The Ritual of New Creation (8 page)

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Authors: Norman Finkelstein

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BOOK: The Ritual of New Creation
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received, a recognition that institutions of transmission substantially alter what is being conveyed, and that institutions are defined in the contemporary world by their breaking points.
41
Jewish literary intellectuals feel this more acutely than any other group in our culture, for more than any other group they have been obsessed with institutions of transmission. As we continue to discover the breaking points of which Newman speaks, I can only hope that this Jewish obsession with cultural transmission survives.
 
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Chapter 2
Harold Bloom; Or, the Sage of New Haven
As a paradigm for contemporary Jewish writers and intellectuals, Harold Bloom is an especially vexing figure. To be sure, Bloom's notions of Judaism's "text-centeredness" and of its essential understanding of writing as revision are major contributions to Jewish literary thought in our time. Likewise, they are keys to Bloom's own thought, both sources of his vision and crucial proofs of his system. But when it comes to Bloom himself, just what do revision and "text-centeredness" mean? Perhaps such concepts, however convenient, only confirm Bloom's rather perverse insistence that there is no essential distinction between literature and criticism, that "all criticism is prose poetry."
1
As I have already noted, it is assertions such as this, violating all sense of literary "manners," that would have greatly disturbed humanistic critics, including Jewish critics, of the preceding generation: ''Professor Moldy Fig," as Bloom likes to typify them. On the other hand, a deconstructionist would ask what all the fuss was about: Bloom's work, more or less unwittingly, merely propels itself into the abyss of language which dissolves all generic distinctions into so much "text." Bloom spends more of his time attacking this trendier attitude, "at best gorgeous nonsense, and at worst only another residuum of the now wearisome perpetual crusade of intellectual Paris against its own upper middle class."
2
Contrary to appearance, however, Bloom repeatedly insists that he does not come down between these two positions, but rather sees no real difference when comparing them. As he flatly describes himself:
 
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The interpreter here is a Jewish Gnostic, an academic, but a party or sect of one, equally unhappy both with older and with newer modes of interpretation, equally convinced that say [M. H.] Abrams and Jacques Derrida alike do not aid him in reading poems as poems.
3
The dissatisfaction that Bloom is expressing here has much to do with his own status as a writer, and hence the relation of academic criticism to
belles lettres
in our time. Fervently rejecting the consensus of "an MLA election or a Deconstructive banquet,"
4
speaking more and more like an Emersonian aphorist or Biblical
nabi,
occasionally indulging in self-parody but still quite serious in regard to his radically self-reliant Gnostic stance, Bloom continues his sublimely grotesque amelioration of disciplines and traditions, the textual wandering that is his own belated version of both the Exile and the Fall. As Jean-Pierre Mileur, one of Bloom's subtlest commentators, points out:
The exile that makes meaning possible manifests itself as belatedness, and the form of that belatedness, partially described by the revisionary ratios, is Bloom's own procedure of rhetorical substitutionhis endless wandering from the language of religion, to psychology, to philosophy, to rhetoricwhich rehearses a similar homelessness, since no rhetoric ever actually subsumes and becomes entirely sufficient to the purposes of any other. Being cut off from the substance, from the literal, is the price paid for meaning. But this suffering is also the freedom to trope and thus to be elsewhereour defense against the literality of death.
5
When the narcissistic self is wounded by the inescapable knowledge of its impending mortality, the result in strong writers is the "lie against time" that is the text. And just as meaning wanders rhetorically and psychically within the text and between texts (hence the need for a map), so Bloom wanders among the discourses, gloomily wrestling (despite his apparent high spirits) one author after the next, like the protagonists of the Gnostic fantasies he so adores. Will Bloom ever find, to borrow George Steiner's term, a textual homelandin the minds of his readers, if not his own? Or, if such a question is too benign for such a fetishistically pragmatic, fiercely appropriative thinker, what use can we find for this prodigious sage?
 
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Beyond Normative Literary Criticism
I remember, as a young man setting out to be a university teacher, how afflicted I was by my sense of uselessness, my not exactly vitalizing fear that my chosen profession reduced to an incoherent blend of antiquarianism and culture-mongering.
6
Despite his honest and wholly understandable ambivalence, Bloom is now ensconced as an arbiter of culture, and as such is given more to the mode of confession than most practitioners of an art once quaintly considered to have had pretensions of objectivity. After Bloom recounts a personal anecdote (it is invariably charming), he usually proceeds with an exposition of one or another of his most controversial themes. The implication, confirmed by the pragmatic basis of Bloom's theorizing, is that personal needs or desires have led him to his unique literary determinations, a statement which Bloom himself, as an ephebe of Nietzsche and Freud, no doubt would find rather banal. However, Bloom's immensely overdetermined revisionism, with its emphasis on Family Romance and the Will to Power, still does not automatically account for his insistence that normative literary criticism must free itself from "the modest handmaiden's role prescribed by the modern Anglo-American academy,"
7
that professors of literature, in the end, must not merely provide instruction in reading but must "teach how to live."
8
In
After the New Criticism,
Frank Lentricchia calls his chapter on Bloom "The Spirit of Revenge," but it is more than the New Criticism, or even as august a father-figure as T. S. Eliot that Bloom at his most sincere, most impassioned, and most cunning seeks to overthrow: it is nothing less than literature itself. If the deconstructionist seeks to demonstrate that all modes of meaningful discourse can be endlessly deferred because of the ambiguities and contradictions of language, then Bloom assaults those same modes of discourse by concentrating instead upon personal power:
Disabuse yourself of the lazy notion than any activity is disinterested, and you arrive at the truth of reading. We want to live, and we confuse life with survival. We want to be kind, we think, and we say that to be alone with a book is to confront neither ourselves nor another. We lie. 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.
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