The Novelist as Gnarcissist
BRESLIN, PAUL
The Novelist as Gnarcissist The Flight to Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy By Harold Bloom Farrar Straus Giroux 240pp. $9.95. Reviewed by Paul Breslin Assistant professor of English, Northwestern...
...As I mentioned, Gnosticism is hard to embody in images...
...one can rise from the contingent to the transcendent by the ladder of correspondence...
...Jonas further remarks that the rise of Gnosticism coincided with the collapse of the Greek city-state and the assimilation of regional identities into the empires of Macedonia and later of Rome...
...I had thought it slumbered forever in the back stacks of Partisan Review...
...On their quests they encounter many hostile powers, mostly drawn from Valentin-ian myth: Achamoth or the Lower Sophia, her daughter Ruha, the seven Archons...
...Behind the volatilized reality of The Flight to Lucifer—with its perpetually dissolving images—one just might discover, instead of existential terror, the situation Christopher Lasch has described as "the culture of narcissism": the volatilized reality of late industrial capitalism...
...Ihe problem, rather, is that having assembled such richly suggestive materials...
...we soon learn, is a reincarnation of the second-cenlurv Gnostic whose name he bears...
...But the vulgar materialist has some warrant for supposing that behind the Demiurge, the God of blind power, lay the blind power of the Roman empire, and that behind the alien cosmos lay the less metaphysical alienation of people uprooted by conquest from their regional identities...
...So then, he was to die, here on Lucifer...
...Nevertheless, whereas the laws of the city-state really corresponded to the will of the citizens, the empire and the cosmos proved less obliging...
...In so doing, the claims of the inferior worlds to absolute reality are disposed of...
...Valentinus...
...My objection is not to the hermetic subject matter, since it becomes accessible enough with a little effort...
...In fact, aslongagoas 1973 he took the title and terminology for the prologue to his The Anxiety of Influence from a Gnostic text, The Gospel of Truth...
...The beginning and the end, then, are relatively unproblematical...
...His experience, and mine, and that of most of his readers, takes place in a relatively secure middle-class setting...
...it is distinct from the psyche, which, with its passions and faculties, belongs to the material world...
...If we feel the allure of the Gnostic decathexis with the world, it is not because we have been crushed by blind power...
...Holy heimarmene, Batman—anything but THAT...
...Bloom apparently doesn't know what to do with them...
...Heidegger's description of human existence as "Geworfenheit" echoes the Gnostic idea of the spirit "cast" or "thrown" into matter...
...Despite exhaustion and surprise, he was charmed instantly and wholly...
...His description is inert and lazy, as in this paragraph on the temple of Saklas the Demiurge: "The Saklas-eum, towering above Siniavis upon a foundation a hundred steps high, was a gigantic domed structure surrounded on all four sides by chambers, stairs, and secret corridors, and above all by quarters for the priests and cells for sacrificial victims...
...Perscors' first name may derive from the -\ctae Tlmimif, a Gnostic text...
...One might try to transfer one's identity as citizen of the city-state to the wider identity of citizen in the empire and the cosmos itself...
...Perscors never walks, he "marches," and he is inclined to bombastic meditations: '"Until I die?' he questioned...
...Its terms are mostly derived from two sources that Bloom has brought together before: the Romantic literary tradition and Gnostic theology...
...Sex, always a problem stylistically, elicits phrases like "the terrible intensity of his comings...
...Or, still worse: "Taking it as the sign of his ongoing fate . . . ." Even the phrase "failure of nerve" puts in an extraterrestrial appearance...
...Something in her face had intoxicated him, and he felt no other memory, no other desire than the need to see that face again...
...The recollection of Divine origin is the "gnosis" the religion is named for...
...Impatient to master the full range of his fate, he marched westward through the hills...
...Jewish and orthodox Christian cosmology—as Hans Jonas has noted in his brilliant study, The Gnostic Religion—posit an intelligible relation between the deity and the creation...
...But not before battering at and at least maiming the Archons, and not before serving some purpose of which he sensed Valentinus to be the manifestation...
...Awakened into knowledge, the spirit must then escape to the realm of light through a succession of "worlds," each governed by one of the lower beings...
...He is thus successful...
...Reviewed by Paul Breslin Assistant professor of English, Northwestern University...
...Granting Bloom his subject, one still cannot help asking what led him to Gnosticism as an implicit metaphor for the human condition in the 20th century...
...Jonas subordinates this line of argument to the history of ideas...
...That Olam should come to redeem the Primal Man reflects the Gnostic idea that savior and saved are really parts of one temporarily divided being...
...A similar relation obtains in Platonism between the Ideas and their Hawed realization in particular things...
...A brief sketch of Gnosticism is necessary for understanding what Bloom is up to—and why he fails...
...Sometimes the elevated diction descends inappropriately, as when Saklas tells Olam: "This time you aren't getting through to the pillar of the Limit...
...Olam transports Valentinus and Perscors to Lucifer, a planet that "repeats earth, but very belatedly...
...a deeper drive spoke in Perscors...
...it is the middle, some four-fifths of the book, that utterly fails to achieve significant form...
...Most of the story is preoccupied with these vertiginous metamorphoses, or with various characters declaiming Gnostic wisdom at one another...
...The world we live in, however corrupted by Adam's fall, represents, at least imperfectly, the realized will of a loving God...
...One might accept generalized description as a convention of an elevated style, if this particular elevated style weren't so downright bad...
...Yet either because he simply cannot write good descriptive prose, or because he has a genuine contempt for the senses, Bloom does not render the landscape and persons of his narrative in clear, powerful images...
...contributor, "American Scholar, " New York "Times Book Review" With this book, the well-known literary critic Harold Bloom makes his debut as a writer of—let's say of fiction, though not in any usual sense...
...Finally, there is the language of comic books: "Not Achamoth, but you...
...Perscors and Valentinus encounter Man-daeans, Manichaeans and Marcion-ites, not to mention Simon Magus himself...
...Valentinus attempts to restore his impaired memory of his former incarnation...
...The exhaustion left him as he moved toward her...
...Contributing further to the extreme volatility of Luciferean reality is Bloom's poor control of narrative timing...
...She stood a few yards away, half concealed in her nakedness by the rushes, and laughed at him mischievously...
...Yet that is knowledge by report...
...Hate energized him...
...The sectaries are all given ample opportunity to quote from their scriptures...
...My psyche feigning the glory of my spark...
...Admittedly, taking Gnostic theology as a donnee posses technical difficulties that even a great writer in his maturity would be hard-pressed to solve...
...The antimimon pneuma, my Counterfeit Spirit...
...Still smiling, she retreated into the rushes and was gone, and he failed to find her, as he went deeper and deeper into the rushes, away from the river...
...The only mimesis possible is the encounter with illusion: One could imitate the illusions in order to show them dissolved...
...Jonas provides a clue in the epilogue to his study...
...Things and persons turn into other things and persons with dizzying rapidity...
...The clumsiness of the prose prevents the reader from granting the events, persons, or places much credence even as appearances...
...An open court surrounded the building, and about this ran four porticos...
...In contrast, Gnosticism maintains an absolute dualism...
...The story, briefly, goes as follows: Olam (the name means "eternity" in Hebrew), one of the 30 Aeons who dwell unfallen in the Pleroma of Fullness, descends to earth to awaken two modern Americans, Seth Valentinus and Thomas Perscors...
...It passes the successive boundaries by recognizing the presiding power and speaking the appropriate password...
...Bloom.repeatedly refers to events as "uncanny" or unnatural, but in a world where nothing is natural, nothing is unnatural either...
...Valentinus remembers at last the secret truths that he himself taught in an earlier life...
...The common factor in Gnosticism and the antinatural strain of Romanticism celebrated in Bloom's criticism is the insubstantiality of everything other than a grandiose transcendent self —and this doctrine, as Gerald Graff has shown, rationalizes all too well the experience of contemporary middle-class life...
...Emotions are rendered in a ponderous phenomenologese: "an impulse caused him to turn around...
...Nothing is duller than watching an illusion dissolve when one was never under its spell in the first place...
...This is especially true of the Valentinian variety, where matter is simply degraded spirit and vanishes altogether when spirit returns to its origin...
...Perscors finally discovers the hidden tower and, like Browning's Childe Roland, goes up in flames before an audience of those who failed in his quest before him...
...The heavens do not declare the glory of God...
...Occasionally a banal or implausible thought arrives in vestments of portentous language: "An old horror came back to him from his earthly life: it was a sickness that he had felt about bullfighting...
...His friend Perscors is an incarnation of Primal Man, the savior-figure in Manieheimism...
...The way of the spirit, then, is a long sequence of illusions encountered, penetrated and dissolved...
...To collect its scattered parts, the Deity sends an emanation or "call" into the dark world reminding the pneuma of its Divine origin...
...Bloom the critic describes the genre that Bloom the novelist undertakes: an internalized quest romance, where the persons and events must be understood as symbolic externalizations of an inner, mental drama...
...In the heretical Christian sects, this role is reserved for Christ...
...He points out that when we cannot believe in the old Platonic and Christian hierarchies, the cosmos becomes as alien to us as it seemed to the Gnostics...
...Gold and ivory were dominant in the facade of the structure...
...After their arrival, the earthlings go their separate ways...
...The one he did write is a symptom, rather than a criticism or a transcendence, of contemporary reality...
...in his immolation, Perscors is delivered from the world of matter...
...For a description of a person (if supernatural beings may count as persons), here is the first encounter with Ruha: "Looking up again, he saw a woman watching him...
...mv hastv researches turned up nothing on Per seors, but it apptoprialely suggests "pierce-body...
...The only reason the Deity need meddle with the dark kingdom of matter ruled by the Demiurge is that portions of itself have been "cast" into the body and have fallen asleep in matter, forgetting their Divine origin...
...If only the reader were "charmed instantly and wholly...
...and of course Saklas, the Luciferean equivalent of Ialdabaoth...
...Perscors is charged with recovering a tower of vision stolen from Earth and hidden somewhere on Lucifer by Saklas the Demiurge, chief of the Archons...
...Bloom, the critic-turned-novelist, seems scarcely aware that they exist...
...The illusions do not hold still long enough: everything is constantly changing and mutability itself becomes a kind of norm...
...At the time of the narrative, it is repeating the struggle among competing Gnostic sects in the second century AD...
...Bloom might claim that we are in a similar situation, that our own age is especially grim and full of arbitrary violence...
...Had Harold Bloom himself recognized this resemblance and brought his knowledge to bear on his materials, he might have written a different book, and a better one...
...The single possible surprise after the first 30-40 pages would be to encounter something that remains itself: to have a mill that does not grow taller as Perscors looks at it, or a raven that does not turn into a shaman (or was it the other way round...
...it does not lend itself easily to fictional representation...
...To the extent that The Flight to Lucifer has a plot, it has one of this kind...
...The spirit?or pneuma—of man is a spark of the Deity...
...the cosmos is not the work of the Deity at all, but of a lower being, the Demiurge, often equated with the God of the Jews...
...To begin with, Gnostic doctrine is radically anti-mimetic...
Vol. 62 • June 1979 • No. 12
