Evangelist of Romanticism
PETTINGEIL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing EVANGELIST OF ROMANTICISM BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL THROUGHOUT the last two decades Harold Bloom has infuriated the literary establishment by attacking its pet theories, from...
...Yahweh's one significant rival, in Bloom's view, is the creator of Hamlet and Falstaff...
...EVEN at his most technical, Bloom never is abstract...
...You do not make the Bible, or Shakespeare into your own fiction," Bloom observes...
...Finally, there are the volumes containing various lecture series he has given—one might call these "minitheories...
...Eliot, W.H...
...Bloom's iconoclastic interpretations are hard to shake off...
...As Bloom notes, we cannot in fact "describe precisely how J went about giving us a representation of Yahweh...
...His ultimate antagonist is not TS...
...The aims of religious belief do not necessarily coincide with the purposes of poetry...
...Despite every effort of organized religion to tame or downplay him, J's deity remains a Being possessed of such extraordinary intensity that humanity proves a pale imitation of his Nature...
...only a ritual repetition of the past is acceptable...
...Branching out from Romantic poetry, Bloom tries to come to grips with his own anxieties and influences...
...But none of us deals with the void out of which the deity brought matter into being...
...He is not a personification of Godhead, likethe Father in Paradise Lost, or the white-bearded Ancient of Days Blake satirized as "Nobodaddy...
...One could perhaps stretch one's imagination enough to conceive how it might be to write even The Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost, but not Genesis or Hamlet...
...When thestudents of the'60s abandoned their classrooms for street politics, Bloom reminded us that Shelley, too, had been a "New Left agitator...
...Writers & Writing EVANGELIST OF ROMANTICISM BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL THROUGHOUT the last two decades Harold Bloom has infuriated the literary establishment by attacking its pet theories, from New Criticism to deconstructionism...
...Auden, and Allen Tate still influenced academic tastes...
...His subjects are personally significant to him, and he scorns hiding behind the impartial critical vocabulary of "one" and "we" and "everybody...
...Soon any new book by him automatically brought forth a barrage of furious sputtering from colleagues whose sacred cows were being gored in its pages...
...Marlowe he subsumed...
...The book's provocative title comes from Andrew Marvell's worried stanzas about Paradise Lost...
...The crux of his theory—that each poet must struggle to absorb his precursors or they will, like the mythic Titans, devour him instead—produces a dramatic tension few critical systems of any era can match...
...Still, Bloom sees that Shakespeare also had his anxieties of influence, in the forms of Marlowe, Chaucer and, of course, the English Bible...
...emptiness marked by the limits of truth and meaning...
...His first book in five years, Ruin the Sacred Truths (Harvard, 206 pp., $20.00), the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard for 1987-88, falls in the last category...
...Anyone who knows his heroes will not be surprised by his confession that Sigmund Freud "always appears in my dreams as Yahweh the Father, complete with cigars and Edwardian three-piece suit...
...Bloom defends those 19th-century critics who talked as if Shakespearean characters lived outside their plays, as well as in them...
...His own Globe Theater plays out his vivid projections of writers wrestling their precursors...
...Eliot, or deconstruction—it is Harold Bloom, engaging in inward dialogue with the part of himself that would be obedient to past pieties, the self that would concede literary criticism is not a creative activity but merely mimetic explication...
...Of course they do, heavers...
...Against the deconstructionists, who think words are only about words, texts about texts, Bloom maintains that all literature represents a humanistic striving to create, in the sense of God making something out of nothing...
...Thus, Job and Jonah wrestled with the austere influence of their forebear, Jeremiah—in the manner of Jacob, who held on to the angel until he received a blessing...
...What I find incoherent is the judgment that some authentic literary art is more sacred or more secular than some other...
...Judged beside them, any fiction seems imitative...
...The Prince of Denmark is a "representation so original that conceptually he contains us, and has fashioned our psychology of motives ever since...
...In the case of Scripture, its magisterial cadences could be dramatically adapted to the mouths of stage kings, knaves and fools...
...Bypassing such revered figures as Matthew Arnold, he declared Oscar Wilde and John Ruskin as the 19th century's supreme literary commentators...
...Initially, Milton'ssecretary feared that the most sublime poetry, when applied to Scriptural subjects "would ruin (for I saw him strong), / The Sacred Truths to Fable and Old Song...
...An evangelist of Romanticism, Yale's controversial critic came to prominence when T.S...
...To the uninitiated, this may sound like another chapter in the argument about what constitutes the difference between secular and religious writing...
...Harold Bloom believes exactly the opposite...
...He confesses that he has been accused of "mistaking Shakespeare for God...
...For Bloom, the supreme poetic creation is the Creator (though the critic acknowledges that Yah weh may not be " invented" in the same fashion that Milton's Satan, or Dante's Beatrice have been...
...For him, "misprision" makes us cocreators, while providing the only way we can fulfill the ancient religious injunction to "know thyself...
...Yet he stands by Victor Hugo's aphorism that "after God, Shakespeare invented most...
...What we hope to fashion is the "song of ourselves...
...Outrageous remarks became his stock in trade...
...Then it became clear that Bloom's mechanisms not only evolve from volume to volume but that his readings are intuitive...
...Chaucer's tales suggested the idea of personality as subject...
...If you wish, you can insist that all high literature is secular (including Scripture), or, should you desire it so, then all strong poetry is sacred...
...Bloom has written several sorts of books...
...We would be diminished individuals had they never been created...
...Although his name continues to be associated primarily with his theory, much of his reputation can be traced to studies of single poets, from Shelley's Mythmaking (1959) to Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (1977...
...Bloom's richly inventivemind turns the kind of interior anxiety most critics suppress into a Shakespearean drama of influences...
...Rather, we confront forefathers (and mothers) whom we love—and works that have shaped us, yet whose potency seems a threat...
...Their reality defines the way we perceive ourselves...
...Only the Bible resists reinterpretation in the light of Shakespeare...
...Ruin the Sacred Truths is subtitled Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present...
...Within the Old Testament certain older books were well-known to the scribes of later ones...
...Or, as Rabbi Bloom has often said, "There are no texts...
...The Young Turk responded to their magisterial, impersonal tone intimately and intemperately...
...Freud and Yahweh form two persons of a Trinity of creators—the third being Shakespeare...
...Salman Rushdie's current plight reminds us that many people continue to feel any work of art dealing with something sacred is blasphemous...
...Indeed, he did this so masterfully that today most people cannot tell whether an out-of-context passage is Elizabethan drama or Holy Writ...
...There are only ourselves...
...This admission provides a clue to the secret of Bloom's combative manner...
...Eliot with the fervor of an old-fashioned atheist denouncing God...
...Nevertheless, the believer too shares the anxiety of balancing reverence and obedience to his Maker with the problem of establishing an identity...
...As for Freud, he discovered psychology by reading the Bard...
...And he went after T.S...
...Early reviewers were bogged down by such arcane terms as "tessera" and "apophrades...
...For novices, his most accessible works remain three collections of occasional pieces...
...Neither Judaism nor Christianity says much to illuminate them...
...Ruin the Sacred Truths seems his most intimate book to date...
...But somehow their power molds our conception of the Divine...
...From 1973 to 1976, Bloom published his theoretical trilogy about "the Anxiety of Influence...
...Bloom treats favorite texts like a lover who wants to possess them exclusively, so that they can never belong to another...
...But God as portrayed by the Biblical writer known as "J" or "the Yahwehist," equally fascinates the critic, who has described himself as a Jewish gnostic...
...No less than the Ancient Mariner's tales, they hold us in thrall...
...After listening to Bloom discuss Hamlet, Iago, Edmund, and Falstaff, one recognizes how much he perceives Yahweh, Jeremiah, Job, and Jonah as Shakespearean characters...
...The critic is convinced that we can no more imagine the world before the Bard than we can comprehend the void before creation, so profoundly has he altered our sense of personality...
...There is a unique strangeness in his stories about God breathing life into Adam, eating curds with Abraham at Mamre, attempting to murder Moses at one point, and later burying the leader of the Exodus with his own hands...
...Bloom reads the villainous Edmund in King Lear as a "sly portrait" of the rival playwright—"a remarkably antic and charming Satan, and a being with real self-knowledge...
...These incidents strike many readers of the Bible as so uncanny that they are often repressed...
...Poetry and belief wander about together and apart, in a cosmologica...
...Certain literary works combine the aspirations of both modes: Dante, Milton and Blake each wrote religious epics, daring to imitate the Godhead's progenitive powers while remaining faithful worshipers...
...Familiar texts metamorphose into something rich and strange when read as Oedipal conflicts...
...He confides that "As the years pass, I develop an even greater hatred of solitude, of finding myself having to confront sleepless nights and baffled days in which the self ceases to know how to talk to itself...
...The Bible itself is a work transcribed over many centuries...
...For such zealots all innovation is forbidden...
...Bloom vehemently rejects any such distinction, however...
Vol. 72 • April 1989 • No. 7
