The Ritual of New Creation (9 page)

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Authors: Norman Finkelstein

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BOOK: The Ritual of New Creation
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Page 30
To this we can add Bloom's earlier assertion, opposing deconstruction, that "the human writes, the human thinks, and always following after and defending against another human, however fantasized that human becomes in the strong imaginings of those who arrive later upon the scene."
10
When we take such statementsand many more like themtogether, we arrive with Bloom at the lofty solipsism or Gnosis of the self toward which his dialectics of influence and fascination with power always lead. More than any other element in his theories, it is Bloom's Gnosis"a timeless knowing, as available now as it was then, and available alike to those Christians, to those Jews and to those secular intellectuals who are not persuaded by orthodox or normative accounts or versions of religion"
11
which cancels not only normative religious practices but normative literary practices as well. This is not to say that literature of the traditional genres will cease to be produced (though Bloom always pretends amazement when another ephebe somehow manages to crawl, like some Kafkaesque insect, out from under the Oedipal heap of precursors), but that our perceptions of literary production may come to constitute literature in a manner that is every bit as psychically potent and aesthetically charged as the text we read and interpret. For Bloom, this has always been the case; it is the deep truth of all literary creation. It seems beside the point to term such understanding, whether derived from reading or writing, "literary criticism," which is to say, knowledge of a work that is other than our own. Indeed, we have made the work our own, having transformed it, through the necessary revisionary ratios, into Gnosis, which stands apart from all creation, especially the cosmos of all created, anterior texts. As Bloom declares:
Poetry and criticism are useful not for what they really are, but for whatever poetic and critical use you can usurp them to, which means that interpretive poems and poetic interpretations are concepts you make happen, rather than concepts of being.
12
Or to cite one of his favorite aphorisms of Emerson, "for every seeing soul there are two absorbing facts
I and the Abyss.
"
In
Agon,
the opening chapters of which codify so many of Bloom's earlier, implicit conclusions, we are informed that unlike philosophical or rational theological knowledge, "Gnosis never yields to a process of rigorous working-through."
12
I would argue, however,
 
Page 31
that
Kabbalah and Criticism,
often considered the most esoteric of Bloom's works, is the site of just such a working-through, where the revisionist, with his Orthodox upbringing and his equally orthodox New Critical training, teaches himself to go against the Talmudic injunction which he himself quotes and, like the Kabbalists, reads "by so inclined a light that the text reveals chiefly the shape of your own countenance."
14
Paradoxical as it may seem, Bloom's arguments for the defensive warfare of influence, which shatters the autonomy of the discrete text, finally reinstate textual and even authorial autonomyat least for the strong writers who, having won through to a renewed sense of identity, can only read themselves. Consider the strategies of this passage:
when you
know
the influence relation between two poets, your knowing is a conceptualization, and your conceptualization (or misreading) is itself an event in the literary history you are writing. Indeed, your knowledge of the later poet's misprision of his precursor is exactly as crucial a concept of happening or historical event as the poetic misprision was. Your work as an event is no more or less privileged than the later poet's event of misprision in regard to the earlier poet. Therefore the relation of the earlier to the later poet is exactly analogous to the relation of the later poet to yourself. The ephebe's misreading of the precursor is the paradigm for your misreading of the ephebe. But this is the relation of every text to every reader whatsoever. The same figures of belatedness govern revisionary reading as govern revisionary writing.
15
Lentricchia observes that here Bloom is presenting the critic as "one who prefers to 'misread' in order to pump up the value of his own writing."
16
This is undeniable, but I would press the argument further: given Bloom's Gnosticism (in which the initiate, having rejected the created cosmos, recognizes allegiance only to the alien Abyss), the knowledge of the critic in relation to the poet, which is the same knowledge of the poet in relation to the precursor, ultimately establishes the usurping, Oedipal self as the primordial text, no matter how crippling the revisionary wrestling seems to have been. From Satan's deluded "We know no time when we were not as now" to Stevens' perhaps equally deluded "I have not but I am and as I am I am," Bloom's heroes, at their most sublime, speak only
 
Page 32
about themselves. The map of misreading always seems to lead to the same place, if the reader or writer can endure the entire length of the quest. Bloom warns against idealizing what poems (and presumably, all strong writing) can do for us: interpreting the Lurianc notion of
tikkun
or cosmic restitution, he says:
Poems cannot restitute, and yet they can make the gestures of restitution. They cannot reverse time, and yet they can lie against time. The Kabbalistic
tikkun
has supernatural ambitions. We are not theosophists or mystics, and I do not urge another idealizing view of poetry upon us. Pragmatically, representation in belated poetry works to
remind
us of what we may never have known, yet need to believe we have known. Such reminding may be only a lesser kind of restitution, but it does strengthen the mind, almost literally it
re-minds
.
17
Be that as it may, Bloom's Gnosis of the self can be regarded as immensely gratifying to what remains of our post-romantic sensibility. Bloom promises that we can misread so fiercely, that our delusions can be so artful, that we can become "children of the dawn, earlier and fresher than any completed text ever could hope to be."
18
Perhaps we have discovered that such Gnosis is the one idealized, compensatory restitution that Bloom cannot avoid embracing.
How can Bloom's actual writing be described now that it has steeped in Gnosis for so many years? As we have seen, Bloom claims to be a "sect of one"; he does not care for disciples who will adopt his methods (the same is true of Emerson, as he affirms in his Journal
19
), though presumably he would accept a few, given his belief in the necessity of literary elites.
20
Indeed, it is hard to conceive of even the most audacious and theoretically sophisticated graduate students writing their dissertations in the Bloomian manner; the community of consensus in the persons of their directors would stifle them soon enough, given what the master accurately calls "acceptable critical style": "a worn-out Neoclassical diction, garlanded with ibids, and civilly purged of all enthusiasm."
21
But then, since he tries to dissolve the distinction between literature and criticism, Bloom inevitably looks past the boundaries of academic writing. We may think of him in the company of such strong critics as Kenneth Burke, William Empson, or Northrop Frye and continue to associate his work with that of the now largely dispersed Yale school of criticism. His most recent works, however, reveal the visionary company to which he truly wishes

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