The Ritual of New Creation by Norman Finkelstein Read Free Book Online

who arrive later upon the scene." 10
When we take such statementsand many more like themtogether, we arrive with Bloom at the lofty solipsism or Gnosis of the self toward which his dialectics of influence and fascination with power always lead. More than any other element in his theories, it is Bloom's Gnosis"a timeless knowing, as available now as it was then, and available alike to those Christians, to those Jews and to those secular intellectuals who are not persuaded by orthodox or normative accounts or versions of religion" 11 which cancels not only normative religious practices but normative literary practices as well. This is not to say that literature of the traditional genres will cease to be produced (though Bloom always pretends amazement when another ephebe somehow manages to crawl, like some Kafkaesque insect, out from under the Oedipal heap of precursors), but that our perceptions of literary production may come to constitute literature in a manner that is every bit as psychically potent and aesthetically charged as the text we read and interpret. For Bloom, this has always been the case; it is the deep truth of all literary creation. It seems beside the point to term such understanding, whether derived from reading or writing, "literary criticism," which is to say, knowledge of a work that is other than our own. Indeed, we have made the work our own, having transformed it, through the necessary revisionary ratios, into Gnosis, which stands apart from all creation, especially the cosmos of all created, anterior texts. As Bloom declares:
Poetry and criticism are useful not for what they really are, but for whatever poetic and critical use you can usurp them to, which means that interpretive poems and poetic interpretations are concepts you make happen, rather than concepts of being. 12
Or to cite one of his favorite aphorisms of Emerson, "for every seeing soul there are two absorbing facts I and the Abyss. "
In Agon, the opening chapters of which codify so many of Bloom's earlier, implicit conclusions, we are informed that unlike philosophical or rational theological knowledge, "Gnosis never yields to a process of rigorous working-through." 12 I would argue, however,

 

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that Kabbalah and Criticism, often considered the most esoteric of Bloom's works, is the site of just such a working-through, where the revisionist, with his Orthodox upbringing and his equally orthodox New Critical training, teaches himself to go against the Talmudic injunction which he himself quotes and, like the Kabbalists, reads "by so inclined a light that the text reveals chiefly the shape of your own countenance." 14 Paradoxical as it may seem, Bloom's arguments for the defensive warfare of influence, which shatters the autonomy of the discrete text, finally reinstate textual and even authorial autonomyat least for the strong writers who, having won through to a renewed sense of identity, can only read themselves. Consider the strategies of this passage:
when you know the influence relation between two poets, your knowing is a conceptualization, and your conceptualization (or misreading) is itself an event in the literary history you are writing. Indeed, your knowledge of the later poet's misprision of his precursor is exactly as crucial a concept of happening or historical event as the poetic misprision was. Your work as an event is no more or less privileged than the later poet's event of misprision in regard to the earlier poet. Therefore the relation of the earlier to the later poet is exactly analogous to the relation of the later poet to yourself. The ephebe's misreading of the precursor is the paradigm for your misreading of the ephebe. But this is the relation of every text to every reader whatsoever. The same figures of belatedness govern revisionary reading as govern revisionary writing. 15
Lentricchia observes that here Bloom is presenting the critic as "one who prefers to 'misread' in order to pump up the value of his