Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism by Harold Bloom
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Sounds of Silence

Harold Bloom’s religion was literature. He dedicated his life to writing of every type. But his was no religion of faith, of unswerving belief in the merits of the written word. Bloom recognised books, literature, indeed all of language, as a double-edged sword. One side allowed humans to conquer the world; the other trapped them in a sort of spiritual peonage. His therapy for this Gnostic reality of language was to use language against itself. That is to say, he loved poetry.

Bloom was not a self-recognised poet. Neither was he a novelist or a creator of new literary forms. He was a critic, by which he meant that he wrote his biography as a response to the things he read. And this response was fundamentally religious:

“The original meaning of the state of being blessed was to be favored by God. Since I do not share my mother’s trust in Yahweh’s covenant with my people, I long ago transmuted the blessing into its prime form, which is our love for others. I turned to the reading and studying of literature in search of the blessing, because I came to understand we cannot love enough people. They die and we abide. Literature has become, for me and many others, a crucial way to fill ourselves with the blessing of more life.”

I think that it is because of this religious background that all of Bloom’s criticism may be considered as a form of poetry. His constant and inventive comparison of a word, literary piece, or genre with another effectively relativises all of literature by demonstrating the conflict (‘agon’ is a term he often uses) among interpretations and meanings. Bloom struggles with language not in the sense of searching for the right word or phrase but as a poet fighting to be free of it. Just as Jacob wrestled with God only to receive his eternal blessing as well as a permanent deformity, Bloom recognises the consequences of the biblical blessing and the injury imposed by language. He quotes Wallace Stevens:

“To say more than human things with human voice,
That cannot be; to say human things with more
Than human voice, that, also, cannot be;
To speak humanly from the height or from the depth
Of human things, that is acutest speech.”

Bloom says: “Poetry, as I most richly conceive it, is the ultimate secular mode of what the ancients called theurgy.” Theurgy is the calling down of the gods through incantations and spells - in other words, magic. By making unexpected connections within his incredibly expansive knowledge, this is exactly what Bloom does. The reader can only be astonished, for example, when he connects the biblical Song of Deborah with the Battle Hymn of the Republic in the American Civil War, or expresses his admiration for the biblical villains Ahab and Jezebel, or proposes the concept of “self-otherseeing” as a literary explanation of Revelation as a normal part of human existence (as well as a central key in reading Shakespeare). He improves our understanding of texts ancient and modern by making their connections clear:

“I listen even at my age to a trumpet call that urges me to fresh hope: “Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.” I think of Walt Whitman chanting: “Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sunrise would kill me, / If I could not now and always send forth sunrise from myself.” Or I hear Wallace Stevens lamenting: “The exceeding brightness of this early sun / Makes me conceive how dark I have become.”

“All institutionalizing of prophecy is betrayal,” Bloom says, revealing his view of religion as a permanent search, an unending interpretation of the world’s best interpretations (he hated the God of Milton not because it was violent but because it was doctrinal, and doctrine always serves the interests of power). And no matter how erudite, how nuanced his critical work is, it is never suggested as definitive, never pompous, but rather is intended to provoke yet more interpretation: “My intention for this book is to teach myself and others how to listen for the voice we heard before the world was made and marred.” It is out of silence that language emerged, and where it returns to be understood. And whence with Hamlet he now speaks.

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