401 It is now possible to connect all of the above to the curiosity that Whitman displays toward his fellow passengers in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and to the solitary fishing image of being struck from the float forever held in solution, but by means of the ratio of tessera and with specific reference to shard-like biblical allusions. There are more subtle allusions to the New Testament in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” than the blatant face-to-face allusions to 1 Corinthians 12 at the start of the poem; for instance, the concomitant allusion, “But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away” (1 Cor. 10), in the line, “we love you—there is perfection in you also/ You furnish your parts toward eternity.” To see through a glass darkly is to be a follower of veiled Moses, but to see face to face is to accept Christ as Savior. In the context of the poem, it is to

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accept Whitman as the American Christ; thus, the phrase, “The similitudes of the past and those of the future,” resembles Romans 5:14: “the similitude of Adam’s transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come,” although the one who comes is Whitman, since the poet depicts himself as being haloed in the disintegration of the dark glass: “the fine centrifugal spokes of light around the shape of my head.” The opaque line, “That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I should be of my body,” recalls quite a few similar “should-be” formulations in the New Testament, in which the believer knows the body of Christ but the world does not (unless converted and hence justified), 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) Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ; that ye should be married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God. (Rom. 7.4) 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)

Whitman is both American Adam and Christ; he wants for future Americans to be heirs to his own body, which reminds that in Acts at 2.38-39 the gift of the Holy Spirit is “for you and your children and for all who are far off.” The phrase, “The impalpable sustenance of me from all things” alludes to Acts as much as to the Emersonian reference to the soul’s circumscription of all things: “And by him all that believe are justified from all things” (Acts 13.39). Justification is concerned with Christ expiating human guilt through an acceptance of the sacrifice of His body on the cross, but Whitman spurns Original sin. In “The Over-Soul,” Emerson emphasizes that curious questions with regard to the future are confessions of sin; the Emersonian way is to instead acknowledge the unity of the human heart. In the middle section of the poem, Whitman works through a guilt-complex that he believes connects him to his readers, “It is not you alone who knows what it is to be evil,” and lists the wayward sins of the carnal man: “guile, anger, lust, hot wishes,” etc.

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These malignant items represent a dangerous moment of doubt because they are constative confessions, and thus, I want to remind that Hicks thought that if we make an image merely in imagination, it is an idol; and to his iconoclastic injunction, I graft Paul’s statement in Romans: “Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God . . . but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts . . . Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity” (1.21-30). Whitman provides a Pauline list of sins committed; he shows his spiritual scars to the reader. But just before this, he has a crisis of confidence in his own poetic abilities that are figured as great thoughts beset by dark patches, which figuration of doubt gives rise to the Bloomian concept of the crisis-lyric. The imagery of light and dark (patches) is central to the message of John at 3:19: “And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.” Whitman is vain enough to figure himself as Christ; usually the externalization of Deity impedes the internalization of consciousness, but here the enigmatic crisis is resolved through an admission of natural-born pride in Manhattan, and there follows the benediction of a second birth, “have you not accepted?” The justification of the reader has been achieved through acceptance of Whitman as the meaning, not the name of Jesus. The ending to the poem emphasizes that the text of America stands between the Over-Soul and the American citizen: “Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul” because Whitman knows that human life is but a shadow, a poor player strutting his part on the American stage, choosing a part, great or small. This theatricality explains the allusion to Edgar’s Poor-Tom confession in the pre-Christian cosmos of King Lear and yet the echo of the natural man is placed within a Pauline framework.402 From an iconoclastic perspective, Whitman’s greatest sin is the glorification of the material world: “The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings.” Blank suspicions will later all but overwhelm him in “As I Ebb’d,” but for now, the tide of the imagination is high. In Where Shall Wisdom Be Found, Bloom considers Plato’s contest with Homer to be the educator of Athens and yet begins by thinking through what he perceives as the competition between the Yahwist and Homer: “our civilization is still split between a Hellenic cognition and aesthetic and a Hebraic morality and religion.”403 Still, Bloom scolds Plato for sentencing the atheists to either death or imprisonment in The Laws, in which text Plato writes in his own persona and without the irony of using his supreme fiction, Socrates, as a mouthpiece: “The dissembling atheist deserves to die for his sins . . . whereas the other kind needs simply admonition combined with

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incarceration.”404 The gods of Homer and the Hebrews share an uncanny sublime that Plato and his followers try to obliterate in the belief that religion must be imposed by the state: “Plato accurately argues that most citizens never grow up, and therefore need to be fed benign fictions rather than the Homeric epics, where the gods are selfish, nasty spectators, all too happy to see us suffering in their theater of cruelty.”405 In sublimed erotic quest for the eternal forms of justice and beauty that exist beyond man’s touch in the realms of immortality, Plato, like Henry V, would banish lecherous Zeus and Falstaff because they are not exactly statist.406 In a parallel way, the School of Resentment seeks to extirpate the Falstaff of Yale because he is no cultural materialist and does not seek the just “great” society in his sublime literary criticism, “the Republic inaugurates their Puritanism.”407 Philosophy is the inward soul of wisdom, and according to Plato, belongs to the gods, but poetry is the outward form of wisdom when expressed at its most persuasive, and Bloom mentions Iris Murdoch’s brilliant contention that in The Republic, Plato ascetically strives to mortify metaphors in his rationalistic dialogues, and then F. M. Cornford’s reading that Plato finds a structural analogy between the ideal state and the human soul.408 Bloom discovers a strong Shelleyan parallel between the deaths of Jesus and Socrates, who accepted their fates without becoming brutes in those hagiographies/dialogues that describe their disputatious lives and transcendent deaths. Bloom compares Pascal and Montaigne and thus Pascal’s chiasmus: “man is neither angel nor brute, and the unfortunate thing is that he who would act the angel acts the brute,” is sired by Montaigne’s apothegm, “They want to get out of themselves and escape from the man. That is madness: instead of changing into angels, they change into beasts; instead of raising themselves, they lower themselves.”409 Montaigne’s thoughts on transcendentalism remind Bloom of puritanical materialists: “These transcendental humours frighten me, like lofty and inaccessible places; and nothing is so hard for me to stomach in the life of Socrates as his ecstasies and possessions by his daemon.”410 Bloom reproofs Pascal as Montaigne’s weak ephebe, though not for being an ironic quietist: “When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened,” whereas Montaigne maintains a thoroughly skeptical attitude with regard to eternity: “It would be an inequitable disproportion to receive eternal compensation in consequence of so short a life.”411 Does not the continuation of Pascal’s aphorism—why here rather than there—tap us twice on the shoulder with memories of Bloom’s background? Bloom’s assertion that wisdom is to be found in world literature answers Montaigne’s question: what do I know? But what is it, Bloom asks, that provokes Platonists to instigate

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an askesis of their humanity? An answer is found in Bacon’s essays: “Men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark . . . the contemplation of death, as the wages of sin and passage to another world, is holy and religious.”412 Montaigne chimes in agreement with Bacon: “There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly, no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live well and naturally; and the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being.”413 For this reason Bloom advises bildung, Goethe’s word for an aesthetic education in the classics and the contemplation of great lives, even the enigmatic life of Jesus celebrated in the Gospel of Mark, but, as for the Platonizing Apostle Paul, Bloom echoes Goethe: “Spare me . . . your absurdities!”414 Bloom attacks the ascetic spirit because it is the apparent enemy of life as art, the exact opposite of Falstaffian Bloom, who wishes for more life.415 The spiritual opposite to Bloom’s Epicureanism has to be seen as Augustine’s wistful desire for the monastic life. Bloom writes of Augustine that his thought reflects the trinity inasmuch as there are three crucial concepts therein— intellect, memory, and will: “what joins intellect and memory for Augustine is God’s will, working in the soul as the Pauline principle of caritas, the love of the creator God for his creatures, man and woman.”416 In the Confessions, Augustine suggests that memory is the agent by which means the soul finds its way to God’s will in a conversion experience, as Bloom puts it, “Memory is a power stronger than the self, until the self understands: ‘You were with me, but I was not with you.’ ”417 Augustinian memory finds God’s will within the humbled self as opposed to the world outside by means of the Neo-platonic dualism that by confronting duration one discovers eternal salvation; via memorial introspection, one’s inner soul is able to contemplate the ideal forms from the material world of becoming—much as Wordsworth becomes healed by contemplating memorized but re-imagined forms of Nature. Whitman too confronts the well-joined carpentry of duration in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and writes to future generations of Americans: “I am with you.” There is a mysterious interplay between friendship and solitary optative vision in the poem as the flying, or should this be floating, scheme, which envelops all, disintegrates, only for America to become a republic of neighbors. But wicked individualistic Manichaeism opposes emanative Neo-Platonism and the shared sense of common American humanity that Whitman appeals to is not exactly consonant with the One that Wordsworth’s imagination perceives in moments of solitary vision, despite Bloom’s reference to Shakespeare as sharing the creativity of Spinozistic deity, which enthusiastic Bardolatory contradicts his deconstruction of Coleridgean aesthetics. Americans possess a common human heart, but they are more self-reliant than Europeans, and this providential individualism forms the metaphorical float of Whitmanian

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teleology. Bloom finds another three-in-one, that of poem, life, and history of mankind, in Augustine’s homily on the memory of reciting a psalm as an existentialist metaphor for being aware of mortality’s span. Bloom speaks of his lifelong obsession with reading poetry and canonical memory in antithesis to Augustine’s trinity that eventually swapped the cupiditas of his secular love for Virgil for the ascetic Gospel of Love. Cupiditas is wanton like Eve and symbolic of selfish epicurean excess, in short, the Stevensian metaphysical materialism that defines Bloomian selfhood. Bloom’s concept of selfhood quickens at the threshold vacated by God, or that selfhood which Augustine defined as Promethean and Satanic idolatry. Bercovitch usefully, if antithetically, remarks that the severe displacement of Protestant principles that Bloom isolates begins in England “with the Puritan ‘vulgar prophets’ who claimed the prerogatives of Christ, with the Quaker doctrine of the inner light” but that the Romantic poet “freed the individual to choose (or invent) his identity.”418 Unlike Augustine, Plotinus, and Paul, who denigrate the Gnostics, Bloom has a Manichean understanding of tradition wherein authors deny their literary heritage and assert their independent newness in relation to past orthodoxies. Nevertheless, Bloom chooses Plato as an exemplar of the teacher who sublimes his homoerotic attraction for his students into a love of wisdom “since love turns out to be another name for philosophy . . . the authentic quester ascends to revelation, to the astounding Beauty that is also the Good.”419 A parallel is drawn between Hal and “the outrageous Professor Falstaff,” but whereas Socrates professes a wise ignorance, Sir John “teaches by excess, by an over-flowing rather than an ascesis.”420 Fatherly Falstaff gives love far too easily: “In the English-speaking academic world, closely ruled by campus Puritans, we now have knitting-circles of Madame Defarges, sadistically awaiting the spectacle of the guillotine, fit punishment for ‘sexual harassment’, that poor parody of the Socratic Eros.”421 Overhearing (rather than over-the-shoulder reading or even the over-reader) is defined as the human will-to-change and Hamlet is its prime exemplar, a character who “becomes the theologian of his own consciousness.”422 Bloom’s rhetoric rises to the Shakespearean occasion of an alternative form of self-fashioning than that offered by brain-washing Marxists: “to hear yourself, at least for an instant, without self-recognition, is to open your spirit to the tempests of change.”423 The ever-augmenting inner spirit with its crucial faculty of overhearing is invented by Shakespeare and then vividly redefined by Milton, Bloom’s “oracle of the inward life.”424 Inner spirit and inward life mutates into Milton’s “version of the Inner Light” that guided the pugnacious Protestant, when “he went deep into internal exile by composing Paradise Lost.”425 Milton here seems molded into a Hasidic Jew, turning away from the political world of Christian Europe and Bloom confesses that, as a Jewish Gnostic, he does

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not think Paradise Lost a Christian epic. Thus, he writes that Milton believed in the God within and quotes the key speech made by Satan, in which the arch-fiend mouths what would become Bloom’s Emersonian mantra that the American Sublime is fathered in that transatlantic abyss created by the “self-begot, self-raised,/By our own quick’ning power” (V, 860-1). Satanic quickening is here the opposite of the Pauline quickening of mortal bodies (Rom. 8.11), that is the doctrine that the believer becomes spiritually alive the more he renounces the sweet life of sin. Reading Bloom’s ever-changing evaluations of authors that are subtly altered by new insights is exactly like observing a Shakespearean character over-hearing themselves thinking as they speak. But Bloom is no poet; he cannot forget. He is iconoclastic in the sense of shattering New Critical urns, which makes his preference for Orc as opposed to Urizen akin to the rosebud metaphor in Citizen Kane. Bloom has spoken publicly against the massacres that the Second Amendment has brought to American society, and in his reading of Blood Meridian, he salutes Cormac McCarthy’s identification of the albino Judge Holden with Moby Dick; in effect the Second Commandment becomes the Second Amendment, as iconoclastic violence is used as “protection” against “The the.” The dumbfoundering Stevensian definite inarticulate here represents an urge to write the self into life, while purging away the tidal detritus of what our daily lives dump in memory, including precursors and received truth, that is the white whale as the myth of a blank canvas. Bloom’s best prose is by no means filled with critical clichés that emptily follow academic fashions; for him the canon is formed by selfelection, which he categorizes as a mixture of the Alexandrine-Hellenic and Judeo-Christian, in the sense of Scripture become secular scripture and sometimes vice versa. He deconstructs texts via a combination of genealogy and close-reading and even applies these tactics to the tenets of normative Judaism and Christianity. By means of a canonical myth of memory, Bloom remembers Zion, and this revenge against time’s ravages he rediscovers as a secular form of transcendence in the poetry of great writing. Although his Jewishness causes him to have the occasional blind-spot, Bloom’s vivacity is such that he self-creates more than he receives from post-Protestant American society; therefore, my closing metaphor is Shylock-Falstaff dialectic. Bloom seems at his most vulnerable, bemoaning the figure of Shylock as the bitter Shakespearean archetype that has cursed the Jew in history: “Shylock has been the Jew throughout four centuries now, and still has great power to hurt.”426 If Marlowe’s Barabas is a cardboard caricature, who poisons wells, then Shylock is a well-rounded Jewish devil born of creative rivalry, and yet Bloom announces that Shylock is a precursor of Falstaff in Shakespeare’s development since “Shylock and Falstaff share an exuberance, negative

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in Shylock, extravagantly positive in Falstaff.”427 Bloom notes that both Shakespearean types are rejected at the end of their theatrical lives, but that “we sooner can see Falstaff as a monk than Shylock as a Christian.”428 In spite of Bloom’s avowal that American Jews are not in exile, he nevertheless quotes James Shapiro’s meditation upon anti-Semitism as part of his discussion of The Merchant of Venice: “To avert our gaze from what the play reveals about the relationship between cultural myths and people’s identities will not make irrational and exclusionary attitudes disappear.”429 This said, Bloom is at times critical of the American polis and hence he styles himself as Falstaffian, or someone who loves life in a Nietzschean sense, and yet hates societies given to military fantasies: “The Falstaffian spirit is a great sustainer of civilization. It disappears when the state is too powerful and when people worry too much about their souls. . . . There is little of Falstaff ’s substance in the world now, and, as the power of the state expands, what is left will be liquidated.”430 But here an ironic analogy with Judge Holden surfaces, since, as Hobsbawm proposes, the cowboy represents a form of in-built anarchism in American society: “the ideal of an individual uncontrolled by any constraints of state authority,” which he contrasts with “the imposition of government and public order.”431 In Bloom’s view, Falstaff menaces the recently crowned Henry V inwardly, and from this observation it follows that the rowdily life-affirming Falstaff becomes the dialectical opponent of Corinthian civility, the ascetic spirit of statecraft and Agincourt addresses. Just like the sanctimonious Henry V of the rejection scene, Bloom draws the analogy that, in The Republic, Plato shuts the mythmakers out of his Just City.432 Bloom compares the dismissal of Homer from the ideal republic to the shunning of Falstaff: “Plato dismisses him (Homer) as Prince Hal/Henry V exiles Falstaff, whose soul is not exactly statist.”433 Bloom’s existentialist self-identification with Falstaffian being is such that he has acted the part of Falstaff on two occasions, and for him the paradoxical secret to Falstaff ’s character is extravagant freedom: “I prefer to love Falstaff, the image of freedom’s wit, and the language of wit’s freedom.”434 Shakespeare’s invention is self-consciously paralleled with Don Quixote, who “resists yielding to the authority of church and state. When he ceases to assert his autonomy, there is nothing left except to be Alonso Quixano the Good again, and no action remaining except to die.”435 From his garrulous collegiate perspective, Bloom compares the relationship of Hal and Falstaff to that of Alexander and Aristotle, “Falstaff is . . . as much Prince Hal’s tutor as Aristotle was Alexander’s.”436 It was said of Aristotle that he wished to conquer the realms of knowledge in emulation of his student’s desire to conquer the known world, which prompts me to describe Bloom as the authentic Jewish super-brain of the world’s last Christian super-power, the Falstaffian educator of Urizenic America.437

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Notes 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Notes 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68

69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

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Bloom, The Breaking of the Vessels, pp. 60–1. Ibid., p. 61. Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. xi. Ibid., p. xii. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 95. Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. xii. Christopher Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 14–19. Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. xi. Ricks, Allusion to the Poets, pp. 5–6. Quoted from Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 4. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. xxii. Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., p. 37. Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, pp. 226–7. Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 31. 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. Ibid. Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 16. Harold Bloom, “The Breaking of Form,” in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. H. Bloom (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 16. Geoffrey Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 178. Bloom, Deconstruction and Criticism, p. 9. S. T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer (Princeton, London: Princeton University Press, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1993), p. 193. Bloom, Poetry and Repression, pp. 16–17. Ibid., p. 17. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 97. Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 65. Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 30. Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, p. 156. Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 10. Bloom, Deconstruction and Criticism, p. 12. Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, pp. 60, 402. Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 18. Ibid., p. 17. Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 10. Ibid., p. 11. Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, pp. 294–5.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Walter Nash, Rhetoric: The Wit of Persuasion (London: Blackwell, 1989), p. 1. Abrams, Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Theory, p. 250. Bloom, Anatomy of Influence, p. 9. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, pp. xix–xx. De Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 300. Ibid., p. 205. Abrams, Doing Things with Texts, p. 319. De Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 106. Ibid., p. 117. Ibid., p. 301. Bloom, Deconstruction and Criticism, pp. 7–8. Ibid., p. 8. J. Hillis Miller, The Linguistic Moment: From Wordsworth to Stevens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 339. Miller, Theory Now and Then, pp. 348–9. De Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 108. Bloom, Poetry and Repression, pp. 8–9. Ibid., p. 8.

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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.

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Notes 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

69

70 71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

84 85 86

233

Ibid., p. 274. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 70. Fletcher, Allegory, p. 62. Ibid., p. 44. Harold Bloom, “Coleridge: The Anxiety of Influence,” in New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth, p. 265. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of The Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 311. Ibid. Christopher Norris, Paul de Man: Deconstruction and the Critique of Aesthetic Ideology (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 182. Kate Soper, What is Nature: Culture Politics and the Non-Human (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 32. 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. 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. Quoted from Derrida, Mémoires for Paul de Man, p. 204. 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. Derrida, Mémoires for Paul de Man, p. 258. Ibid., p. 260. Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 328. Derrida, Mémoires for Paul de Man, p. 259. Paul de Man, “Shelley Disfigured,” in Deconstruction and Criticism, p. 57. Quoted from Eamonne Dunne, J. Hillis Miller And The Possibilities of Reading: Literature After Deconstruction (London: Continuum, 2012), p. 43. Quoted from John Harwood, Eliot to Derrida: The Poverty of Interpretation (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 198. De Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 300. Derrida, Mémoires for Paul de Man, p. 228. De Man, Mémoires for Paul de Man, pp. 228–9, Allegories of Reading, p. 288. De Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, p. 4. Ibid., p. 153. 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. Ibid., pp. 5–6. Ibid., p. 7. 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.

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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_bc4f ac6a5a161cec184203d112277fb3&utm_source=Email%20marketing%20 software&utm_term=The%20Strange%20Case%20of%20Paul%20de%20 Man [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.

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Notes

235

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.

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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].

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Notes

237

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-1harold-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.

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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 CounterHistory,” 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.

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Notes 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102

239

Ibid., pp. 190, 242. Ibid., pp. 367, 378. Ibid., p. 52. Ibid., p. 95. Ibid., pp. 358–9. Reed Way Dasenbrock, “Review of Yeats, Ireland and Fascism,” Comparative Literature 97, 5 (December 1982), 1262–5. Harold Bloom, “Yeats and the Romantics,” in Modern Poetry: Essays in Criticism, ed. John Hollander (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 503. Bloom, Yeats, p. 7. Ibid., p. 103. Ibid., p. 6. Sandra Seigal, “Prolegomenon to Bloom: The Opposing Self,” Diacritics 1, 4 (1971), 36. Bloom, Yeats, p. 68. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 183. Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., p. 181. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 35. Bloom, Agon, 92. Allen, Harold Bloom A Poetics of Conflict, pp. 22–3. Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 13. Moynihan, A Recent Imagining, p. 34. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 118. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid. Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, p. 90. Bloom, Deconstruction and Criticism, p. 12. Ibid., p. 3. Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. 81. Bloom, Yeats, p. 188. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 39. Ibid., p. 38. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid. Elaine Shepherd, Conceding an Absence (London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 1. Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh, p. 193. Fite, Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision, p. 79. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 37. Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 26. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 60. Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. xii. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. xxii.

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240

Notes

103 104 105 106 107 108 109

Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. x. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 17. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. T. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. viii. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, pp. 4–5. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., pp. 45–6. Ibid., p. 47. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid. Ibid., p. 54. Ibid., pp. 6, 55, 101. Ibid., p. 62. Bloom, Agon, p. 3. Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 5. Ibid., pp. 6–7. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., p. 34. Ibid. Ibid., p. 35. Ibid., p. 38. Ibid., pp. 37–8. Bloom, Novelists and Novels, pp. 211–12. Ibid., p. 46. Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 235. Ibid., p. 237. Ibid., p. 239.

110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145

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Notes 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186

241

Ibid., p. 244. Ibid., p. 245. Ibid., pp. 245–56. Bloom, Agon, p. 158. Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 246. Ibid., p. 247. Ibid. Ibid., p. 348. Ibid., p. 349. Ibid. Ibid., p. 350. Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 252. Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 351. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 352. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 353. Ibid. Ibid., p. 354. Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 254. Ibid., p. 248. http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/120455/haroldbloom-is-god [Accessed 25 March 2013]. Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 354. Ibid., p. 355. Bloom, How to Read and Why, p. 245. Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 357. Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 254. Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 356. Ibid., p. 262. Ibid., p. 257. Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 407. Ibid. http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/120455/haroldbloom-is-god [Accessed 25 March 2013]. Bloom, How to Read and Why?, p. 28. Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 5. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid. Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 335. Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 18. Ibid., p. 20.

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242 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231

Notes Ibid., p. 22. Ibid. Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., p. 121. Ibid., p. 146. Ibid. Ibid., p. 148. Ibid., p. 149. Ibid., p. 152. Ibid., p. 154. Ibid., p. 162. Ibid., p. 164. Ibid., p. 167. Ibid., p. 186. Ibid., p. 166. Ibid., pp. 166–7. Bloom, Novelists and Novels, pp. 277–8. Ibid., p. 291. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 35. Bloom, Novelists and Novels, p. 293. Ibid. Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 192. Ibid., p. 278. Ibid., p. 283. Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh, p. 42. Ibid., p. 50. Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 45. Bloom, The Book of J, p. 10. Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh, p. 50. Ibid., p. 14. Robert Alter, “Harold Bloom’s ‘J’,” Commentary 90, 58 (November 1990), 28. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 23. Bloom, The Book of J, p. 29. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., p. 259. Ibid., p. 46. Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., p. 178. Ibid., p. 183. Ibid., p. 185. Ibid., p. 210.

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Notes 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275

243

Ibid., p. 229. Ibid., p. 233. Ibid., p. 239. Ibid., p. 244. Ibid., p. 255. Ibid., p. 262. Ibid., p. 268. Ibid., p. 282. Ibid., p. 288. Ibid., p. 293. Ibid., p. 294. Moshe Idel, “Enoch and Elijah: Some Remarks on Apotheosis, Theophany and Jewish Mysticism,” in The Salt Companion to Harold Bloom, p. 347. Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 28. Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh, p. 3. Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., p. 82. Ibid. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid., p. 64. Ibid., p. 70. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 90–1. Ibid., p. 114. Ibid., p. 97. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 97–8. Ibid., p. 98. Ibid., p. 115. Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh, p. 102. Ibid., p. 104. Ibid., p. 119. Ibid., p. 131. Ibid., p. 149. Ibid., p. 148–9. Ibid., p. 138. Ibid., p. 146. Ibid., p. 182. Ibid., p. 169. Ibid., p. 185. Ibid., p. 191. Ibid., p. 206. Bloom, Omens of the Millennium, p. 178. Ibid., pp. 16–17.

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244 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283

Notes Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh, p. 218. Ibid., p. 210. Ibid., p. 213. Ibid., p. 233. Ibid., p. 214. Ibid., p. 211. Ibid., p. 155. 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].

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Notes 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

245

Bloom, Novelists and Novels, p. 26. Ibid., p. 27. Allen, Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflict, p. 128. 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]. Bloom, The Shadow of a Great Rock, p. 22. Ibid., p. 264. Ibid., pp. 257, 261. Bloom, Novelists and Novels, pp. 198, 202. Bloom, The American Religion, p. 264. Bloom, Agon, p. 145. Ibid., p. 151. 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]. Bloom, The Visionary Company, pp. xvii–xxiii. Ibid., p. xvii. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. xxiii. Ibid., p. 464. Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language, pp. 58, 62. Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking, p. 114. Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. xix. Ibid., p. xxiv. Ibid., p. 7. Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. 128. Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 129. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., pp. 25–9. Ibid., p. 407. Ibid., p. 272. Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 132. Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 32. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., pp. 28–9. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 23.

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Notes

65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106

Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 19. Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, p. 416. Ibid., p. 242. Ibid., p. 117. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 81. Ibid., p. 363. Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 123. Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, p. 95. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 96. Ibid. Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 53. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 96. See also Fite, Harold Bloom, p. 78. Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, p. 28. Ibid., pp. 367, 378. Ibid., p. 402. Ibid., p. 367. Fite, Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision, p. 9. Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, p. 160. Ibid., p. 125. Ibid., p. 128. Ibid., p. 426. Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence, p. 4. Ibid., pp. 289, 297. Ibid., p. 252. Ibid., p. 392. Bloom, Yeats, p. 7. Ibid., p. 57. Ibid., p. 88. Bloom, “Yeats and the Romantics,” p. 517. Bloom, Yeats, p. 73. Ibid., p. 216. Ibid., p. 215. Ibid., p. 189. Ibid., p. 471. Bornstein, Yeats and Shelley, pp. 33, 35. Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 162. Bloom, Yeats, p. 60. Ibid., p. 63. Bloom, “Yeats and the Romantics,” p. 502. Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 206. 107 Bloom, “Yeats and the Romantics,” p. 501.

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Notes

247

108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149

Ibid., p. 519. Bloom, Yeats, p. 12. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., p. 179. Ibid., pp. 179–80. Ibid., pp. 23–4. Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 186. Ibid., pp. 185–94. Bloom, Agon, p. 150. Bloom, Yeats, p. 24. Ibid., p. 35. Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 44. Ibid. Bloom, Yeats, p. 25. Ibid., p. 181. Ibid., pp. 32, 34. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., p. 35. Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, pp. 136–7. Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 113. Ibid. Ibid., p. 125. Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 138. Ibid., pp. 131, 134. Ibid., p. 139. Ibid., p. 148. Ibid., pp. 185–6. Ibid., p. 187. Ibid., p. 186. Ibid., p. 187. Ibid., p. 189. Ibid., p. 190. Ibid., p. 193. Ibid., p. 187. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., p. 166. Ibid., p. 160. Ibid., p. 164. Ibid., p. 171. Ibid., p. 173. 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.

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248 151 152 153 154 155 156

157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191

Notes Ibid., p. 176. Ibid., p. 190. Ibid., p. 339. Ibid., p. 340. Ibid. 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. Robert Nisbet, History and the Idea of Progress (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1994), p. ix. E. H. Carr, What is History? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), pp. 38, 43. Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence, p. 4. Ibid. Bloom, Agon, p. 215. Ibid., p. 216. Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, pp. 341–2. Ibid., p. 343. Ibid., p. 214. Ibid. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 164. Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 251. Ibid. Ibid., p. 243. Ibid., p. 242. Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 63. Ibid., p. 47. Ibid., p. 48. Ibid. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., p. 52. Ibid., p. 53. Ibid., p. 54. Ibid., p. 55. Ibid., p. 57. Ibid., p. 60. Ibid., p. 64. Ibid., pp. 50–1. Ibid., p. 56. Ibid., p. 70. Ibid. Bloom, Agon, p. 146. Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, pp. 67, 70. Ibid., pp. 72–3. Ibid., p. 73.

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Notes 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235

249

Ibid., p. 74. Ibid., p. 99. Ibid., p. 69. Ibid., p. 80. Ibid., pp. 102, 109. Ibid., p. 100. Bloom, Agon, p. 148. Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, p. 1. Ibid., pp. 2–3. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., pp. 51–2. Ibid., p. 56. Ibid., pp. 61–5. Ibid., p. 76. Ibid., p. 70. Ibid., p. 74. Ibid., p. 95. Ibid., p. 98. Ibid., p. 103. Ibid., p. 120. Ibid., p. 130. Wallace Stevens, Wallace Stevens: Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1984). Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 147. Ibid., p. 163. Ibid., p. 168. Ibid., p. 170. Ibid., p. 175. Ibid., p. 194. Ibid., pp. 189–90. Ibid., p. 204. Ibid., p. 208. Ibid., p. 258. Ibid., p. 266. Ibid., p. 270. Ibid., p. 280. Ibid. Ibid., p. 281. Ibid., pp. 282–3. Ibid., p. 306. Ibid., p. 307. Ibid., p. 328. Ibid., p. 335. Ibid., p. 336.

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250 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251

252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276

Notes Ibid., p. 346. Ibid., p. 350. Ibid., Bloom, p. 381. Bloom, Agon, p. 331. Ibid., p. 332. Bloom, Poetry and Repression, pp. 213–14. Bloom, Agon, p. 9. Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 221. Ibid., p. 214. Ibid. Bloom, Agon, p. 6. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid. Ibid., p. 8. Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 212. 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. Bloom, Agon, p. 17. Ibid., p. 80. Ibid., pp. 104–5. Ibid., p. 125. Ibid., p. 127. Ibid., p. 93. Ibid. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid., p. 114. Ibid., p. 52. Ibid., p. 74. Ibid., pp. 63–4. Ibid., p. 57. Ibid., pp. 30–2. Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 240. Ibid., p. 239. Bloom, Agon, pp. 119–120. Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 183. Bloom, Agon, p. 121. Ibid., p. 178. Ibid., p. 150. Ibid., p. 149. Ibid., pp. 155–6. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., p. 154.

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Notes 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286

287 288 289 290

291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298

299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306

251

Ibid., p. 170. Ibid., p. 165. Bloom, Omens of the Millennium, pp. 48–9. Ibid., p. 49. Bloom, Agon, p. 186. Ibid., p. 195. Ibid., p. 194. Ibid., p. 189. R. W. Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays & Lectures (New York: The Library of America, 1983), p. 119. 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. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid. Ibid., p. 29. 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]. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), pp. 164–5. Elias Hicks, Letters of E. Hicks (New York, 1834), p. 213. http://www. quaker.org/pamphlets/hicks.pdf [Accessed 14 July 2013]. Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays & Lectures, p. 395. Harold Bloom, Modern Critical Views: Whitman (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2006), p. 2. Ibid., p. 3. P. J. Keane, Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason: The Transatlantic ‘light of all our day’ (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), p. 211. Elias Hicks, The Letters of Elias Hicks (New York, 1834), p. 25. http://www. quaker.org/pamphlets/hicks.pdf [Accessed 14 July 2013]. 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. Harold Bloom, The Best of Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer through Robert Frost (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), pp. 23–4. Bloom, Genius, p. 307. Ibid., pp. 307–8. Ibid., p. 308. Ibid., p. 309. Ibid., p. 310. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 312–13.

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252 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334

335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346

Notes Bloom, The American Religion, p. 35. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., p. 52. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 52. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 51–2. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., p. 38. Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., p. 48. Ibid., p. 49. Ibid., p. 63. Ibid., p. 191. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., pp. 84, 107. 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-bethe-mormon-breakthrough.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0 [Accessed 24 May 2013]. Bloom, The American Religion, p. 107. Ibid., p. 114. Ibid., p. 115. Ibid., p. 128. Ibid., p. 116. Ibid., p. 265. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., p. 265. Ibid., p. 271. Ibid., p. 265. Ibid., p. 199. Ibid., p. 202.

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Notes 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360 361 362 363 364 365 366 367 368 369 370 371 372 373 374 375 376 377 378 379 380 381 382 383 384 385 386 387 388 389 390

253

Ibid., p. 204. Ibid. Ibid., p. 205. Ibid., p. 208. Ibid., p. 213. Ibid., p. 211. Ibid., p. 221. Ibid., p. 230. Ibid., p. 233. Ibid., p. 263. Ibid., p. 43. Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, p. 415. Ibid., p. xviii. Ibid. Ibid., p. 726. Ibid., p. 272. Ibid., pp. 271–2. Ibid., p. 272. Ibid., p. 273. Ibid., p. 277. Ibid., p. 278. Ibid., p. 296. Ibid., p. 286. Ibid., p. 383. Ibid., p. 385. Ibid., p. 387. Ibid., p. 389. Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 54. Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, p. 394. Ibid., p. 395. Ibid., p. 400. Ibid., p. 401. Ibid., p. 722. Bloom, Genius, p. 7. Ibid., p. xi. Ibid., p. xviii. Ibid. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 246. Ibid., p. 247. Ibid., p. 135. Ibid., p. 137. Ibid., p. 140.

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254 391 392 393 394 395 396 397 398 399 400 401 402 403 404 405 406 407 408 409 410 411 412 413 414 415 416 417 418 419 420 421 422 423 424 425 426 427 428 429 430 431

Notes Ibid., p. 141. Ibid. Ibid., p. 140. Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh, p. 174. Bloom, Genius, p. 142. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 136. Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays & Lectures, pp. 453, 459, 463. Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, p. 834. Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays & Lectures, pp. 386–7, 394. Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language, p. 550. Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, p. 38. Ibid., p. 52. Ibid., pp. 38, 51. Ibid., p. 48. Ibid., p. 38. Ibid., p. 48. Ibid., p. 147. Ibid., pp. 136, 147. Ibid., p. 140. Ibid., p. 152. Ibid., p. 146. Ibid., p. 200. Ibid., pp. 227, 229. Bloom, Genius, p. 85. Ibid., p. 86. Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self, pp. 161–3. Bloom, Genius, p. 129. Ibid., pp. 22, 24. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid. Ibid., p. 49. Ibid., pp. 49, 51. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. xliv. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, p. 278. Ibid., p. 191. Ibid., p. 175. Ibid., p. 282. 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].

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Notes 432 433 434 435 436 437

255

Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking, p. 185. Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, p. 48. Bloom, Shakespeare, p. 288. Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, p. 86. Bloom, Shakespeare, p. 294. Ibid.

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Index Abrams, M. H. 24, 35, 57–8, 69–71, 86, 99–100, 150–1, 157 Adam Kadmon 39–40, 104, 106, 183, 186 Akiba, Joseph 7, 25–6, 101–2, 126, 130, 198 Allen, Graham 15, 23–4, 27, 29–30, 74, 93, 108, 149 Alter, Robert 132 Arnold, Matthew 27, 57, 121 Ashbery, John 124, 171 Auden, W. H. 90–1, 151, 161, 205 Auerbach, Eric 35, 85 Augustine 13, 17, 215–16 Austen, Jane 92, 150 Austin, J. L. 63–4 Bacon, Francis 23, 215 Bate, Jonathan 44, 61 Bate, W. J. 44, 109 Bercovitch, Sacvan 150, 188, 216 Bielik-Robson, Agata 72, 76 Blake, William 1–2, 8, 11, 13, 16, 22–4, 31, 38–46, 62, 69, 77, 79, 87, 91, 102–11, 117–18, 124, 126, 131–2, 136–7, 142, 146–8, 152–61, 165, 168–70, 179, 181, 193, 195–6, 199, 202, 205 Bloom, Harold Agon 145, 178–86 The American Religion 2, 4, 8, 31, 145, 148, 194–202 American Religious Poems 4, 31 Anatomy of Influence 40, 42, 69, 167 The Anxiety of Influence 2–4, 6, 8, 15, 19, 21–2, 24, 29–31, 41–51, 53, 69, 72–3, 75, 77, 108–9 Blake’s Apocalypse 8, 106–7, 109, 155–8

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The Book of J 2, 4, 8, 20, 73, 124, 129–37 The Breaking of the Vessels 29, 43 Deconstruction and Criticism 53, 68, 70, 76, 81, 109 Figures of Capable Imagination 43, 120–3, 168–72 Genius 6, 10, 13, 193, 207–10, 215–16 How to Read and Why 89, 123, 126 Jesus and Yahweh 8, 138–43 Kabbalah and Criticism 6, 8, 29, 36, 56, 58, 67, 100, 113–18, 138 A Map of Misreading 8, 29, 42, 45, 53, 63, 73–5, 111–13 Omens of Millennium 10–11, 13, 17, 138, 186 Poetics of Influence 2, 5, 13, 27, 120–4 Poetry and Repression 7, 17, 32, 46, 53, 61–2, 66, 71, 118–20, 179 The Ringers in the Tower 8, 22, 65, 79, 86, 108, 154–5, 161–8 Ruin the Sacred Truths 1, 106, 124–9, 152, 178 The Shadow of a Great Rock 15, 22, 149 Shakespeare 8, 90, 145, 202–7 Shelley’s Mythmaking 8, 47, 103–7, 152 The Visionary Company 8, 39, 41, 86, 106, 151–4, 156, 159, 202 Wallace Stevens 24, 74, 172–8 The Western Canon 5, 8, 27–8, 35, 76, 83, 88–92, 95 Where Shall Wisdom Be Found 213–15, 218 Yeats 8, 107–8, 159–63

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258

Index

Boman, Thorleif 63, 119 Bornstein, George 47–8, 50, 160 Browning, Robert 90–1, 107, 151, 159–60, 163, 165, 187 Buber, Martin 22, 24, 97, 103–5 Burke, Kenneth 41, 68, 95, 203 Byron, George 86, 151, 153, 155, 170, 182 Calvin, John 2, 4, 101, 109, 126, 147, 169, 188, 198 Carlyle, Thomas 14, 150, 185 Celan, Paul 15–16, 123 Cervantes, Miguel 95, 218 Chaucer, Geoffrey 57, 203, 205, 207 Coleridge, S. T. 3, 14, 21–2, 31, 36–7, 40, 45–7, 50, 61–2, 77, 87, 93, 106, 109, 118, 125, 133, 150, 152–3, 155, 159, 167, 171–2, 176–7, 207, 215 Cordovero, Moses 114, 117–19 Covering Cherub 2–3, 42, 48, 50, 63, 79, 105, 107–11, 124, 128, 154 Crane, Hart 11, 13, 122, 124, 159–60 Curtius, E. R. 37, 111 Dante 7, 13, 24, 38, 85–6, 124 de Bolla, Peter 66–7, 76 de Leon, Moses 111, 115 de Man, Paul xiv, 19, 35, 37, 53–4, 57, 64, 69–81, 94 De Quincey, Thomas 61, 83, 167 Derrida, Jacques xiv, 35, 43, 46, 53–69, 78–81, 83, 115–16, 143 Dodds, E. R. 49, 180 Dryden, John 44, 90, 151 Eagleton, Terry 77, 94–5 Eliot, T. S. 13, 35, 37–8, 44, 83, 151, 154, 161 Emerson, R. W. 1, 6, 11–12, 18, 31, 40, 44, 50, 91, 100, 118–20, 124–5, 132, 140, 145, 147–8, 150–1, 168–74, 178–9, 184–93, 195, 199, 208, 211–12, 217

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Empedocles 11, 170, 180, 186 Ezekiel 2, 15, 62, 105, 108, 110, 149, 157 Ezra the Scribe 130–1 Finkelstein, Norman 15–16 Fite, David 8, 15, 17, 19, 21, 26–7, 157, 168 Fletcher, Angus 16, 48, 49, 54, 73, 183 Foucault, Michel 89–90, 94 Fox, George 148–9, 188–9 Franklin, Benjamin 158 Freud, Anna 109, 119 Freud, Sigmund 19, 24–5, 42–51, 56, 59, 61–2, 64, 66–7, 76, 97, 101, 108–11, 113–14, 118, 121–8, 141–2, 153–4, 156, 171, 180, 182–3, 187 Frye, Northrop 26–7, 35, 38–40, 42–3, 49, 60, 133, 155, 202 Gibbon, Edward 140, 158 Gilgamesh 24–6, 125 Ginsberg, Allen 122, 167–8 Gramsci, Antonio 27, 95 Greenblatt, Stephen 84–5, 88–94, 99 Hallam, Arthur 160, 164 Harap, Louis 98, 101 Hartman, Geoffrey 4, 35, 42, 45, 57, 79, 81, 99 Heidegger, Martin 15, 17, 19–20, 64, 77–8, 123–5 Heraclitus 11, 33, 162, 184 Hicks, Elias 149, 187–8, 191, 213 Hobsbawm, Eric 78, 88, 218 Hollander, John 14, 122, 160 Homer 16, 85, 124, 180, 190, 213–14, 218 Idel, Moshe 138, 186 Isaiah 106, 114, 139, 142, 149, 156–7

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Index Jacob 22, 24, 76, 100, 106, 136, 157 Jakobson, Roman 42, 64, 71 James, Henry 10, 119, 150 James, William 195 Jameson, Frederic 92 Jeremiah 124–7 Jesus Christ 7, 13, 16, 24, 26–7, 41, 48–9, 51, 68–9, 86, 94, 119, 126, 130, 132, 138–42, 146–9, 156, 180, 187–202, 205, 207, 209–16 Job 40–1, 108, 124, 126, 133, 156 John 16, 26, 37, 48, 68, 119, 138–9, 141, 148, 150, 189–91, 194, 197, 209–10, 213 Johnson, Barbara 53, 80 Johnson, Samuel 1, 45, 109, 151, 172, 207 Jonas, Hans 1, 4–5, 8, 10–12, 15–20, 28–9, 100, 116, 123, 179–80, 184, 208 J-Writer 4, 17, 24–6, 28, 73, 97, 101, 103, 119, 122, 124–6, 129–43, 198, 213 Kafka, Franz 24, 121–2, 124, 126–9, 132, 137 Keats, John 11, 31, 47, 74, 86, 107, 151, 153, 155, 163, 172–4, 207 Kennedy, Paul 166 Kermode, Frank 64 Kierkegaard, Søren 19, 25, 44, 79, 126, 169, 200 Lacan, Jacques 47, 62, 66–7 Layton, Bentley 5 Leavis, F. R. 84 Lentricchia, Frank 15, 29–31 Levinson, Marjorie 83–4 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 55, 60 Lewis, C. S. 13, 151 Locke, John 23, 59, 70 Longinus 38, 99, 208 Lucretius 42, 46

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259

Luria, Isaac 5, 8, 29, 62, 112–13, 115–17, 143, 157 Luther, Martin 108, 146, 148–9, 207, 210 McCarthy, Cormac 217 McGann, Jerome 84, 86–8, 94, 154 Maimonides, Mosheh 67, 97, 101, 129–30 Marlowe, Christopher 41, 90, 189, 204–7, 217 Marx, Karl 27, 84, 87–9, 94–5, 216 Melville, Herman 49, 177, 192–3 Miller, J. H. 35, 53, 57, 59, 71 Miller, Perry 147, 150 Milton, John 2, 3, 5, 21–4, 31–2, 37–46, 62–3, 67–8, 74, 102, 106–9, 112, 124, 126, 133, 147–8, 151–7, 159, 163, 181, 183, 192, 200, 216–17 Montaigne, Michel 90, 206–7, 210, 214–15 Moses 26, 63, 67–8, 86, 100, 104, 107, 127, 130–1, 133–41, 143, 211 Moynihan, Robert 72, 99 Mullins, Edgar 200–1 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 Orpheus 39, 170–1, 180, 186 Ozick, Cynthia 6–9, 25, 30 Parrish, Timothy 7, 8 Pater, Walter 46, 49–50, 117, 161–6, 169, 178

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260

Index

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

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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 Tennyson, Alfred 38, 163–4 Tertullian 77, 181 Trilling, Lionel 108, 121, 182 Tyndale, William 101, 149, 192, 207, 210 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 Weber, Max 3, 147 Weiskel, Thomas 22 Whitman, Walt 1, 3–4, 7, 16, 18, 31, 38, 46–9, 51, 63–5, 110, 118–20, 122, 124, 127, 143–5, 148–9, 168, 171–4, 176–8, 186–96, 199, 207, 210–15 Wilde, Oscar 43, 57, 161–2, 189, 208 Williams, Raymond 84 Wimsatt, W. K. 37, 99 Winters, Yvor 169

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Index Wittgenstein, Ludwig 75, 204 Wordsworth, William 3–4, 11–12, 14, 18, 21–5, 28, 31, 45–6, 50, 62, 74, 84, 87, 102, 104–8, 119, 124–6, 136, 143, 147, 150–5, 159–60, 162–6, 170–3, 176–7, 186, 190, 211, 215

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261

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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