The Ritual of New Creation (12 page)

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Authors: Norman Finkelstein

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BOOK: The Ritual of New Creation
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Page 40
authority, canonization too, despite its enervating effect, may as well be regarded as a wholly pragmatic process. The generative fecundity of strong misreading becomes the final arbiter of cultural value: if the text proliferates through its legible afterlife, then it has won canonic status. Bloom's formulation of canonization may be seen as a darker (or misread) version of Gershom Scholem's, as it appears in "Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism":
In the process of this renewed productivity, Holy Scriptures themselves are sometimes enlarged; new written communications take their place alongside the old revelation and the tradition. A sort of no-man's-land is created between the original revelation and the tradition. Precisely this happened in Judaism, for example, as the Torah, to which the quality of revelation was originally confined, was "expanded" to include other writings of the biblical canon that had first been subsumed, completely and emphatically, under the heading tradition and considered merely repositories of this. Later, the boundaries often shifted: the canon, as Holy Writ, confronted tradition, and within the tradition itself similar processes of differentiation between written and oral elements were repeated.
46
For Scholem, this process of expansion, leading to the convention of commentary as the complement of revelation, is the means of providing individual freedom within the bounds of communal and historical authority. Scholem's expanding commentary becomes Bloom's several generations of misreadings: the self in its struggle against anteriority is preserved and remains viable, but, as we have seen before in Bloom's agonistic humanism, the historical, the communal, and the political dimensions recede into the background. In this case, canon formation becomes solely a psychohistorical study, a self-implicating continuum of stronger or weaker personalities.
Even within the bounds of pragmatism, this is a severely limited view. While the study of influence as it develops in Bloom's theory (part Freudian, part kabbalistic, but wholly American) is crucial to an understanding of canon formation, it lacks the political insights that are the necessary complement to any individualistic psychology. If the crisis of humanism is a crisis of cultural authority, and if canons of sacred or secular literature serve as the vehicles for such authority, then Bloom is telling only half the storyfor textual power is as
 
Page 41
much a matter of communal consensus as it is psychic struggle. As Gerald L. Bruns says in his consideration of the Hebrew Scriptures:
To inquire into the canonization of the books of the Torah is to ask how they came to possess their power over a nation and people. What did it mean for these books to become binding? More important, what were the conditions under which such a thing occurred?
47
It is symptomatic of Bloom's individualistic ideology that he rarely makes such inquiries, despite his professed concern for literary traditions. And while I think we must respect Bloom's reverence for the heroic voice and its "lie against time," we must also recognize that individual writers, no matter how "strong," draw their strengths at least partly from manifestly social configurations of power. Nor am I deterred by the fact that this statement could be made by either a "traditional humanist'' or a "deconstructionist": after all, in the course of Bloom's rhetoric, these figures are straw men; they represent the self-imposed intellectual boundaries within which Bloom has chosen to narrate his belated vision of cultural loss, the Fall from canonic authority, the Exile from the homeland of the text.
Raising the Sparks
From our perspective, religion is spilled poetry.
48
When Bloom, thinking of Yerushalmi's
Zakhor,
states "that all contemporary Jewish intellectuals are compelled to recognize that they are products of a rupture with their tradition, however much they long for continuity,"
49
his rather mournful tone masks a certain defiance, if not a madcap glee. At about the same time, he also declares that philosophy "is a stuffed bird on a shelf; so, of course, is religion, and they are equally dead and equally stuffed."
50
Given Bloom's enormous appropriations of Jewish thought, one can only conclude that a certain lingering fascination is to be found around that stuffed bird.
Bloom seems to define Jewishness in terms of negation and loss. Obsessed by the endless permutations of Jewish thought and identity since biblical times, yet resolutely opposed to the orthodox and even normative modes of Judaism found today, Bloom is a vivid example of Scholem's assertion that even in an age of secularization,
 
Page 42
"so many people from opposing camps, such as that of the pious and that of the consciously and emphatically irreligious, nevertheless confess their identity as Jews," making the question of modern Judaism's relation to tradition still one of great moment.
51
For Scholem, and certainly for Bloom, to be Jewish in a modern sense is to problematize Judaismto wander, to question, to agonize, and to appropriate, like a Kafka, a Benjamin, a Freud. David Biale claims that, for Scholem, "the only possible definition of Judaism is the totality of the contradictory principles which make up Judaism."
52
This is even truer for Scholem's ephebe, since Scholem remains a normative believer, while Bloom, the "Jewish Gnostic," repudiates religion as such. Bloom can still lay claim to Jewish identity because, paradoxically, modern Jewish authority, at least by implication, declares that authority in Judaism no longer obtains.
It is deeply ironic then that if Bloom represents the dilemma of modern Judaism's lack of unified authority, he still gravitates, as if by instinct, to the most archaic aspects of Jewish belief, to those fraught with the strongest imperatives. In his Introduction to Olivier Revault d'Allonnes's
Musical Variations on Jewish Thought,
Bloom reveals his fascination with the book's central vision of Judaism as a nomadic cult moving with the currents of time and opposed to the spatial orientation of state power. This vision accords with Bloom's own understanding of "wandering meaning": his meta-narrative of belated texts parallels the belated condition of diasporic Jewry, and both find their meaning only through nomadic or vagrant existence. Furthermore, Bloom sees the Freudian dynamics as based upon "Jewish myths of Exile" too; thus "psychoanalysis becomes another parable of a people always homeless or at least uneasy in space, who must seek a perpetually deferred fulfillment in time."
53
In short, the social, the psychological, and the literary spheres coalesce around the notion of Exile, as wandering generates meaning and fulfillment is always deferred.
Bloom's most compelling insight in this regard concerns the motivation for literary production within the Jewish tradition of textuality. As he pointedly observes, "In Hebraic tradition, all literary representation partook of transgression, unless it were canonical. But Exile is a profound stimulus to the human anxiety for literary representation."
54
In effect, Bloom explains why Jews have remained the People of the Book. While it is a commonplace in the study of Judaism to observe that the Book replaces the homeland for diasporic Jewry, Bloom notes in addition how the Second Commandment
 
Page 43
is repeatedly circumvented, if not violated, due to the thousands of years of psychohistorical pressure imposed upon the Jewish sensibility by the conditions of exile. Scholem, in "Revelation and Tradition," posits "new historical circumstances" as the original impetus for the development of Oral Torah and the tradition of commentary, including the canon-formulating, protective injunction of the
Pirke Aboth
to put a hedge around the Torah. In Scholem's analysis, revelation, as encoded in Written Torah, undergoes this elaborate transformation due to what he call , perhaps disingenuously, "the spontaneous force of human productivity."
55
In Bloom, this force, filtered through Freud, becomes the anxiety of influence, a psychic condition and a condition of textual production perfectly congruent with wandering and exile. The fear of transgression cannot maintain the imagination within the confines of Holy Scripture; like Jacob wrestling the angel, the great Hebrew agon about which Bloom writes so eloquently, Jews must always struggle with precursor texts and win their blessing. This blessing, as befits Revault d'Allonnes's nomadic people, "achieves a pure temporality, and so the agon for it is wholly temporal in nature": the text, wherever it may wander, will be preserved in time.
56
When we recall that the ubiquitous revisionary ratios apply to both sacred and secular canons, we can understand why such categories as agon, exile, wandering meaning, and so forth, expand to become part of Bloom's universal, albeit Hebraic critical machine. The Yahwist and Blake, Luria and Freud, no matter how remote from each other historically and culturally, all share the same psychological and rhetorical patterns, resulting in the same
stance
. What they
know
(gnosis) is the struggle for priority and the strong self in a text that becomes
davhar,
holding firm against the past and imposing itself upon the future. This is the only compensation for primal loss, regardless of who partakes of it. Cynthia Ozick is thus sadly mistaken when she accuses Bloom of turning literature into an idol; as Bloom would respond, a weakening process of idealization is at work when Ozick declares that, in the Jewish view, "there is no competition with the text, no power struggle with the original, no envy of the Creator."
57
Bloom's conception of Judaism, which, as I have implied, is an extreme version of Scholem's, disdains any such narrative of continuity and faith: all modes of writing, not merely those of secular literature, are equally "idolatrous"; and any commentary, whether it is a kabbalistic reading of the Torah or a Wordsworthian reading of Milton, constitutes a violation or break as much as a simple carrying

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