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

Costica Bradatan 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.

Categories: General, Psychology