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I cannot see how one could possibly read
Harold Bloom’s most recent book without developing mixed,
very mixed feelings and thoughts about it. As a matter of
fact, this review itself is an attempt at making (some) sense
of the contradictory impressions that my reading of the book
made on me. It is as though Bloom’s deeply idiosyncratic attitude
to the authors he comments upon — and especially to those
he does not — is so contagious that it ends up contaminating
somehow the reader’s own attitude to Bloom’s book.
There are in Bloom’s book idiosyncrasies
he openly admits, and idiosyncrasies he cautiously passes
over and does not say a word about (the latter being somehow
much more puzzling than the former). He admits, for example,
that the very choice of the one hundred authors is “wholly”
idiosyncratic: “At one point I planned many more, but one
hundred came to seem sufficient. Aside from those who could
not be omitted — Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Homer, Vergil,
Plato, and their peers — my choice is wholly arbitrary and
idiosyncratic. These are certainly not ‘the top one hundred,’
in anyone’s judgment, my own included. I wanted to write about
these.” (ix) Once this confession has been (so strategically)
made, you cannot but accompany Bloom in his very personal
enterprise. As far as his unacknowledged idiosyncrasies are
concerned, I will deal with some of them later on in this
review.
One of the major merits of Bloom’s Genius
consists undoubtedly in the art of reading he proposes. In
general, Bloom is a master of showing how one has to approach
a work of literature in order to fully enjoy it and make the
most of it. In a world in which the endlessly sophisticated
interpretations proposed by the secondary literature tend
to overwhelm, suffocate, and ultimately destroy that which
is interpreted, Bloom teaches his readers how to read the
perennial works of world literature. (One of his previous
books is significantly titled How to Read and Why). It happens
sometimes that simplicity and commonsense are the most difficult
things to attain, and Harold Bloom teaches us how to approach
Shakespeare, Milton, Borges, St. Augustine, Cervantes, Plato,
and even the Scriptures: without prejudices, without ideological
or political lenses, without any useless sophistication and
presumptuousness, but with common sense, freshness, humility
(“I am a literary critic attempting to reeducate myself, as
I go on seventy-one, with the help of the master Saramago.”
[519]), and joyousness, and with an openness of mind and heart
alike: “That is the prime purpose of this book: to activate
the genius of appreciation in my readers” (3) Yes, there is,
beyond any doubt, a “genius of appreciation”, and the study
of the works of genius is, in Bloom’s view, the proper way
of cultivating it. As a matter of fact, if literature proves
to be of any use for life, this happens only because of those
works produced by genial minds: “Genius, in its writings,
is our best path for reaching wisdom, which I believe to be
the true use of literature for life.” (4)
It is difficult to overestimate the superior
value and sanity of Bloom’s insight: there is, there must
be, in any isolated writing something that renders it “useful
for life”, useful in a very peculiar sense: in the sense in
which the reading of an authentic literary masterpiece necessarily
elevates, augments and enlarges the reader’s consciousness.
This lies, in fact, at the very heart of the test Bloom proposes
for distinguishing genius from mere talent: “The question
we need to put to any writer must be: does she or he augment
our consciousness, and how is it done? I find this a rough
but effectual test: however I have been entertained, has my
awareness been intensified, my consciousness widened and clarified?
If not, then I have encountered talent, not genius.” (12)
As Miguel de Unamuno sharply noticed, it often happens in
the history of literature that some literary characters come
to be seen as more real and more authentic than the writer
who imagined them. Thus, for Unamuno Don Quixote has more
reality, vitality and more unforgettable charm than Cervantes
himself. This is because a genius has the miraculous capacity
not only to reflect life, the existent life, but also to produce
new life. A real genius does what William Shakespeare did:
“at the least [he] changed our ways of presenting human nature,
if not the human nature itself…” (16) Certainly, this “production
of new life” (change of human nature) is one of the most fascinating
things about imaginative literature: it is as if the human
condition transcends itself in a dramatic attempt to resemble
God.
Under such circumstances, the job of the
literary critic (which is: “the appreciation of originality
and the rejection of the merely fashionable.” [172]) is undoubtedly
an extremely difficult and demanding one. Actually, it is
so difficult that, Bloom seems to imply, an authentic literary
critic must have nowadays something of a frightening prophetic
figure. Upon reading Genius, I have been taking great delight
in following how Harold Bloom charmingly tends throughout
the book to portray himself — whether knowingly or unknowingly
— as some sort of (post-)modern prophet under the humble guise
of a nonconformist literary critic and professor of English.
Our prophet has thus the crucial advantage of having already
gotten inside the modern Babylon. For the corrupted city,
rotten to the bones by such terrible plagues as feminism,
political correctness, Marxism, Catholicism, etc. resides
mainly in our universities and cultural journalism: the academic
world “rewards cheerleading and loathes genius” (352); “I
have lived to find the temples of learning consigned to amateur
social workers.” (302); “nothing is more soul-destroying than
any praise from the New York Times Book Review” (389); “We
are governed, in academic and journalistic circles these days,
by feminist Puritans.” (705); “poetry and its absorption alike
have been all but destroyed by the creeping plague so appropriately
called ‘political correctness’” (726). All jesting aside,
it is a touch perplexing, if not simply incomprehensible,
to read in this book by Harold Bloom, someone who happens
to be an extremely influential and well-respected professor
of literature at Yale and NYU (formerly at Harvard) that:
“In our era, being excluded from the universities is quite
likely to be a blazon of excellence.” (430) Maybe this is
true, and Bloom is right, but in this case he lives his life
in the most self-ironical fashion, to say the least.
No doubt, one of the most ingenious and challenging
things about Bloom’s book is the principle based on which
the one hundred “exemplary minds” are divided into specific
groups or “families of minds”: “Each [genius] of my hundred
is unique, but this book requires some ordering or grouping,
as any book does.” (xi) In his book Bloom does not simply
portray, however sketchily, one hundred “exemplary minds”:
he is much more daring than that. He endeavors to offer a
“principle of order” governing the complex, multifaceted realm
of the history of imaginative literature, and — moreover —
to derive this principle from a venerated tradition of esoteric
and theosophical thought belonging to the Jewish spirituality.
And it is at this point that Bloom’s project reveals its indubitable
and courageous originality: “From the time …when I first conceived
of this book, the image of the Kabbalistic Sefirot has been
in my mind. Kabbalah is a body of speculation, relying upon
a highly figurative language. Chief among its figurations
or metaphors are the Sefirot, attributes at once of God and
of the Adam Kadmon or Divine Man, God’s Image. These attributes
or qualities emanate out from a center that is nowhere or
nothing, being infinite, to a circumference both everywhere
and finite.” (xi) The one hundred geniuses dealt with in Bloom’s
book (and, very importantly, they are not only poets, dramatists
or novelists, but also philosophers, psychoanalysts, religious
thinkers, founders of religion) are thus divided into ten
groups, corresponding to the ten Sefirot of the Kabbalistic
tradition: Keter, Hokmah, Binah, Hesed, Din, Tiferet, Nezah,
Hod, Yesod, and Malkhut. Then, each Sefirah has two “lustres”,
with each of them covering five kindred “exemplary minds”.
As such, by placing it within this complex scheme, and massively
relying upon the dialectics of the Kabbalistic thinking, Bloom
makes each individual genius reveal something essential about
divinity. If we can have some form of access to the divine
nature, this is made possible, in Bloom’s view, only by the
tremendous creative efforts of the geniuses of language. “The
Sefirot are the center of Kabbalah, since they purport to
represent God’s inwardness, the secret of divine character
and personality. They are the attributes of God’s genius,
in every sense that I use ‘genius’ in this book” (xii) It
is as if through the works of a genius some divine and primordial
wisdom is brought forth; in other words, whenever we come
across a piece of great literature, it is God himself — or,
anyway, something divine — who in some way describes himself
through those pages. According to this line of thought, the
great literature of all ages and of all peoples has some religious
dimension — it is work in the service of God as it reminds
us incessantly of God himself as Creator: the ten “Sefirot
chart the process of creation; they are the names of God as
he works at creating. The Sefirot are metaphors so large that
they become poems in themselves, or even poets.” (xi)
Yet, for all its originality, ingeniousness
and brilliance, there is a sense in which Bloom’s employment
of this Kabbalistic scheme is unconvincing, insufficiently
documented and with no essential consequences upon the substance
of the descriptions of the one hundred geniuses he portrays.
It is true, he makes several references to the works of Gershom
Sholem and Moshe Idel, but the few introductory paragraphs
in which Bloom advances the Kabbalistic theoretical framework
to contain his one hundred geniuses seem insufficient, insufficiently
wrought and badly tailored for his very ambitious project.
I believe that Kabbalah is much more complex a tradition than
one could summarize in few pages, and the works of genius
Bloom comments upon are only superficially and externally
connected to this theoretical framework; there is no sense
in which the works of his one hundred geniuses are derived
necessarily from his theoretical (Kabalistic) apparatus. In
short, it seems to me that the Kabbalistic theosophical frame
in which Bloom chooses to place his “exemplary minds” and
make sense of them remains an artificial element of his book,
a rather rhetorical and inconsequential device employed simply
for conferring upon it a touch of exoticism and peculiarity,
but nothing more. Bloom’s insight that every work of genius
has something divine in it, and, consequently, that the works
of all geniuses must say something about God’s character is,
needless to say, a great one. But I think that in this book
Bloom did not develop this insight as fully as he should (could)
have done.
On the other hand, one wonders whether this
failure is not simply a premeditated, a carefully engineered
failure. I am wondering whether the employment of this Kabbalistic
scheme is not one of the big ironies of this book. For to
say that the “Sefirot are metaphors so large that they become
poems in themselves, or even poets.” (xi) is to subtly imply
that, maybe, who knows?, not (genial) literature is divine,
and geniuses some sort of angels (demons, respectively), but
— on the contrary — that divinity belongs in some way or other
to the field of literature. That, as Feuerbach says, it is
not God who created us, but it is us who incessantly create
God. Actually, upon reading Bloom’s book, I have had serious
problems with understanding how someone who has a very critical
attitude to any established religion, someone who considers
himself unbeliever or, at the best, a modern “Gnostic heretic”
(121) can found a literary theory upon the Kabbalistic theosophy,
other than ironically — very, very ironically. As a matter
of fact, that Bloom has extremely ambiguous attitudes to matters
religious is abundantly illustrated in his book. For example,
he confesses that he “found my Bible in the poets and my Talmud
in the literary critics” (181) In his book St. Paul and Muhammad
are regarded simply as “geniuses of language”, as authors
of books. In a way Jesus Christ himself did not escape the
same cruel fate: he was initially one of the one hundred geniuses,
but eventually Bloom changed his mind (Jesus “was there, but
has been somewhat withdrawn, partly because of my perplexities,
partly through sage editorial counsel.” [113]) Bloom has a
very “original” way of reading the Scriptures: for him, just
as the Yahwist is merely “a storyteller, of amazing sophistication
and yet with a childlike directness” (115) so “Jesus, in his
sayings and in his symbolic acts, was the greatest of all
ironists.” (138) Well, in such an increasingly secularized
and dechristianized world as ours, when there is no real faith
left, Jesus Christ should be happy that at least he had an
excellent literary career and still is a big name in world
literature: “To speak of the genius of Jesus is to speak of
the sayings attributed to him, and some of these authentically
manifest an authority, memorability, and individuality that
are marks of genius.” (135) As a matter of fact, Bloom ends
up candidly admitting the absolute preeminence of literature
over everything, be it mundane or celestial: “I should observe,
with diffidence, that God and the gods necessarily are literary
characters. The Jesus of the New Testament is a literary character,
just as are the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible and the Allah of
the Koran.” (135)
What I have found particularly annoying in
Bloom is the way in which he completely refuses throughout
this book to control his numerous personal idiosyncrasies,
resentments and antipathies. I think that this goes well beyond
the limits of an ironical discourse, and tends at times to
become simply a list of cheap injuries and ordinary slander.
For example: Bloom finds it very easy to talk about “the disturbed
Jung, a mock-Gnostic” (179), just as he confesses: “Celine,
whom I find unreadable …is my garbage bin..” (637). He, for
example, complaints so aggressively about “our still-current
French intellectual disease” (519) as well as about the very
bad influence that some French authors (especially Michel
Foucault) may have upon the American intellectual life that
someone who does not know anything about these authors might
rightly imagine that all what they have written is gross pornographic
literature, to be kept safely away from the reach of children.
There is something sadly narrow and unwise in the way Bloom
understands to approach other cultures. I can not simply understand
how can a man, of his eminence, with his learning and esprit
de finesse, identify German culture with Nazism (he talk about
“the death camps awaiting Kafka’s lovers and sisters a quarter-century
later, when German culture triumphed.” [209]). Among the most
disappointing things I came across in his book are these comments
on Dostoevsky: “His obscurantism, which he calls Russian Christianity,
embraces a worship of tyranny, a hatred of the United States
and of all democracy, and a profound and vicious anti-Semitism.”
(785); “In spiritual matters, he merely was a bigoted know-nothing,
whose authentic anti-Semitism was the only evidence of his
election as a Russian prophet.” (790) Somewhere in his book
Bloom says: “The question we need to put to any writer must
be: does she or he augment our consciousness, and how is it
done?” So, taking seriously his advise, I am now asking: how
could possibly Harold Bloom augment our consciousness (or
his or anyone’s) when writing such nonsense?
© 2003 Costica Bradatan
Costică Brădăţan is a doctoral
candidate in philosophy at the University of Durham (UK).
His research interests include early modern philosophy, history
of ideas, philosophy and literature, philosophy of religion.
Bradatan is the author of two recent books (in Romanian):
An Introduction to the History of Romanian Philosophy in the
XX-th Century (Bucharest, 2000) and Isaac Bernstein’s Diary
(Bucharest, 2001), as well as of numerous book chapters, scholarly
papers, articles and reviews, published in both Romanian and
English.
Courtesy of Metapsychology where
this article was published for the first time
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