The Ritual of New Creation (11 page)

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Authors: Norman Finkelstein

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BOOK: The Ritual of New Creation
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Page 37
founded upon a completer
study of literature
than we have yet achieved, but never upon literature itself, or any idealized mirroring of its implicit categories. The strong imagination comes to its painful birth through savagery and misrepresentation. The only human virtue we can hope to teach through a more advanced study of literature than we have now is the social virtue of detachment from one's own imagination, recognizing always that such detachment made absolute destroys any individual imagination.
34
It seems then that literature and humanism are ultimately incompatible, and only a constant policing of the writer's violent imagination and not its idealized celebration (as in the work of, say, Northrop Frye) will permit aspiring humanists to continue in their literary education.
Here Bloom both models himself after Freud and swerves away from him. Bloom distinguishes himself from his mentor in that for the former, artistic creativity is a matter of repression rather than sublimation: "To equate emotional maturation with the discovery of acceptable substitutes [such as the writing of poems] may be pragmatic wisdom, particularly in the realm of Eros, but this is not the wisdom of the strong poets."
35
In Bloom's revision of the Freudian narrative, it is in the id and not the superego that the poetic father-figures are to be found. Yet Bloom's dark wisdom regarding the savage desires of the strong imagination also resembles Freud's pessimism in such late works as
Civilization and Its Discontents,
in which the superego is seen as capable of severely punishing an ego which has already renounced many of its instinctual pleasures. In Bloom's understanding of literature, the detached "study of literature," or criticism, may operate as a superego, standing over the "strong imagination,'' though such critical detachment can also lead to the destruction of the imagination. As Freud notes, "Every renunciation of instinct now becomes a dynamic source of conscience and every fresh renunciation increases the latter's severity and intolerance."
36
Against such circumstances, Bloom remains the apostle for the fierce poetic voice: in his terms, "criticism teaches not a language of criticismbut a language in which poetry already is written."
37
Consider, for example, his use of the Hebrew term
davhar
("word"). Bloom compares it with the Greek
logos:
The concept of
davhar
is: speak, act, be. The concept of
logos
is: speak, reckon, think.
Logos
orders and makes reasonable the
 
Page 38
context of speech, yet in its deepest meaning does not deal with the function of speaking.
Davhar,
in thrusting forward what is concealed in the self, is concerned with oral expression, with getting a word, a thing, a deed out into the light.
38
Naturally, Bloom prefers the Hebrew notion, for in contrast to the Greek sense of order and context in
logos, davhar
emphasizes linguistic acts of the self that establish the priority of personal being. Although Bloom relates Derrida's kabbalistic sense of language to
davhar,
his general critique of deconstruction (and probably all philosophies derived from Greek models) follows from its continued reliance on
logos,
"word referring only to another word."
39
Genuinely assertive acts of speech are thrust forward by the (obviously phallic) self; they are creative insofar as they emulate the original act of Creation in Genesis. As Bloom well knows, Torah is traditionally understood as
davhar:
as "the concentrated power of God Himself, as expressed in His Name," it is "an instrument of Creation, through which the world came into existence."
40
There is much to be said for this position, if not from a philosophical than at least from a literary point of view.
Davhar
empowers the speaking self, allowing for a sense of priorityand hence authoritythat guarantees a vision of independent life. Thus Bloom can ask of Wordsworth in conjunction with Milton, "what is the Word (
davhar
) of his own, both as against and related to the Word of Milton, that Wordsworth is compelled to bring forward in
Tintern Abbey?
"
41
The same could be asked of all strong writers and their precursors, regardless of whether they are members of Bloom's particular pantheon, for
dahvar
specifies individual human relations among texts, however agonistic they might be. The self of the text is never entirely dispersed among linguistic or social practices, and while it resists a communal identity, its agon guarantees it will never be entirely isolated.
The same embattled humanism is apparent in Bloom's various pronouncements regarding contemporary concern over the formation and perpetuation of authoritative literary canons. The subject calls forth some of his most elliptical and gnomic prose, generating numerous digressions and verbal substitutions in an already restless discourse. Bloom first approaches canon formation via the vexed term
tradition,
which he defines as "good teaching, where 'good' means pragmatic, instrumental, fecund."
42
In a later discussion, he first asserts that "we cannot define traditionand I suggest we stop trying,"
 
Page 39
then shifts to the related term
canonization
and states that "when you declare a contemporary work a permanent, classic achievement, you make it suffer an astonishing, apparent, immediate loss in meaning."
43
What is beginning to emerge is Bloom's great ambivalence toward his subject and hence toward his culturally burdened role of sage: whereas the teaching or passing-down of tradition initially or ideally serves as personal empowerment, it invariably finds itself complicit in the procedures of canonization, which reify or sterilize the text, leaving the teacher's handing-over of fecund knowledge powerless and the student bereft. It is better, then, not to seek to define the process in which we are engaged, but Bloom is temperamentally incapable of following his own advice. From canonization he switches again to his perennial master-trope of
influence,
concluding that
"influence," substituting for "tradition," shows us that we are nurtured by distortion, and not by apostolic succession. "Influence" exposes and de-idealizes "tradition," not by appearing as a cunning distortion of ''tradition," but by showing us that all "tradition" is indistinguishable from making mistakes about anteriority. The more "tradition" is exalted, the more egregious the mistakes become.
44
When he is most gloomily humanistic, Bloom always consoles himself with notions of distortion and mistakes. Because tradition can never be what we wish it to be, because what we know and value most truly about the text is lost to canonization, then the entire process may as well be viewed as influence anxiety, an endless sequence of psychohistorical caricatures.
And yet somehow the capable self continues to emerge, and strong poems continue to be written:
A strong poem, which alone can become canonical for more than a single generation, can be defined as a text that must engender strong misreadings, both as other poems and as literary criticism. When a strong misreading has demonstrated its fecundity by producing other strong misreadings across several generations, then we can and must accept its canonical status.
45
This tautological definition indicates that, since misreading is the only means through which we can achieve enabling psychological

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