Ruin the Sacred Truths:

...David Caslronovo During the last fifteen years Harold Bloom has in-vented his own brand of psychological literary criticism: essentially unconcerned with the traditional analysis of authors' personalities, childhood traumas, and family situations, he has pioneered a new approach that focuses on the anxieties, burdens, and aggressions that a writer feels when he takes up his pen...

...Bloom's vision is a passionate and personal account of why writers create...

...This criticism is no clever game for professors, no precious savoring of plural meanings and ambiguities...

...Blake tries to cancel the Hebrew Bible, but winds up writing bibles of his own...

...Nice authors finish weakly...

...With Kafka and Freud (the latter, after all, a storyteller), Bloom examines Jewish prohibitions, idolatry, and the superego and its relationship to Mosaic law...

...Each author that Bloom treats illustrates his theme eloquently: how the past and our ambivalence toward it is a starting point for freedom...

...Eliot's idea of tradition and the individual talent-writers earning their places in a large historical process which they in turn alter-is seemingly behind Bloom's philosophy of literature...

...But this book, and the earlier The Anxiety of Influence (1973) give detailed accounts of how a new book purposely distorts, misreads, and overpowers an older work or tradition...

...Wordsworth finds strength in personal memory...

...Avoiding ponderous dismantlings of literature and ideas, autopsies on poems, he gives readers the story of his own search to know himself through books...

...The likes of Dante and Kafka use Christian and Jewish doctrine, ideals, and figures of speech for their own literary-egotistical purposes...

...Using a phrase from Hegel, Bloom sees self-conscious characters as "free artists of themselves...

...The writers he considers stand out as distinct and powerful imposers of ethical stories, private beliefs, psychological attitudes toward their characters, and luminous images of the soul and intellect...

...But the attentive reader will be impressed with Bloom's devotion to his role of teacher-sage, communicator of the complexity and grandeur of creative life across the centuries.e centuries...

...The dangers of his special lexicon-with words like "metalepsis" and "transumption" used to describe artistic revision-are also obvious...

...First offered as the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in 1987-88, the chapters of this book are a short course in Bloom's approach...

...At a time when literary criticism often seems to be an endless seminar about obscure questions of linguistic usage, Ruin the Sacred Truths helps to clear a space for literature as a succession of new spiritual experiences...

...Here he also links Beckett to Schopenhauer's pessimism, only to show how the contemporary writer's mockery is a new form of the sublime, a spectacular denial of human illusions...

...Figures do not blur into each other-and the reader follows a succession of very dramatic conflicts between authors...

...With Shakespeare, Bloom suggests how the influence of Chaucer's self-evaluating characters, especially the Pardoner, lead to the breakthrough into modern consciousness seen in Hamlet or Lear or other introspective, developing characters...

...Hemingway once acknowledged that he was in the ring with Stendhal and again with Balzac, but no one would get him in the ring with Tolstoy unless he went crazy or kept getting better...

...Rupturing their relationship to orthodox tradition, they nevertheless long for continuity and "inwardness" as opposed to the world's ambitions and drives...

...Creativity is theft, manhandling, misappropriation, and willful destruction...

...With a canvas like this, Bloom must be careful not to lose his readers in a tangle of ideas...

...Opposing the weight of "belief to the freedom of "poetry," he describes a world in which the most original figures transform their intellectual and spiritual heritage...

...Bloom's authors-including Jeremiah, Shakespeare, Milton, and Kafka-are ruthless competitors with their literary precursors, strong sons engaged in the Oedipal enterprise of overcoming their fathers and creating permanent places for themselves...

...Bloom only selects writers whose originality lies in a threatened and exhilarated sense of others' achievements...

...Only weak authors idealize and imitate their predecessors...

...The ideas here are especially valuable in linking these two writers with a desire to reinvent Jewish culture...

...He traces the way in which literary imagination attaches itself to and wrenches itself from the past...

...He shows how Dante "swerves" from Virgil, avoids Augustine's vision, seeks salvation through the invented figure of Beatrice, and glorifies his own achievement by having his ancestor Cacciaguida praise The Divine Comedy...

...Although the book seems rather abstract at times because it does not deal with the details of biography and literary culture, it succeeds in making the texts clear markers in the history of consciousness...

...Unlike Eliot's civilized world of poet-thinkers, Bloom's creative universe is ferocious, mocking, resentful, and ultimately murderous...

...Teaching at Yale as Sterling Professor of the Humanities in an era when some of his colleagues have become more involved with the slippery, tricky qualities of language than with the individual stamp of a writer's style, Bloom is a champion of identity...

...Bloom ends with Samuel Beckett's rebellion against his "father" Joyce's "apotheosis of the word...