Art and Ardor

by Cynthia Ozick

  The theology Bloom chose was obsessive, syncretic, but not at all random—Jewish Gnosticism (i.e., Kabbalah, or what Robert Alter has called “linguistic mysticism”) strained through Freud, Nietzsche, Vico, and, of course, Gershom Scholem, whom Bloom sees as “a Miltonic figure.” This theology-of-text became for Bloom a continuing invention through four books of prophetic evolution: The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading, Kabbalah and Criticism, Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens—volumes that reinforce one another even as they enlarge, through fresh illustrations, allusions, paradoxes, and widening sources, the arena of the Bloomian stride.

  In a brief passage remarkable not only for its renewing the issue of Hellenism-versus-Hebraism as the central quarrel of the West, but also for its implicit claim that paganism—i.e., anti-Judaism—is the ultimate ground for the making of poetry, Bloom writes: “Vico understood, as almost no one has since, that the link between poetry and pagan theology was as close as the war between poetry and Hebrew-Christian theology was perpetual.” And again: “Vico says that ‘the true God’ founded the Jewish religion ‘on the prohibition of the divination on which all the gentile nations arose’ ”—this after Bloom has already made it clear that he agrees with Vico in equating the earliest poetry-makers with pagan diviners.

  Now the New Criticism, while keeping clear of theology proper, had always had a soft spot for the Gentile sacral, and was never known for philo-Judaism (given its heroes and seers, Pound and Eliot), so in itself this equation of the origins of poetry with anti-Judaism would not have been enough to shake the academy. It was not simply in their seeking out a theological connection that Bloom’s four volumes, each coming with astonishing speed on the heels of the one before, outraged one department of English after another, including his own at Yale. The real shock of Bloom was that he overturned what the academy had taken for granted for a good number of graduate-school generations: that if you analyze a poem closely enough, and with enough dogged attention to the inherent world of accessible allusion locked into every phrase, you will at length find out what the poem truly means. This New Critical premise had so much become received doctrine that it had, by now, entirely escaped questioning, and for the most recent graduate students it was there in a nameless way, like air or money: a heritage urged and used without contemplation, presumed to be both natural and permanent.

  Bloom, then, came on this scene of unalterable precedent as a shatterer,2 to show that the very critical medium that had seemed to work so well, both for the assimilation of literature and for exchanging its terms, was incomplete and beside the point. “Few notions,” Bloom observed,

  are more difficult to dispel than the “commonsensical” one that a poetic text is self-contained, that it has an ascertainable meaning or meanings without reference to other poetic texts. Something in nearly every reader wants to say: “Here is a poem and there is a meaning, and I am reasonably certain that the two can be brought together.” Unfortunately, poems are not things but only words that refer to other words, and those words refer to still other words, and so on, into the deeply populated world of literary language. Any poem is an inter-poem, and any reading of a poem is an inter-reading. A poem is not writing, but rewriting, and though a strong poem is a fresh start, such a start is a starting-again.

  “Such a start is a starting-again.” This idea, original when applied to literature, is brilliantly borrowed from the history of religion. The “strong” poet is like Paul, or Mohammed, or the Buddha; as visionaries, these were all revisers, not innovators. All the varieties of Christianity and Islam are inconceivable without the God of the Jews, and all the varieties of Buddhism are inconceivable without their Hindu base of Atman and Brahma. Kabbalah, in turn, revises Scripture by making it up again through the expansion of its language. For Bloom, analogously, Milton becomes a kind of Moses, Wordsworth perhaps a Joshua, and Blake (in whom Bloom reads Milton) an Isaiah, or even the Psalmist. Bloom is interested in both Genesis, the Beginning, and in Beginning Again, to which Genesis is indispensable. He divides poets into “precursors” and “ephebes,” or revisers; and he defines revision as purposeful misinterpretation, or “misprision.” The “strong” poet, in Bloom’s view, makes use of his precursor, and the “tropes” or telltale traces of the precursor can be detected in the latecomer-poet. Further, the underlying problem of poetry-making, according to Bloom, is that Milton and Wordsworth, Emerson and Whitman have already appeared and played their notes of grandeur; and the grandeur remains. Any poet born afterward is born into Miltonic and Emersonian shadows and illuminations; any poet born afterward is born into the condition of “belatedness,” which he fights by wresting not the flame of the precursor, which cannot be taken, but the power to remake the flame. Invention is replaced by interpretation.

  The meaning of a poem can only be another poem.

  Every strong poem, at least since Petrarch, has known implicitly what Nietzsche taught us to know explicitly: that there is only interpretation, and that every interpretation answers an earlier interpretation, and then must yield to a later one.

  Poets’ misinterpretations or poems are more drastic than critics’ misinterpretations or criticism, but this is only a difference in degree and not at all in kind. There are no interpretations but only misinterpretations, and so all criticism is prose poetry.

  In the Bloomian scheme, interpretation is a process nearly analogous to a process in physics; to describe and summarize it, Bloom has developed a kind of physics of rhetoric, a terminology concisely and meticulously calculated to account for each stage in the conduct of “belatedness.”

  We are studying a kind of labor that has its own latent principles, principles that can be uncovered and taught systematically.

  Poems are, Bloom says, “acts of reading” (the emphasis is Bloom’s own), and the description of how a poem comes into being out of its reading of an earlier poem, i.e., out of its own “swerving” from the influence of a powerful precursor-poem, Bloom names a “dialectic of revisionism.” It would be unfair to try to paraphrase or condense Bloom’s exposition of his “principles”; each of his four theoretical books is, in his own sense, a retelling or reinterpretation or revision of his starting insight, and each of the later three is a starting-again, a reinvigoration of the earliest. Kaballah and Criticism, for instance, restates the Bloomian concern in still another dress, this time the dress of Cordovera and Luria. The ingenuity of the restatements themselves testifies to Bloom’s artistic intelligence, his supernal—even infernal—erudition, his architectural powers, both massive and rococo, his quick appetite for telling and then telling again in fresh garb. The tapestry is always changing, the critical fabrication is always new; but the obsessive narrative of the Bloomian drama beats unflaggingly below—the drama of giants who once walked the earth, and turned “originality” into an acrobatic labor for those who came after. Through misreadings, evasions, defenses, repressions, all the canny devices of “misprision” under the pressure of “influence,” the strong newcomer at last converts the materials of the precursor into substitute, sometimes antithetical, matter. It is a story of purgation and renewal. Above all, it is a story of a contest for power, in which the competitors struggle for the possession of context; in which context is contest. And finally, it is a mode of Gnosticism, wherein, through the toil of attaining knowledge of the Sublime Maker, the searcher himself becomes that Maker.

  Through all of this, Bloom has invented, and continues to invent, a vocabulary of concision, which he begins now to call a “shorthand.” Here, for instance, is his “mapping” of “the pattern of ratios” in Whitman’s Song of Myself:

  Sections: 1–6

  Clinamen, irony of presence and absence

  7–27

  Tessera, synecdoche of part for whole

  28–30

  Kenosis, metonymy of emptying out

  31–38

  Daemonization, hyperbole of high and low

  39–49

 
; Askesis, metaphor of inside vs. outside

  50–52

  Apophrades, metalepsis reversing early and late

  These inventions are later augmented by Kabbalistic terminology, as well as by vocabulary borrowings taken from Freud—without, however, subscribing in any way seriously to the Freudian scheme. (In fact, he sees Freud as still another interesting datum of revisionist criticism.) Revisionism, Bloom explains, “as a word and as a notion contains the triad of re-seeing, re-esteeming, and re-aiming, which in Kabbalistic terms becomes the triad of contraction, breaking-of-the-vessels, and restitution, and in poetic terms the triad of limitation, substitution, and representation.”

  It is possible that this fabricated and borrowed terminology may put off a reader of poetry as easily as a medical textbook may put off a philosopher; and just as anatomical taxonomy seems far from philosophy (though the philosopher himself may be no more than a sausage filled with all those named parts), so does the vocabulary Bloom has devised seem far from “normal” criticism, and still farther from poetry itself. Listed nakedly, the Bloomian glossary has the ring of engineers’ shoptalk. But this is to miss—because of the smoke it gives out—a chance of sighting the burning bush. The glossary is the girandole—the scaffolding out of which the Bloomian fireworks erupt. And what the fiery wheel writes on the sky is, after all, a single idea: discontinuity. What Bloom means by “revisionism” is a breaking off with the precursor; a violation of what has been transmitted; a deliberate offense against the given, against the hallowed; an unhallowing of the old great gods; the usurpation of an inheritance by the inheritor himself; displacement. Above all, the theft of power. These themes—or, rather, this chorus chanting a uniform theme—Bloom expresses through a nervy prowess accompanied by all the voices of inspiration that a capacious and daring mind, richly packed, can bring to bear on a ruling fascination. The jeweled diversity of Bloom’s expanding and self-paraphrasing glossary is the consequence of an intoxication with the beauty and persuasiveness of the bewitchment it serves—a bewitchment by force, power, seizure, rupture; the dream of storming, looting, and renovating heaven.

  Bloom’s appropriation, in the third book of the series, not simply of Kabbalistic terminology, but, going beyond analogy and metaphor, of Kabbalahlike vaultings of imagination in applying that terminology, has begun, it would seem, to win him a “Jewish” reputation. Not that Bloom, with his celebrated command of the Romantics, is perceived as a Jewish critic; but his unprecedented incursions into Hebrew—what other American critic is at home with shevirat ha-kelim?—has at least suggested that Jewish sources imply Jewish insights—or, if not that, then surely a Jewish “stance.”

  Professor Alvin Rosenfeld, for instance, in an essay in The Southern Review called “Notes on the Antithetical Criticism of Harold Bloom,” points out that the “strain of revisionary defiance” represented by Kabbalah “was greatly feared by the rabbis, who correctly understood its antinomian impulses. For to the Gnostic, knowledge is always knowledge of origins, ultimately a rival claim upon origins, which in human terms inevitably means an attempt to transform man into God”—and yet, having shown in two sentences how Bloom jumps past Jewish claims, Rosenfeld ends by asking Bloom to be more “balanced,” to stress “preservation” and “continuation” as much as “rebellion” and “loss.” Rosenfeld concludes: “If [Bloom] can now adjust his critical stance in a way that will allow for restitution [through “balance”], a new power may be his.” But this is to shout “Go West!” to a comet flying eastward. The “equilibrium,” the “vitalizing tension . . . between . . . tradition and innovation” that Rosenfeld calls for in Bloom, is precisely what Bloom, all along the way, has schemed to destroy. Rosenfeld notes:

  Bloom’s devotion to the Hebrew Bible has often been expressed in his writings. For instance, in A Map of Misreading, he identifies himself “as a teacher of literature who prefers the morality of the Hebrew Bible to that of Homer, indeed who prefers the Bible aesthetically to Homer . . .” If present signs hold, one expects to see more, not less, emphasis on biblical thinking and exegesis in his work.

  This would appear to promise a stronger Jewish element to come, stronger even, and possibly more central, than Bloom’s Kabbalistic concerns—but the fact is opposite. Kabbalah is Gnosticism in Jewish dress; still, it is not the Jewish dress that Bloom is more and more attracted by—it is the naked Gnosticism. To “prefer the morality of the Hebrew Bible to that of Homer” is not to make a choice at all—there is no morality, of the kind Bloom means, in Homer. And simply to speculate whether one might prefer the Bible “aesthetically” to Homer is itself, of course, already to have chosen the Greek way: the Jewish way, confronting Torah, does not offer such a choice.

  If, then, one intends to reflect on Bloom’s work from a Jewish point of view, it is necessary to take him at his Gnostic word when he utters it. (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”) And if one means to find in Bloom a Jewish utterance, it must be in the utterance itself, not in the prospect or the hope of an utterance. The fait accompli of Bloom’s work judges the Jewish Bloom. 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. Bloom’s gifts, and the structures that derive from them, yield a clue to what those awesome architectural masters who devised the cathedrals must have been like; but the cathedrals were wanting, one might say, in Jewish content.

  For myself, I believe Bloom to be engaged in the erection of what can fairly be called an artistic anti-Judaism. This does not place him with Pound and Eliot, who are simply anti-Semitic in the commonplace sense, nor yet with the New Critics, whose austere faculty for “tradition” was confined to Christianity. Bloom is neither anti-Jewish nor, as his incursions into Kabbalah prove, parochial in the usual way of English-speaking literary intellectuals. Bloom is no ordinary literary intellectual. Within the bowels of the Bloomian structure there lives, below all, the religious imagination: sibylline, vatic, divinatory—in short, everything that the Sinaitic force, bent on turning away from god-proliferation, denies. Bloom’s four theorizing volumes vault beyond criticism toward their destination—which is a long theophanous prose-poem, a rationalized version of Blake’s heroic Prophetic Books. Not unlike Blake, Bloom means to stand as a vast and subtle system-maker, an interrupter of expectations, a subverter of predictability—the writer, via misprision, of a new Scripture based on discontinuity of tradition. In this he is pure Kabbalist. Contrary to Jesus, whom the Gospels report to have declared, “Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law” (a statement vividly anti-misprision, and one that those less stiff-necked interpreters, the rabbis of the Talmud who were Jesus’s contemporaries, never made), Bloom invents subversion after subversion, until he comes at last to the job of idol-making.

  Idol-making: I posit this not figuratively, not metaphorically, not what Bloom might call “metaleptically,” but literally. And I choose for Bloom the more drastic term “idol-maker” over “idolator” because the idolator, having no self-consciousness, is a kind of innocent conformist. The idol-maker, by contrast, has the highest self-consciousness of all, and should be prepared philosophically, conscientiously, for the consequences of the pervasive idolatry in which he has, in effect, a vested interest.

  Here, lifted out of the astonishing little volume called Kabbalah and Criticism, is a severe (a favorite adjective of Bloom’s) representation of an idol:

  What then does an idol create? Alas, an idol has nothing, and creates nothing. Its presence is a promise, part of the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Its unity is in the good will of its worshiper.

  Now a confession. Following one of Bloom’s techniques in his reading of Nietzsche and Freud, I have substituted one word for another. Bloom wrote “poem,” not “idol”;
“reader,” not “worshiper.” What turns out to be an adeptly expressive description of an idol is also, for Bloom, a useful description of a poem.

  The single most useful, and possibly the most usefully succinct, description of a Jew—as defined “theologically”—can best be rendered negatively: a Jew is someone who shuns idols, who least of all would wish to become like Terach, the maker of idols. A Jew—so Jews are taught to think—is like Abraham, who sees through idols. But Bloom is both: he is both Terach and Abraham.3 He is a system-builder who is aware that a closed, internalized system is an idol, and that an idol, without power in itself, is nevertheless a perilous, indeed a sinister, taint in the world.