 | | became more the Jew by becoming more the Victorian. The catalyst for this daring gambit was Matthew Arnold, Trilling's guide to the nineteenth century and his ideal Hebraist, his master in strictness of conscience. Trilling's brand of anglophilia, one suspects, was a back door Judaism after all, with the novel its Torah and criticism its commentary.
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This "back door Judaism," when it identifies itself as Judaism at all, is refined and civil, sincere in precisely the way Trilling came to use the term later in his career. Thus, Judaism becomes available to Trilling's criticism only when it contributes to the moral, centralizing drive of the project; Judaism's
différance,
both founder
and
other for Western culture, is anxiously avoided.
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By contrast, Judaism is a central constituent in the work of Harold Bloom, and this centrality of Judaism (or perhaps I should say Judaisms) has contributed in turn to what has been through much of his career a fiercely oppositional stance. Bloom, whose ambivalence toward Derrida's thought is matter of record, would no doubt feel uneasy being regarded as the embodiment of contemporary Jewish
différance
. Besides, by now a number of the key terms in Bloom's work have found their way into our critical lexicon, and his allegiance to a long line of obviously canonical authorsdespite his unorthodox readings of themcertainly moves him toward cultural centrality. At a number of points in his career, Bloom takes issue with the notion of modernism itself, seeing it merely as a weak and unconvincing form of revision, and his comments regarding Postmodernism are even more dismissive. Nevertheless, if Postmodern thought has any real bearing on Jewish literary intellectuals, Bloom, perhaps more than any other contemporary, merits our attention.
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To be modern is to experience rupture; to be Postmodern is to reflect upon the experience of rupture, and in doing so repeat and further that experience. In such works as
Kabbalah and Criticism,
Bloom demonstrates that the interpretive paradigms which obtain in some of the most esoteric Jewish texts likewise obtain in the canon of secular literature, and that those paradigms depend as much upon agon and breakage as they do upon tradition and continuity. He comes to believe, as in a recent formulation, in "the stubborn resistance of imaginative literature to the categories of sacred and secular. Poetry and belief wander about, together and apart, in a cosmological emptiness marked by the limits of truth and meaning."
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If, as Bloom claims, Jewish modernity thus means Kafka and Freud, then
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