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I chose next to read the Paris Review interview with the eminent scholar and literary critic, Harold Bloom. Bloom is almost bigger than life and trying to sum him up in a short introduction to a brief excerpt would be a mug’s game. Bloom is a contrarian, a hyperbolist, a dogmatist, an effective iconoclast, and probably a genius. He is not in any way predictable, which makes his many, many books highly interesting reads.
As a literary critic, his most important text is probably The Anxiety of Influence. The general reader would also profit immensely by reading The Western Canon, as well as Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human (the title alone of this one should adequately explain why I called Bloom a “hyperbolist” above.)
Bloom also writes extensively on Freud, and on various aspects of religion. In this realm, his most controversial text is The Book of J, in which he maintains that the author “J” who wrote the texts which have formed the very heart of the Hebrew scriptures, was probably a woman. Another interesting read is The American Religion, in which Bloom proclaims that American religious life, and therefore the American socio-political agenda, is not founded upon a true Christianity, but rather a newly-evolved, particularly American, species of Gnosticism.
The Harold Bloom interview is very long, and incredibly dense. By the time I was half-way through it, I had already selected three excerpts as possible candidates for use here. I could have picked at least another three in the second half. I finally settled on the one that follows, because I feel that it gives an overall impression of what Bloom is all about. A young reader with any intellectual curiosity and dexterity encountering this excerpt should be launched by it into a lifetime of deep, fruitful reading. In the course of the interview, Bloom quotes his idol, Emerson, as having said “That which I can receive from another is never tuition but only provocation.” That pretty much sums up Harold Bloom for me.
Interviewer:
You teach Freud and Shakespeare.
Bloom:
Oh, yes, increasingly. I keep telling my students that I’m not interested in a Freudian reading of Shakespeare but a kind of Shakespearean reading of Freud. In some sense Freud has to be a prose version of Shakespeare, the Freudian map of the mind being in fact Shakespearean. There’s a lot of resentment on Freud’s part because I think he recognizes this. What we think of as Freudian psychology is really a Shakespearean invention and, for the most part, Freud is merely codifying it. This shouldn’t be too surprising. Freud himself says “the poets were there before me,” and the poet in particular is necessarily Shakespeare. But you know, I think it runs deeper than that. Western psychology is much more a Shakespearean invention than a Biblical invention, let alone, obviously, a Homeric, or Sophoclean, or even Platonic, never mind Cartesian or Jungian invention. It’s not just that Shakespeare gives us most of our representations of cognition as such; I’m not so sure he doesn’t largely invent what we think of as cognition. I remember saying something like this to a seminar consisting of professional teachers of Shakespeare and one of them got very indignant and said, You are confusing Shakespeare with God. I don’t see why one shouldn’t, as it were. Most of what we know about how to represent cognition and personality in language was permanently altered by Shakespeare. The principal insight that I’ve had in teaching and writing about Shakespeare is that there isn’t anyone before Shakespeare who actually gives you a representation of characters or human figures speaking out loud, whether to themselves or to others or both, on what they themselves have said. And then, in the course of pondering, undergoing a serious or vital change, they become a different kind of character or personality and even a different kind of mind. We take that utterly for granted in representation. But it doesn’t exist before Shakespeare. It doesn’t happen in the Bible. It doesn’t happen in Homer or in Dante. It doesn’t even happen in Euripides. It’s pretty clear that Shakespeare’s true precursor—where he took the hint from—is Chaucer, which is why I think the Wife of Bath gets into Falstaff, and the Pardoner gets into figures like Edmund and Iago. As to where Chaucer gets that from, that’s a very pretty question. It is a standing challenge I have put to my students. That’s part of Chaucer’s shocking originality as a writer. But Chaucer does it only in fits and starts, and in small degree. Shakespeare does it all the time. It’s his common stock. The ability to do that and to persuade one that this is a natural mode of representation is purely Shakespearean and we are now so contained by it that we can’t see its originality anymore.
I will end by disclosing that I learned from researching this post that Harold Bloom grew up in the Bronx, where he lived on the Grand Concourse and where he exercised his love books at the Bronx Library. This is the same library to which I walked—up Bainbridge Avenue to E. Kingsbridge Road—on many an occasion during my decade-plus sojourn in that borough. Had I only known!
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Showing posts with label Harold Bloom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Harold Bloom. Show all posts
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Reflections: Dopplegänging It
Have you ever found yourself understanding—understanding with real breadth and depth—another person concerning whom that understanding reveals the source of one’s personal existential trials in a clear light? For me, there have been at least two such persons: Simone Weil and Franz Kafka.
(What follows from this point on is only the roughest sketch of the possibilities touched upon, but in the form of a blog post, it will have to suffice.)
If Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, writing in the 19th century, began the most lastingly influential critical/taxonomic vivisections of Western bourgeois man—i.e., the first Modern man—it was Kafka, writing in the 20th century, who, having internalized the spiritual angst and existential anxiety revealed by those predecessors, exposed in his writings the dark depths of Modern alienation.
In proclaiming Kafka’s “central place in this century’s canon,” my favorite literary critic, Harold Bloom, notes in his indispensable text, The Western Canon:
“Certainly ‘Kafkaesque’ has taken on an uncanny meaning for many among us; perhaps it has become a universal term for what Freud called ‘the uncanny,’ something at once absolutely familiar to us yet also estranged from us. From a purely literary perspective, this is the age of Kafka, more even than the age of Freud. Freud, slyly following Shakespeare, gave us our map of the mind; Kafka intimated to us that we could not hope to use it to save ourselves, even from ourselves.”
Bloom—himself a kind of Gnostic Platonist—quotes the following as the acknowledgement of “a dualism that Kafka finds exists at the heart of everything and everyone”:
There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you.
And when the world has been unmasked, Kafka says, what is revealed is that:
There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.
Compare this, if you will to what Simone Weil, in speaking in the context of necessity, calls “gravity”:
We must always expect things to happen in conformity with the laws of gravity unless there is supernatural intervention.
And:
Generally what we expect of others depends on the effect of gravity upon ourselves, what we receive from them depends on the effect of gravity upon them. Sometimes (by chance) the two coincide, often they do not.
Particularly in light of that second quote, consider now these reflections of Roberto Calasso from the pages of K.:
Kafka was an expert on the feeling of being foreign or extraneous, and he began, in his last period, to consider it and represent it in his work in commonplace situations that became suddenly illuminating. For example, the family’s card-game ritual. For years, in the evening Kafka’s parents played cards. For years they asked him to take part. For years the son said no. ...Kafka inferred something quite profound: his behavior with his family made clear to him why “the current of life” had never swept him along, why he had always remained on the threshold of things that then eluded him.
I am reminded here of Simone Weil, always on the threshold of the Church, refusing to enter, much as Kafka refused to play cards with this parents.
Calasso continues:
It was Kafka’s suspicion, and this too arose from his observations of the family card game, that any practical initiatives on his part to camouflage himself in normalcy (and these could be as diverse an office job or halfhearted attempts to devote himself to gardening or carpentry) were simply palliatives or a clumsy way of masking behavior that remained as unmistakable, in its hopeless inconsistency, “as the behavior of a man who chases the wretched beggar from his door and then when he’s alone plays the benefactor by passing alms from his right hand to his left.”
I often find myself, in similar ways, feeling an inability to connect with others and instead playing a role in which both they and myself are imaginary creatures.
Again, Calasso:
This behavior corresponds to the sensation of going through life pressing his head “against the wall of a windowless, doorless cell.” The rest—“my family, the office, my friends, the street”—were “all fantasies, some closer, some further off.” Of them, “the closest” was “the woman.” And thus the endless attraction, since that closest of fantasies could condense within it all the others and act as their emissary.
In my own alienation, I find myself wondering: is what “the woman” was for Kafka as “the Cross” was for Simone Weil? Similarly, I am intrigued by speculating that what “the Castle”—with its all-powerful, intractably exclusionary, hierarchical bureaucracy— signified to Kafka, might in some important way be analogous to that which kept Simone Weil “waiting for God” on the cathedral steps, never to enter.
As presented in Simone Pétrement’s definitive biography of Weil, we learn that:
[Simone Weil] believes that Christianity is Catholic by right but not in fact.
“So many things exist outside [the Church], so many things that I love and do not want to give up… ....there is an absolutely insurmountable obstacle… It is the use of the two little words ‘anathema sit.’ …I remain with all those things that cannot enter the Church, the universal repository, on account of those two little words. …In order that the present attitude of the Church might be effective and that she might really penetrate like a wedge into social existence, she would have to say openly that she had changed or wished to change. …After the fall of the Roman Empire, which had been totalitarian, it was the Church that was the first to establish a rough sort of totalitarianism in Europe in the thirteenth century... And the motive power of this totalitarianism was the use of those two little words: ‘anathema sit.’”
As one might have heard it said in a smoke-filled church basement: “I can I.D. that totally.”
(What follows from this point on is only the roughest sketch of the possibilities touched upon, but in the form of a blog post, it will have to suffice.)
If Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, writing in the 19th century, began the most lastingly influential critical/taxonomic vivisections of Western bourgeois man—i.e., the first Modern man—it was Kafka, writing in the 20th century, who, having internalized the spiritual angst and existential anxiety revealed by those predecessors, exposed in his writings the dark depths of Modern alienation.
In proclaiming Kafka’s “central place in this century’s canon,” my favorite literary critic, Harold Bloom, notes in his indispensable text, The Western Canon:
“Certainly ‘Kafkaesque’ has taken on an uncanny meaning for many among us; perhaps it has become a universal term for what Freud called ‘the uncanny,’ something at once absolutely familiar to us yet also estranged from us. From a purely literary perspective, this is the age of Kafka, more even than the age of Freud. Freud, slyly following Shakespeare, gave us our map of the mind; Kafka intimated to us that we could not hope to use it to save ourselves, even from ourselves.”
Bloom—himself a kind of Gnostic Platonist—quotes the following as the acknowledgement of “a dualism that Kafka finds exists at the heart of everything and everyone”:
There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you.
And when the world has been unmasked, Kafka says, what is revealed is that:
There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.
Compare this, if you will to what Simone Weil, in speaking in the context of necessity, calls “gravity”:
We must always expect things to happen in conformity with the laws of gravity unless there is supernatural intervention.
And:
Generally what we expect of others depends on the effect of gravity upon ourselves, what we receive from them depends on the effect of gravity upon them. Sometimes (by chance) the two coincide, often they do not.
Particularly in light of that second quote, consider now these reflections of Roberto Calasso from the pages of K.:
Kafka was an expert on the feeling of being foreign or extraneous, and he began, in his last period, to consider it and represent it in his work in commonplace situations that became suddenly illuminating. For example, the family’s card-game ritual. For years, in the evening Kafka’s parents played cards. For years they asked him to take part. For years the son said no. ...Kafka inferred something quite profound: his behavior with his family made clear to him why “the current of life” had never swept him along, why he had always remained on the threshold of things that then eluded him.
I am reminded here of Simone Weil, always on the threshold of the Church, refusing to enter, much as Kafka refused to play cards with this parents.
Calasso continues:
It was Kafka’s suspicion, and this too arose from his observations of the family card game, that any practical initiatives on his part to camouflage himself in normalcy (and these could be as diverse an office job or halfhearted attempts to devote himself to gardening or carpentry) were simply palliatives or a clumsy way of masking behavior that remained as unmistakable, in its hopeless inconsistency, “as the behavior of a man who chases the wretched beggar from his door and then when he’s alone plays the benefactor by passing alms from his right hand to his left.”
I often find myself, in similar ways, feeling an inability to connect with others and instead playing a role in which both they and myself are imaginary creatures.
Again, Calasso:
This behavior corresponds to the sensation of going through life pressing his head “against the wall of a windowless, doorless cell.” The rest—“my family, the office, my friends, the street”—were “all fantasies, some closer, some further off.” Of them, “the closest” was “the woman.” And thus the endless attraction, since that closest of fantasies could condense within it all the others and act as their emissary.
In my own alienation, I find myself wondering: is what “the woman” was for Kafka as “the Cross” was for Simone Weil? Similarly, I am intrigued by speculating that what “the Castle”—with its all-powerful, intractably exclusionary, hierarchical bureaucracy— signified to Kafka, might in some important way be analogous to that which kept Simone Weil “waiting for God” on the cathedral steps, never to enter.
As presented in Simone Pétrement’s definitive biography of Weil, we learn that:
[Simone Weil] believes that Christianity is Catholic by right but not in fact.
“So many things exist outside [the Church], so many things that I love and do not want to give up… ....there is an absolutely insurmountable obstacle… It is the use of the two little words ‘anathema sit.’ …I remain with all those things that cannot enter the Church, the universal repository, on account of those two little words. …In order that the present attitude of the Church might be effective and that she might really penetrate like a wedge into social existence, she would have to say openly that she had changed or wished to change. …After the fall of the Roman Empire, which had been totalitarian, it was the Church that was the first to establish a rough sort of totalitarianism in Europe in the thirteenth century... And the motive power of this totalitarianism was the use of those two little words: ‘anathema sit.’”
As one might have heard it said in a smoke-filled church basement: “I can I.D. that totally.”
X
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Readings: A Cabal for the Ages
My copy of The New Yorker magazine with the Obama cartoon cover arrived in today’s mail, even as the brouhaha it created begins to end in a whimper. (Did I mention that, of all the many political, news, and cultural mags to which I’ve subscribed over the years, The New Yorker is the only one I still take?) Well, it is—and here’s why:
The Ryan LIzza story about Obama isn’t even close to being the most interesting piece in the July 21, 2008 edition. Consider, for instance, the article “Surfing the Universe” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells. This piece tells us the strange and wonderful story of a snowboarding beach boy who earned a Ph.D. in physics from UCSD at the age of 31 and then essentially dropped out of sight for most of the following decade, only to reemerge claiming to have discovered The Theory of Everything – the Holy Grail of Physics. More gripping than politics is this stuff, people.
But this one issue of The New Yorker can top even that. Are you familiar with the towering, magisterial, literary critic and thinker, Harold Bloom, who resides somewhere down in the ivy at Yale University? If not, begin learning about him here. I’ve read many of his books. They are all strange and challenging and…awe-inspiring. I sometimes think that Harold Bloom is buggier than a hillbilly hatband, but few writers have engaged me at so fundamental a level.
So, I ask you: In what slick periodical other than The New Yorker is one apt to find an article (“The Spiritual Life – H-Bloo on A-Rod” by Ben McGrath) that features the surrealistic constellation of baseball superstar, Alex Rodriguez; perennially dominant diva, Madonna; and Ivory Tower guru, Harold Bloom? You’re not gonna find stuff like this in the National Review or The Nation. No way.
How are these mind-bending connections made? Well, for starters, A-Rod has a plug and Madonna has a socket. You can work out a Big Apple celebrity mise-en-scene that works for you concerning how that juice allegedly started flowing. Harold Bloom, it turns out, is a big Yankee fan. Madonna and Bloom are both into Kabbalah. And A-Rod cites the Material Girl as his soul-mate. Hey, presto! This piece may come closer to the Unified Field Theory than the one cited above.
Bottom line: subscribe to The New Yorker; become acquainted with the mind-expanding writings of Harold Bloom; check out Madonna’s rendition of “Fever” on the Erotica album…
…and remember who sent you there.
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ADDENDUM: Since the article I'm raving about is entitled "H-Bloo on A-Rod" I guess that I should give you some Bloom on Rodriguez. Here goes:
"The great Alex Rodriguez, the famous A-Rod, is not a clutch performer," he said. "He compiles these enormous statistics, but every time I make the mistake of looking at a game he comes up with two out and men on second and third, and does nothing."
A-Rod no good in the clutch? Uh, Madonna -- feel free to chime in here, if you like.
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