Harold Bloom's Book of J and The Bible As Literature
Harold Bloom's Book of J and The Bible As Literature
Harold Bloom's Book of J and The Bible As Literature
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Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strong
est part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry."
Arnold elsewhere advocated the "spontaneity of consciousness" of the
Hellenes against the "strictness of conscience" of the more literal-minded
Hebrews, constantly seeking principles?sober truth?to prescribe and
foreclose what Arnold called (sounding like a proto-Derrida) "the free
play of the mind." Nietzsche similarly disvalued priests against poets in
The Genealogy of Morals?and, more ambivalently, contrasted the lit
eral-minded Dionysiac versus the illusion-loving (or fiction-loving) Apol
lonian in The Birth of Tragedy. I. A. Richards argued in Science and
Poetry that literature's value lay in its not offering "truths"?proposi
tional statements?but rather "pseudo-statements"; his book bore as epi
graph the passage from Arnold quoted above. Frank Kermode, citing
Hans Vaihinger's Philosophy of "As If (1911), summed up this whole
tendency in the word fictionalism; and by now professional literary
study seems to limit itself to the deconstruction of every notion of literal
meaning, truth value, or mere referentiality, however qualified.
As secularizing aestheticism displaced the sermonizing didacticism
of yesteryear, literary scholars began to propose a (thoroughly secular)
"recuperation" of the Bible, not as scripture, but as literature?as a book
for secular-minded people to read. The higher-brow strand of this tradi
tion is Bloom's, and for our purposes, it began fifty years ago with Erich
Auerbach's "Odysseus's Scar," in which he compared the episode of
the housemaid Eurykleia recognizing the disguised Odysseus in book 19
of the Odyssey with the story of the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22. As
I put it in these pages on another occasion (Sewanee Review, summer
1989), Auerbach's essay "struck so powerful a chord in England and
America after the war largely because it assimilated biblical narrative
to the literary canons of the twentieth-century avant-garde. Homer,
with his narrative continuity, his realism, his urge to explain everything,
was the nineteenth-century novel; Genesis, with its quick cuts and sur
prising juxtapositions, its suppression of conjunctions and transitions, its
indifference to verisimilitude, was primordial modernism." Auerbach put
Genesis on a par with Homer; Harold Bloom, in The Book of I, does
Auerbach (of course) one better, comparing the biblical writer J to
Shakespeare. Like Auerbach's, Bloom's is a sensibility trained on the
modernist sublime, as witness his frequent assimilation of J to Kafka;
like Auerbach, Bloom's premise "Bible as literature" is that we should
read the Bible for its literary beauties and aesthetic power.
This is a new version of looking for the wrong thing in the wrong
place. Not that the modern distinction between scripture and literature
is an anachronism as regards the Bible: on the contrary the Bible is the
original document of this distinction in Western culture. The problem
is that the Bible's "construction" of the distinction is heavily committed
the other way, for scripture and against literature.
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Consider, to begin with, that the Bible's sacred history is recorded
in prose. When alphabetic writing appeared among the ancient Israel
ites, and it became possible to entrust the primeval mythos of the tribe(s)
to a data-retrieval system more reliable than bardic memory, the decision
among the ancient Hebrews was to reduce the oral poetry to a bare
bones prose pr?cis. In the Pentateuch, quotation verbatim, in verse,
from preliterate sources is reserved only for archaic formulae?oaths,
curses, blessings, promises, oracles, prophecies?of particular verbal
importance in their own right. (Only once [Numbers 21:27-30] does
the Pentateuch quote a poetic song ascribed to "bards"?and the quota
tion is a victory song formerly sung by pagan enemies that Israel has
just defeated, so it functions in context as a jeer against them and their
poetic boasts of power. So much for bardic orality in the Pentateuch.)
By contrast the ancient Greeks, when they developed an alphabet,
used it not to digest their folkloric patrimony but to transcribe it ver
batim and in full into the new medium?and so we have Homer. The
Bible gives us the stories only in outline form: the emphasis is on the
meaning, on the moral of the story, not the story?usually biblical
stories come with an interpretation attached, lest anyone miss the point.
The Greek cultural decision was different: to preserve the poetry, the
art, and so we have Homer's epic story in all its aesthetic force. "Mean
ing" was beside the point for Homer; he was not driving home a lesson
but telling a tale that would move his hearers. Hence Auerbach's remark
that "Homer can be analyzed ... but he cannot be interpreted," implying
that with the Bible it's vice versa; with which compare T. S. Eliot: "Qua
work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to
interpret." Auerbach was arguing in the Bible's favor; Eliot tends the
other way in holding that a work of art's value is not whatever it has
in the way of an interpretandum, a meaning.
In De Quincey's terms the Bible is a text of "knowledge," not of
"power." Apologists for the Bible as literature defend the Bible as if
against a charge of having assayed power and failed?so they proceed
by arguing for the great aesthetic power of this or that biblical passage;
Auerbach, for example, bestows Schiller's formula for "the tragic" upon
the story of the binding of Isaac, in asserting that it "robs us of our emo
tional freedom." But such power belongs to performers with the rhap
sodic charisma that we today expect not from poets but from singers;
moreover the power to "rob us of our emotional freedom" is just what
biblical prose refuses, and refuses programmatically. The Bible is not a
text of power: not because it tried to be one and failed, but because it
quite deliberately renounced aesthetic power from the outset. The He
brew decision to digest the oral heritage in prose, to banish the folk
poetry from the folklore, anticipated Plato's expulsion of the poets from
the Republic, and expressed a cognate distrust of poetry's power. It was
a move consonant with a monotheistic ethos that desacralized as "idols"
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all the cosmic "powers" (king/ tyrant, wine, sex, earthquake, and poetry)
that pagans deified (Zeus, Bacchus, Aphrodite, Poseidon, the Muses).
Like Plato the Israelite priests distrusted the rapture and transport?
the power?of poetry, and wanted to tame and bend it to the ideological
uses of the polity; unlike Plato the temple priests were in a position to
implement the program.
But I have been speaking of the Bible as if it were a monolithic
expression, one, and indivisible. It is; but it is also a unity assembled out
of diverse components. Our concern here is with one in particular, "the
J text."* Of all the strands of biblical narrative, the J text least answers
to the description I have given above of scripture. Whereas the meaning
of biblical narrative is usually transparent, and often explicitly stated,
J deals in richly enigmatic little fables. Their moral or meaning is any
thing but clear, because these narratives descend from a preliterate fore
time when story-telling was not yet a vehicle of theologizing didacticism.
So, granted, J isn't originally scripture. But that doesn't make it lit
erature by default. J's abrupt prose isn't artless, but its energy is over
whelmingly committed to matter, not manner; its pr?cis of the archaic
myths transmits their gist with minimal elaboration. J is thus neither
scripture (it lacks the didacticism) nor literature (its stripped-down nar
rative eschews aesthetic detail, digression, color, and effect for their
own sake). Later the encounter of this archaic polysemy with the in
terpretation-obsessed moralism of "normative" Judeo-Christianity only
augmented the interpretation imperative: what the stories must mean
became the exclusive focus. They are not only "patient of interpreta
tion" (Frank Kermode's formula for the classic text), but avid for it.
And they've gotten it, in spades, for two and a half millennia now.
The J text is thus the perfect object of attention for Harold Bloom:
J's maximally suggestive stories told in minimalist prose extend the wid
est possible license to Bloom's kind of strong interpretation. Moreover
the 2500 years' accumulation of commentary and interpretation encrust
ing these stories gives Bloom a "normative" tradition, a "facticity" (as
he calls it), to satirize?and increasingly this sort of whipping boy has
been something Bloom needs: where Bloom once staged agonistic
encounters between "strong" precursors and "strong" ephebes, his own
agonistic animus has recently been sending him into combat less with
the "strong" precursor texts themselves than with the "weak" or "norm
ative" misreadings by which a timid cultural tradition tries to defend
itself against its own heritage, as it persists in "strong" readings (or
"misreadings") like Bloom's own. Judeo-Christianity's 2500 years of
* The siglum / comes from the scholars (Germans) who first discriminated textual
strands in the Pentateuch according to the name by which each calls God. In one
strand the name, as they transliterated it into the Y-less German alphabet, is
"Jahveh" (in English, "Yahweh"); hence "the J text," or more simply, J.
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"normative" scriptural interpretation is Bloom's ur-version of this phe
nomenon.
I began by saying that Bloom's conception of literature is funda
mentally scriptural, profoundly unliterary and even antiliterary; I mean
that his interest in J, as in every text that has ever interested him, is in
its meaning rather than in its properly literary features. This orientation
has been career-long. Bloom's rebellion against the New Criticism, its
saint, T. S. Eliot, and its canon of (classic) texts was also a blow against
the haughty aestheticism of fictionalism and pseudostatement, and the
disinterested, gentlemanly style of the anglophile academic literary es
tablishment in and against which Bloom has made his career. Bloom
has always been for commitment, not detachment; for agon, not dis
interestedness. He began his career in the late fifties, pugnaciously
boosting the then-unfashionable romantic poets on the then-unfashion
able grounds that what they had to say, their message, their wisdom,
was just what was desperately needed by the world of wasteland mod
ernity?that post-Auschwitz, post-Hiroshima world of Bloom's young
manhood that summarized its despair under the rubric of the absurd
(which meant, first of all, meaninglessness).
Accordingly Bloom's accent was on matter, not manner; on content,
not style. His first book, Shelley's Mythmaking (1959), synthesized Shel
ley's myth (what Shelley had to say) with the thematics of Martin
Buber; Blake's Apocalypse (1963), subtitled "A Study in Poetic Argu
ment," likewise presented Blake as the proponent of an apocalypse or
argument that Bloom appointed himself to extract from the poetry ob
scuring it. (I open my copy of this book at random and find two qua
trains of Blake followed by this: "Nature restricts the heart and four
senses; she cannot bind or close the fifth sense, the specifically sexual
sense of touch. The Atonement set Blake free, not from the orthodox
notion of original sin, but from the deceits of natural religion." And
so on. Nothing about Blake's poem as a poem.) The Visionary Company
(1961) and numerous essays as well made the same case (for the content
of romantic vision) by the same means (exegetical paraphrase). Even
Keats, he of sensations rather than of thoughts, Bloom would recom
mend to undergraduates. In a headnote in a college anthology he is
praised not for his lyric power but for his "tough-minded and healthy
doctrine" of "natural humanism." This phase of Bloom's career closed
with his idol-smashing study, Yeats (1970), which affronted academic
fashion by valuing the early, "romantic" Yeats over late, because the
older Yeats had demoted his youthful apocalyptic ideals to the ironic
pathetic status of mere fictions.
But, even as he was denouncing Yeats's apostasy, Bloom was under
going a similar deconversion himself. Extensive reading in Freud re
sulted in the "influence" tetralogy of 1973 to 1976 (Anxiety of Influence,
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raised ad hoc by the special case of Poe; he goes on to quote C. S. Lewis
formulating "a curious principle" that there is indeed a difference be
tween the mythopoeic faculty that imagines what Bloom calls "the tale"
(Lewis calls it "the Myth") and the word-craft that incarnates it in a
"telling." Lewis raises the question "whether this art?the art of myth
making?is a species of the literary art. The objection to so classifying
it is that the Myth does not essentially exist in words at all. ... I first
heard the story of Kafka's Castle related in conversation and afterwards
read the book for myself. The reading added nothing. I had already
received the myth, and that was all that mattered."
Bloom pronounces Lewis mistaken on Kafka, but avows that in lit
erary experience generally, the myth (the tale, not the telling) is pre
eminent: "myths matter," writes Bloom, "because we prefer them in
our own words, and so Poe's diction scarcely distracts us from retelling,
to ourselves, his bizarre myths." When Bloom notes the "dreadful uni
versalism pervading Poe's weird tales," likening them to the "Freudian
reductions" of "psychoanalytic universalism," we are firmly back in
Bloom's "myth," which is Bloom retelling himself other people's myths,
or rather moralizing upon them, in his own words.
Bloom reportedly reads at the rate of a thousand pages an hour, a
velocity at which we can't expect what he reads to impress itself on him
in its own words. Certainly no critic so eminent has ever exhibited less
interest than Bloom in the tones and voices of literature and the ways
they can qualify, complicate, even unsay the text's manifest or propo
sitional meaning?a curious blind spot (or deafness) for a critic so in
vested in Freud, whose genius was to trace the devious relations of
manifest to latent content. But an indifference to tone seems the neces
sary condition for Bloom's pantheon, a virtual dormitory of strange
bedfellows. Who else could (or would want to) make Emerson and
Freud, Stevens and Poe, Yeats and Ashbery all sound so alike. They
sound alike, of course, because they are all being assimilated to the one
great original, Bloom himself, relentlessly retelling "their" myths in
his own words.
The Biblical "author" Bloom finds in the J text sounds a great deal
like Bloom, too, of course?Bloom, that is, in his own implicit account of
himself and his present ambitions: an imagination of (Bloom's word)
"impish" audacity, gleefully twisting the tails of the "weak" and "nor
mative" interpreters of some 2500 years. "Of all the extraordinary ironies
concerning J, the most remarkable is that this fountainhead of Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam simply was not a religious writer," he writes in
the The Book of J; and elsewhere, in his essay "From J to K," Bloom
pronounces that "Freud, like St. Paul, has a message, but J, like Shake
speare, does not." Here the notion of "literature for its own sake" serves
Bloom as a scourge against the "normative misreadings" of sanctimoni
ous literalizers who value J (or Shakespeare) as scripture, as message. He
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Bloom into a wholly different posture toward narrative. Most narrative
diffuses an easily synopsized armature of plot into a verbal texture of
complicating nuance and movement, most of whose detail will have to
go in any critical account. But in J the armature is all there is. There is
no superfluity to dispense with: J's prose is already so stripped down
as to render any further interpretive economy impossible. On the con
trary, expansion is inevitable, for you can't interpret any J story in fewer
words than J uses. Moreover stories so brief and so cryptic force inter
pretation to retell them; and, with so little to work with, interpretation
must grasp at any straw of detail to make its case. So for once Bloom
really does retell someone else's story in his own words, and attends to
details of plot, characterization, wordplay, and so on, in a way he never
has before. J has brought Harold Bloom as close to close reading as he is
ever likely to get.
So Bloom explicates the familiar stories as he might any other fiction?
but, for Bloom, fiction means something created by a self-conscious
imagination as vehicle for a vision intensely personal and bristlingly
antithetical to the values of the cultural surround. J is usually regarded
as a collector of oral folktales, a perfect example of Levi-Strauss's dic
tum that "myths have no authors"; for Bloom, on the contrary, J is a
"writer above all else," an "author" in all the fully blown romantic
senses: no mere amanuensis to an oral tradition, but a promethean
original.
But this raises a contradiction: an "author" can be "original" only
through a struggle with precursors, but Bloom presents a J with no pre
cursors to fight. And his idealization of (a female) J as exemplary ro
mantic "author" means a J self-consciously defying not only a precursor
tradition whose existence Bloom dismisses, but also a contemporary
"facticity" for which there is no evidence at all. Recall, for instance, J's
"monistic vitalism that refuses to distinguish between flesh and spirit":
the credit of this, presumably, is in J's "refusal" of a distinction her
culture assumed. This is an anachronism?dualism of the kind Bloom
means belongs to a later phase of the development of Hebrew conscious
ness?but anachronism is intrinsic to Bloom's construction of things. The
facticity J spurns turns out to be the normative interpretive traditions
fathered upon her, Bloom complains, by the weak idealizers of 2500
years. By going, literally, to the "original" (in the sense of chronolog
ically the first) writer, Bloom has obliged himself to replay his usual
"influence" narrative in fast reverse: till now, his "strong" writers have
struggled to master their precursors; J's antithetical animus is directed
at her posterity, and the influence she resists is not the strength of her
fathers but the weakness of her progeny.
Bloom means J's authorship to affront those who regard the J text as
the expression of a culture rather than of an individual. But Bloom is also
prosecuting a case against Foucault's death-of-the-author motif, accord
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Bloom's anxious tone answered better to the way things felt than the
pipe-sucking aplomb of the tweedy New Critic, now getting on in years.
It was just then, too, that "theory" arrived?a new tide of "influence" to
fight and master.
This was the background for The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and
its sequels. Here the "agon" Bloom depicted, between precursor and
ephebe, compelled because the "anxiety" Bloom described was so pat
ently his own. The Anxiety of Influence was less what its subtitle said
it was, "A Theory of Poetry," than (the book's own terms) a "crisis poem"
or "internalized quest romance," an anguished rhapsody driven by the
very anxieties it announced as themes. This afflatus took Bloom forward
for over a decade. But as the confessional subtext became increasingly
explicit, the agon became increasingly trivial. The agon between pre
cursor poet and ephebe poet became an agon between the "strong"
poem and the reader?that is, the critic. Then it became an agon be
tween the critic and the normative or received view of the precursor
text, i.e., between the critic of genius (Bloom) and earlier, stupider
critics. By now it is simply Bloom cocking a snook at his "weak" audi
ence.
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resentment" he denounces, when his own critical rhapsodies are driven
more by contempt of rival interpreters than love of the chosen object
he affects to celebrate.
Every so often I remember again what a marvelous genre the essay is.
The most flexible and widest-ranging of all literary forms, it can treat
any topic within human ken, and in any tone the human voice is capable
of; it can span the huge distance from the impersonal treatise or labora
tory report, through all the nuances that oratory can reach, to the spastic
immediacy of the personal letter or diary. It is also the most democratic
of forms: anyone can do it! In fact it is so accessible to those with no
special talent or inspiration that we regularly require high-school and
college students to produce them on call. I'm not sure that it has any
generic or structural mandate other than that of the "re-view"?which
is to say, that perspective or mode of inquiry which "looks again" at
something already seen or felt or apprehended, as it tries to achieve a
tighter focus on that experience. And unlike our more celebrated "cre
ative" genres, it fosters the illusion of a direct, unmediated communi
cation between a flesh-and-blood author, or addresser, and the role of
addressee, which any sufficiently informed reader can readily assume.
Its overwhelming, near-ubiquitous abundance and familiarity doubtless
cause us to consign it to an inferior standing in the field of letters, but I
suppose that none of us is immune to its powers (where else do we go for
information?) or its capacities to persuade, incite, enrage, and charm.
The four collections at hand?dominantly literary essays?are a fair
sampling of such collections. A book of essays, of course, is in some sense,
prima facie, a fraud. By generic necessity an essay is a single response
to an occasion?a desire or need to make a particular statement, to re
spond to a private or public stimulus, to comment on an event, a cultural
artifact, a private crisis, a situation that calls for clarification. If an essay
Louis Auchincloss, The Style's the Man: Reflections on Proust, Fitzgerald, Whar
ton, Vidal, and Others. Scribners, 1994. 178 pages. $21; E. L. Doctorow, Jack
London, Hemingway, and the Constitution: Selected Essays, 1977-1992. Harper
Perennial, 1994. xiv -f 206 pages. $11 pb; Brad Leithauser, Penchants b- Places:
Essays and Criticism. Knopf, 1995. x + 290 pages. $25; Edmund White, The Burn
ing Library: Essays. Knopf, 1994. xxviii + 386 pages. $25.
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