Over the last several years, little by little, progressively though gradually, it has come to me that the phrase “Jewish writer” may be what rhetoricians call an “oxymoron”—a pointed contradiction, in which one arm of the phrase clashes so profoundly with the other as to annihilate it. To say “Jewish writer,” or “Jewish poet,” or “Jewish artist” is—so it has begun to seem to me—to retell the tale of the Calico Cat and the Gingham Dog; when they have finished chewing each other over, there is nothing left.

Encountering the work of Harold Bloom tends to reinforce these still-shadowy views. Bloom, a professor at Yale (who in his own person is, in fact, the entire department of humanities), is a singular figure. Bred like the rest of his graduate-school generation on the New Criticism, he increasingly represents its antithesis—but no, not its antithesis after all, because a thesis can imagine its opposite, and Bloom is not so much opposite as other. Bloom represents instead a frame of mind and of reference, and a source of fantasying power, that the New Criticism could by no stretch of its position or fancy arrive at. At the age of forty-nine, he is already outside the recognizable categories of American historical, psychological,¹ or textual literary criticism. The New Criticism, though it is by now more than thirty years since it was new, remains the model of literary text-analysis. Even when “psychology”—i.e., the writer’s biography—is permitted once again to surround explication de texte, the habit of belief in the power of the text to mean its own meaning, which the student must pry out through word-byword scrutiny, persists.

The New Critical formulation of how to read a page of literature was carried out against a background of 19th-century impressionistic “appreciation,” which included not only the words of the poem, but speculations about the “mood” of the poet, with appropriate allusions to the poet’s life, and often enough an account of the state of mind or spirit of the reader while under the mood-influence of the poem. The New Criticism, puritan and stringent, aimed to throw out everything that was extravagant or extraneous, everything smacking of “sensibility” or susceptibility, every derivation from biographical or psychological allegation. The idea was to look at the poem itself, rather than to generate metaphors about the poem.

The ideal of “the poem itself” has been with us for so long now, and is so bracing, that it is difficult to dislodge. Nevertheless, it is true that biography and psychology have begun to seep back into academic readings of texts, and some belletrists—one thinks immediately of William Gass—have even dared to revive the subjective style of impressionism, wherein the criticism of the text vies as a literary display with the text itself, and on a competitive level of virtuosity, even of “beauty.”

The vice of the New Criticism was its pretense that the poem was a finished, sealed unit, as if nothing outside of the text could ever have mattered in the making of the poem; and further, it regarded the poem as a presence not simply to be experienced in the reading, but as an oracle to be studied and interpreted: the poem’s real end was hermeneutic, its ideal state hermetic. The virtue of the New Criticism was a consequence of its vice—not only did it deny the opportunity, at least in theory, for displays of rivalrous writing (“beautiful” essays about “beautiful” poems), but in keeping out too much of the world, it also perforce kept out what was largely irrelevant to the poem and might, like a bumptious lodger with too much baggage, wreck the poem’s furniture.

Into this devotedly swept and sanctified arena strode Bloom. Lacking verbal fancifulness, he was plainly no kin to the Gass school (a contemporary school of one or two, perhaps, but larger if one includes an army of literary ancestors, Virginia Woolf among them). He had little in common with the Trilling school of meticulous social understanding. He was overwhelmingly dissimilar from the early pure New Critics with their strict self-denials. He was not like any of these, yet somehow suggestive of each of them, and again light-years beyond the imaginings of all of them. Like Trilling and his students, Bloom made connections well out of the provincial text itself; like the New Critics, he paid fanatic homage to the real presence of palpable stanzas, lines, and phrases; like the most subjective and susceptible of poet-readers, he conceived of poetry-reading as a kind of poetry-writing, or rewriting. And still he resembled no one and nothing that had come before, because, though he stuck to explication de texte in the old way, he made connections outside of the text in a new way—and, besides, he raised the subjectivist mode of vying with the original to a higher pitch than ever before, while draining it of all self-indulgence. Meanwhile, the connections beyond “the poem itself” that he found were neither social nor psychobiographical; they were entirely new to American literary criticism; they were, in fact, theological.

The theology Bloom chose was obsessive, syncretic, but not at all random—Jewish Gnosticism (i.e., Kabbalah, or what Robert Alter has called “linguistic mysticism”) strained through Freud, Nietzsche, Vico, and, of course, Gershom Scholem, whom Bloom sees as “a Miltonic figure.” This theology-of-text became for Bloom a continuing invention through four books of prophetic evolution: The Anxiety of Influence; A Map of Misreading; Kabbalah and Criticism; and Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens—volumes which reinforce one another even as they enlarge, through fresh illustrations, allusions, paradoxes, and widening sources, the arena of the Bloomian stride.

In a brief passage remarkable not only for its renewing the issue of Hellenism-versus-Hebraism as the central quarrel of the West, but also for its implicit claim that paganism—i.e., anti-Judaism—is the ultimate ground for the making of poetry, Bloom writes: “Vico understood, as almost no one has since, that the link between poetry and pagan theology was as close as the war between poetry and Hebrew-Christian theology was perpetual.” And again: “Vico says that ‘the true God’ founded the Jewish religion ‘on the prohibition of the divination on which all the Gentile nations arose’”—this after Bloom has already made it plain that he agrees with Vico in equating the earliest poetry-makers with pagan diviners.

_____________

Now the New Criticism, while keeping clear of theology proper, had always had a soft spot for the Gentile sacral, and was never known for philo-Judaism (given its heroes and seers, Pound and Eliot), so in itself this equation of the origins of poetry with anti-Judaism would not have been enough to shake the academy. It was not simply in their seeking out a theological connection that Bloom’s four volumes, each coming with astonishing speed on the heels of the one before, outraged one department of English after another, including his own at Yale. The real shock of Bloom was that he overturned what the academy had taken for granted for a good number of graduate-school generations: that if you analyze a poem closely enough, and with enough dogged attention to the inherent world of accessible allusion locked into every phrase, you will at length find out what the poem truly means. This New Critical premise had so much become received doctrine that it had, by now, entirely escaped questioning, and for the most recent graduate students it was there in a nameless way, like air or money: a medium urged and used without contemplation, presumed to be both natural and permanent.

Bloom, then, came on this scene of unalterable precedent as a shatterer,² to show that the very critical medium that had seemed to work so well, both for the assimilation of literature and for exchanging its terms, was incomplete and beside the point. “Few notions,” Bloom observed,

are more difficult to dispel than the “commonsensical” one that a poetic text is self-contained, that it has an ascertainable meaning or meanings without reference to other poetic texts. Something in nearly every reader wants to say: “Here is a poem and there is a meaning, and I am reasonably certain that the two can be brought together.” Unfortunately, poems are not things but only words that refer to other words, and those words refer to still other words, and so on, into the deeply populated world of literary language. Any poem is an inter-poem, and any reading of a poem is an inter-reading. A poem is not writing, but rewriting, and though a strong poem is a fresh start, such a start is a starting-again.

“Such a start is a starting-again.” This idea, original when applied to literature, is brilliantly borrowed from the history of religion. The “strong” poet is like Paul, or Mohammed, or the Buddha; as visionaries, these were all revisers, not innovators. All the varieties of Christianity and Islam are inconceivable without the God of the Jews, and all the varieties of Buddhism are inconceivable without their Hindu base of Atman and Brahma. Kabbalah, in turn, revises Scripture by making it up again through the expansion of its language. For Bloom, analogously, Milton becomes a kind of Moses, Wordsworth perhaps a Joshua, and Blake (in whom Bloom reads Milton) an Isaiah, or even the Psalmist. Bloom is interested in both Genesis, the Beginning, and in Beginning Again, to which Genesis is indispensable. He divides poets into “precursors” and “ephebes,” or revisers; and he defines revision as purposeful misinterpretation, or “misprision.” The “strong” poet, in Bloom’s view, makes use of his precursor, and the “tropes” or telltale traces of the precursor can be detected in the latecomer-poet. Further, the underlying problem of poetry-making, according to Bloom, is that Milton and Wordsworth, Emerson and Whitman, have already appeared and played their notes of grandeur; and the grandeur remains. Any poet born afterward is born into Miltonic and Emersonian shadows and illuminations; any poet born afterward is born into the condition of “belatedness,” which he fights by wresting not the flame of the precursor, which cannot be taken, but the power to remake the flame. Invention is replaced by interpretation:

The meaning of a poem can only be another poem.

Every strong poem, at least since Petrarch, has known implicitly what Nietzsche taught us to know explicitly: that there is only interpretation, and that every interpretation answers an earlier interpretation, and then must yield to a later one.

Poets’ misinterpretations of poems are more drastic than critics’ misinterpretations of criticism, but this is only a difference in degree and not at all in kind. There are no interpretations but only misinterpretations, and so all criticism is prose poetry.

_____________

In Bloom’s scheme, interpretation is a process nearly analogous to a process in physics; to describe and summarize it, Bloom has developed a kind of physics of rhetoric, a terminology concisely and meticulously calculated to account for each stage in the conduct of “belatedness.”

We are studying a kind of labor that has its own latent principles, principles that can be uncovered and taught systematically.

Poems are, Bloom says, “acts of reading” (the emphasis is Bloom’s own), and the description of how a poem comes into being out of its reading of an earlier poem, i.e., out of its own “swerving” from the influence of a powerful precursor-poem, Bloom names a “dialectic of revisionism.” It would be unfair to try to paraphrase or condense Bloom’s exposition of his “principles”; each of his four theoretical books is, in his own sense, a retelling or reinterpretation or revision of his starting insight, and each of the later three is a starting-again, a reinvigoration of the earliest. Kabballah and Criticism, for instance, restates Bloom’s concern in still another dress, this time the dress of Cordovero and Luria.

The ingenuity of the restatements themselves testifies to Bloom’s artistic intelligence, his supernal—even infernal—erudition, his architectural powers, both massive and rococo, his quick appetite for telling and then telling again in fresh garb. The tapestry is always changing, the critical fabrication is always new; but the obsessive narrative of the Bloomian drama beats unflaggingly below—the drama of giants who once walked the earth, and turned “originality” into an acrobatic labor for those who came after. Through misreadings, evasions, defenses, repressions, all the canny devices of “misprision” under the pressure of “influence,” the strong newcomer at last converts the materials of the precursor into substitute, sometimes antithetical, matter. It is a story of purgation and renewal. Above all, it is a story of a contest for power, in which the competitors struggle for the possession of context; in which context is contest. And finally, it is a mode of Gnosticism, wherein, through the toil of attaining knowledge of the Sublime Maker, the searcher himself becomes the Maker.

Through all of this, Bloom has invented, and continues to invent, a vocabulary of concision, which he begins now to call a “shorthand.” Here, for instance, is his “mapping” of “the pattern of ratios” in Whitman’s Song of Myself:

These inventions are later augmented by Kabbalistic terminology, as well as by vocabulary borrowings taken from Freud—without, however, Bloom’s subscribing in any absolute mode to the Freudian scheme. (In fact, he sees Freud as still another interesting datum of revisionist criticism.) Revisionism, Bloom explains, “as a word and as a notion contains the triad of re-seeing, re-esteeming, and re-aiming, which in Kabbalistic terms becomes the triad of contraction, breaking-of-the-vessels, and restitution, and in poetic terms the triad of limitation, substitution, and representation.”

It is possible that this fabricated and borrowed terminology may put off a reader of poetry as easily as a medical textbook may put off a philosopher; and just as anatomical taxonomy seems far from philosophy (though the philosopher himself may be no more than a sausage filled with all those named parts), so does the vocabulary Bloom has devised seem far from “normal” criticism, and still farther from poetry itself. Listed nakedly, Bloom’s glossary has the ring of engineers’ shop-talk. But this is to miss—because of the smoke it gives out—a chance of sighting the burning bush. The glossary is the girandole—the scaffolding out of which Bloom’s fireworks erupt. And what the fiery wheel writes on the sky is, after all, a single idea: discontinuity. What Bloom means by “revisionism” is a breaking off with the precursor; a violation of what has been transmitted; a deliberate offense against the given, against the hallowed; an unhallowing of the old great gods; the usurpation of an inheritance by the inheritor himself; displacement. Above all, the theft of power. These themes—or, rather, this chorus chanting a uniform theme—Bloom expresses through a nervy prowess accompanied by all the voices of inspiration that a capacious and daring mind, richly packed, can bring to bear on a ruling fascination. The jeweled diversity of Bloom’s expanding and self-paraphrasing glossary comes out of an intoxication with the beauty and persuasiveness of the bewitchment it serves—a bewitchment by force, power, seizure, rupture; the dream of storming, looting, and renovating heaven.

_____________

Bloom’s appropriation, in the third book of the series, not simply of Kabbalistic terminology, but, going beyond analogy and metaphor, of Kabbalah-like vaultings of imagination in applying that terminology, has begun, it would seem, to win him a “Jewish” reputation. Not that Bloom, with his celebrated command of the Romantics, is perceived as a Jewish critic; but his unprecedented incursions into Hebrew—what other American critic is at home with shevirat ha-kelim?—has at least suggested that Jewish sources imply Jewish insights—or, if not that, then surely a Jewish “stance.”

Professor Alvin Rosenfeld, for instance, in an essay in the Southern Review called “Notes on the Antithetical Criticism of Harold Bloom,” points out that the “strain of revisionary defiance” represented by Kabbalah “was greatly feared by the rabbis, who correctly understood its antinomian impulses. For to the Gnostic, knowledge is always knowledge of origins, ultimately a rival claim upon origins, which in human terms inevitably means an attempt to transform man into God”—and yet, having shown in two sentences how Bloom jumps past Jewish claims, Rosenfeld ends by asking Bloom to be more “balanced,” to stress “preservation” and “continuation” as much as “rebellion” and “loss.” Rosenfeld concludes: “If [Bloom] can now adjust his critical stance in a way that will allow for restitution [through “balance”], a new power may be his.” But this is to shout “Go West!” to a comet flying eastward. The “equilibrium,” the “vitalizing tension . . . between . . . tradition and innovation” that Rosenfeld calls for in Bloom is precisely what Bloom, all along the way, has schemed to destroy. Rosenfeld notes:

Bloom’s devotion to the Hebrew Bible has often been expressed in his writings. For instance, in A Map of Misreading, he identifies himself “as a teacher of literature who prefers the morality of the Hebrew Bible to that of Homer, indeed who prefers the Bible aesthetically to Homer. . . .” If present signs hold, one expects to see more, not less, emphasis on biblical thinking and exegesis in his work.

This would appear to promise a stronger Jewish element to come, stronger even, and possibly more central, than Bloom’s Kabbalistic concerns—but the fact is opposite. Kabbalah is Gnosticism in Jewish dress; still, it is not the Jewish dress that Bloom is more and more attracted by—it is the naked Gnosticism. To “prefer the morality of the Hebrew Bible to that of Homer” is not to make a choice at all—there is no morality, of the kind Bloom means, in Homer. And simply to speculate whether one might prefer the Bible “aesthetically” to Homer is itself, of course, already to have chosen the Greek way: the Jewish way, confronting Torah, does not offer such a choice.

If, then, one intends to reflect on Bloom’s work from a Jewish point of view, it is necessary to take him at his Gnostic word when he utters it. (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”) And if one means to find in Bloom a Jewish utterance, it must be in the utterance itself, not in the prospect or the hope of an utterance. The fait accompli of Bloom’s work judges the Jewish Bloom. If Bloom, with Vico, equates the origins of poetry with pagan divination—i.e., with anti-Judaism—and is persuaded of the “perpetual war” between poetry and Judaism, then it is inescapable that Bloom, in choosing poetry, also chooses anti-Judaism. Bloom’s gifts, and the structures that derive from them, yield a clue to what those awesome architectural masters who devised the cathedrals must have been like; but the cathedrals were wanting, one might say, in Jewish content.

For myself, I believe Bloom to be engaged in the erection of what can fairly be called an artistic anti-Judaism. This does not place him with Pound and Eliot, who are simply anti-Semitic in the commonplace sense, nor yet with the New Critics, whose austere faculty for “tradition” was confined to Christianity. Bloom is neither anti-Jewish nor, as his incursions into Kabbalah prove, parochial in the usual way of English-speaking literary intellectuals. Within the bowels of Bloom’s structure there lives, below all, the religious imagination: sibylline, vatic, divinatory—in short, everything that the Sinaitic force, bent on turning away from god-proliferation, denies. Bloom’s four theorizing volumes vault beyond criticism toward their destination—which is a long theophanous prose poem, a rationalized version of Blake’s heroic Prophetic Books. Not unlike Blake, Bloom means to stand as a vast and subtle system-maker, an interrupter of expectations, a subverter of predictability—the writer, via misprision, of a new Scripture based on discontinuity of tradition. In this he is pure Kabbalist. Contrary to Jesus, whom the Gospels report to have declared, “Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the Law” (a statement vividly anti-misprision, and one which those less stiffnecked interpreters, the rabbis of the Talmud who were Jesus’s contemporaries, never made), Bloom invents subversion after subversion, until he comes at last to the job of idol-making.

Idol-making: I posit this not figuratively, not metaphorically, not what Bloom might call “metaleptically,” but literally. And I choose for Bloom the more drastic term “idol-maker” over “idolator” because the idolator, having no self-consciousness, is a kind of innocent conformist. The idol-maker, by contrast, has the highest self-consciousness of all, and should be prepared philosophically, conscientiously, for the consequences of the pervasive idolatry in which he has, in effect, a vested interest.

Here, lifted out of the astonishing little volume called Kabbalah and Criticism, is a severe (a favorite adjective of Bloom’s) representation of an idol:

What then does an idol create? Alas, an idol has nothing, and creates nothing. Its presence is a promise, part of the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Its unity is in the good will of its worshiper.

Now a confession. Following one of Bloom’s techniques in his reading of Nietzsche and Freud, I have substituted one word for another. Bloom wrote “poem,” not “idol”; “reader,” not “worshiper.” What turns out to be an adeptly expressive description of an idol is also, for Bloom, a serviceable description of a poem.

_____________

The single most serviceable, and possibly the most usefully succinct, description of a Jew—as defined “theologically”—can best be rendered negatively: a Jew is someone who shuns idols, who least of all would wish to become like Terach, the maker of idols. A Jew—so Jews are taught to think—is like Abraham, who sees through idols. But Bloom is both: he is both Terach and Abraham.³ He is a system-builder who is aware that a closed, internalized system is an idol, and that an idol, without power in itself, is nevertheless a perilous, indeed a sinister, taint in the world.

Before I offer the necessary explanations for these views, we should, I think, reach a sophisticated understanding of idols. An idol is obviously not only a little wooden graven image standing in the mud. Nor is an idol merely a false idea. An idol can be, and usually is, remarkably made, wonderfully persuasive in its parts, and in its parts often enough wonderfully true. An idol can have, above all, a psychological realism that is especially persuasive and seductive. And beyond this, an idol can be seen to work. (To illustrate most reductively: the Egyptian cat god tells us a great deal about cats, and something also about the mind of the Egyptian who worshiped it, and even more about the ingeniously imaginative mind that created it. Furthermore, it did its job in its time as a working divinity: it demanded awe and accommodation.)

The chief characteristic of any idol is that it is a system sufficient in itself. It leads back only to itself. It is indifferent to the world and to humanity. Like a toy or like a doll—which, in fact, is what an idol is—it lures human beings to copy it, to become like it. It dehumanizes. When we see a little girl who is dressed up too carefully in starched flounces and ribbons and is admonished not to run in the dirt, we often say, “She looks like a little doll.” And that is what she has been made into: the inert doll has become the model for the human child, dead matter rules the quick. That dead matter will rule the quick is the single law of idolatry.⁴ Scripture tells us that the human being is made in the image of God, and since we do not know how to adumbrate God, we remain as free, as unpredictable, as unfated in our aspirations as quicksilver. But when we make ourselves into the image of an image, no matter how flexible the imagination of aspiration, we are bound, limited, determined, constrained; we cannot escape the given lineaments, and no matter how multitudinous are the avenues open to us, they all come, as in a maze, to a single exit.

A second important characteristic of any idol is that it is always assumed to preexist the worshiper.⁵ An idol always has the authority of an ancestor or precursor, even if it has just come fresh from the maker’s carpentry bench or brain-shop. In Rome, a just-hacked-out model of Venus has all the authority of a seven-hundred-year-old shrine to Astarte, because both rest on the precursor-goddess, the moon which rules the tides of both sea and menstruation. Every idol is by nature an ideal, an image-known-before. Every idol is a precursor, and every idolator is a Johnny-comelately, absorbing old news to refurbish for his instant needs.

A third characteristic of any idol is that, because it is inert, it cannot imagine history. It is always the same, no matter how multiform its appearances. It cannot create or alter history. When the God of the Jews said to Abraham, lech l’cha, Go forth, history was profoundly made, and continues to be made; the words lech l’cha, first heard five thousand years ago, at this moment agitate Presidents, Prime Ministers, oil sheikhs, hawks and doves. But an idol, which cannot generate history, can be altered by it: from-the-sublime-to-the-ridiculous is the rule of every idol. Hadrian was a ferocious oppressor of Jews, and declared himself a god to be worshiped in statuary of mammoth beauty. Digging in the sand for old coins a few years ago, an American tourist in Israel drew up the great curly bronze head of the Emperor. He, the god, is reduced to curio.

_____________

A fourth characteristic of any idol is perhaps the most universally repugnant, because it demonstrates how the power of the (powerless) idol—i.e., the powerful imaginations of its devotees—can root out human pity. From this uniquely Jewish observation flows the Second Commandment. The Commandment against idols is above all a Commandment against victimization, and in behalf of pity. Pity, after all, is not “felt,” as if by instinct or reflex. Pity is taught; and what teaches it is the stricture against idols. Every idol is a shadow of Moloch, demanding human flesh to feed on. The deeper the devotion to the idol, the more pitiless in tossing it its meal will be the devotee. Moloch springs up wherever the Second Commandment is silenced. In the absence of the Second Commandment, the hunt for victims begins. The Second Commandment is more explicit than the Sixth, which tells us simply that we must not kill; the Second Commandment tells us we must resist especially that killing which serves our belief. In this sense, there are no innocent idols. Every idol suppresses human pity; that is what it is made for.

When art is put in competition, like a god, with the Creator, it too is turned into an idol; one has only to recall the playing of Mozart at the gates of Auschwitz to see how the muses can serve Moloch—the muses, like the idols they are, have no moral substance or tradition. What the Second Commandment, in its teaching against victimization and in behalf of pity, also teaches, is the fear of godhood. And the “fear of godhood,” Bloom unequivocally writes, “is a fear of poetic strength, for what the ephebe enters upon, when he begins his life cycle as a poet, is in every sense a process of divination.” The strivings of divination—i.e., of God-competition—lead away from the Second Commandment, ultimately contradict it, and crush the capacity for pity.

These four essential characteristics of idolatry: that an idol can have no connection with human meaning other than itself; that an idol always has an ideal precursor on which to model its form; that an idol can have no connection with human deed and human history-making; that an idol crushes pity—these are also the characteristics that, in Bloom’s scheme, mark the way of poems. Bloom tells us that every poem born into the world is, so to speak, the consequence of an idolatry, and has been made in the image of an older poem, a precursor-poem at whose feet the new poem has worshiped. And just as an idolator takes away from his contemplation of the idol whatever his psychological hungers require, so does the new poem take from the older poem whatever it needs for its life. Moreover, even when Bloom’s structures, unlike the actual Molochs of ancient, recent, and current history, appear to be socially harmless and gossamer, they nevertheless dream of a great swallowing and devouring. Even Bloom’s superficially bloodless “interpretation” turns out to be annihilation. (Cf., once again, kenosis and shevirat ha-kelim.) The sacrificial victim is endemic to Bloom’s system, and links it ineluctably with the pagan sacral.

So far I have been describing Bloom as Terach, the maker of idols. But I said earlier that he is also Abraham, who sees through the hollowness and human uselessness of idols. Like Abraham, Bloom recognizes that Terach is courting perversity, that Terach in his busy shop has put himself in competition with the Creator, luring away customers by means of loss leaders, that Terach refuses to accept Creation as given, and has set up counter-realities in the form of instant though illusory gratifications—namely, immediate answers to riddles. The answers may or may not be lies. Often enough the answer an idol gives is a workable answer. No doubt fertility goddesses have been as responsible for as many births as any current fertility drug manufactured by Upjohn or Lederle. But they are exceptionally poor at urging the moral life, because to understand the moral life, one must know how to pay attention to, and judge, history—and at this idols are no good at all.

_____________

In a brief passage in his breathtaking albeit iconolatrous book, The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom acknowledges how idols and icons—i.e., poems—are no good at all in urging the moral life. It seems to me this passage is the most significant commentary on Bloom’s system; in it he becomes Abraham and chases all the customers out of Terach’s shop. Above all, it is a statement that calls into question the entire volume that surrounds it, and all the subsequent volumes:

If the imagination’s gift comes necessarily from the perversity of the spirit, then the living labyrinth of literature is built upon the ruin of every impulse most generous in us. So apparently it is and must be—we are wrong to have founded a humanism directly upon literature itself, and the phrase “humane letters” is an oxymoron. . . . The strong imagination comes to its painful birth through savagery and misrepresentation. The only humane virtue we can hope to teach through a more advanced study of literature than we have now is the social virtue of detachment from one’s own imagination, recognizing always that such detachment made absolute destroys any individual imagination.

“The social virtue of detachment from one’s own imagination”—this splendidly humane sequence, set in a paragraph of clarified self-comprehension, expresses precisely the meaning of the Second Commandment. The “strong imagination,” born out of a “savagery and misrepresentation” neither yoked nor undone by the Second Commandment, created the earliest Moloch, the furnace-god, and encouraged mothers to throw their babies into the fire. The savagery is plain; the misrepresentation is the general conviction that throwing children into furnaces is a social good. Since, as we have seen, idols always imitate their precursor-ideals, it can be no surprise that the post-Enlightenment Moloch of the Nazis reproduced the very Moloch recounted in the Bible—not simply in the furnace (here “misprision” was introduced in the form of technological substitutions, perhaps), but also in the ideal of a service to society.

Based on Bloom’s premises, it comes down to this: no Jew may be idolator or idol-maker; poems are the products of “strong imaginations,” and poets are dangerously strong imaginers, vampirishly living on the blood of earlier imaginers, from Moloch to Moloch; no Jew ought to be a poet.

One might want to intervene here with the reasonable reflection that “Tintern Abbey” is not yet Moloch. Quite. But push, push “Tintern Abbey” a little farther, and then a little farther, push the strong imagination of Nature a little farther, and one arrives finally at Moloch. “Tintern Abbey” assumes that the poet in contemplating his own mind and seeking his own mood, inspired by a benign landscape, will be “well pleased to recognize/ In nature and the language of the sense / . . . [the] soul / Of all my moral being.” But the ecstatic capacity, unreined, breeds a license to uncover not only joy, love, and virtue, but a demon. The soul’s license to express everything upon the bosom of a Nature perceived as holy can beget the unholy expression of savagery. It is not a new observation that the precursors of the Hitler Youth movement were the Wandervögel, young madcap bands and bards who wandered the landscape looking for a brooding moodiness to inspire original feeling.

Still another passage from The Anxiety of Influence (this one on Terach’s side) introduces in detail one of the ingenious terms of Bloom’s special analytic vocabulary:

Kenosis, or “emptying,” at once an “undoing” and an “isolating” movement of the imagination. I take kenosis from St. Paul’s account of Christ “humbling” himself from God to man. In strong poets, the kenosis is a revisionary act in which an “emptying” or “ebbing” takes place in relation to the precursor. This “emptying” is a liberating discontinuity, and makes possible a kind of poem that a simple repetition of the precursor’s afflatus or godhood could not allow. “Undoing” the precursor’s strength in oneself serves also to “isolate” the self from the precursor’s stance. . . .

Historically, morally, theologically, one cannot be a Jew and stand by this passage.

_____________

To recapitulate the idea-germ that exploded into the brilliant hugeness and huge brilliance of Bloom’s system of analysis: a recognition that all of us are disconsolate latecomers; that we are envious and frustrated inheritors; that there have been giants on the earth before us; and what therefore shall we puny latecomers do, how shall we steal the fire that the great ones before us, our fortunate Promethean precursors, have already used up for their own imaginings? The answer comes through modes of discontinuity—kenosis in the term Bloom borrows from St. Paul, shevirat ha-kelim, the “breaking of the vessels,” in the term he borrows from Kabbalah. But the discontinuity does not imply iconoclasm, the Abrahamitic shattering of the idol. On the contrary: it means reinvigorating the ideal of the idol in a new vessel, as Astarte begets Venus, as Rome, through Venus, feels itself possessed by its own goddess.

The notion of “‘undoing’ the precursor’s strength” has no validity in normative Judaism. Jewish liturgy, for instance, posits just the opposite; it affirms recapturing without revision the precursor’s stance and strength when it iterates “our God, and God of our fathers, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Nearly every congeries of Jewish thought is utterly set against the idea of displacing the precursor. “Torah” includes the meaning of tradition and transmittal together. Although mainstream Judaism rejected the Karaites in favor of a less restrictive interpretive mode, interpretation never came to stand for disjunction, displacement, ebbing-out, isolation, swerving, deviation, substitution, revisionism. Transmittal signifies the carrying-over of the original strength, the primal monotheistic insight, the force of which drowns out competing power-systems. That is what is meant by the recital in the Passover Haggadah, “We ourselves went out from Egypt, and not only our ancestors,” and that is what is meant by the Midrash which declares, “All generations stood together at Sinai,” including present and future generations. In Jewish thought there are no latecomers.

Consequently the whole notion of “modernism” is, under the illumination of Torah, at best a triviality and for the most part an irrelevance. Modernism has little to do with real chronology, except insofar as it means to dynamite the continuum. Modernism denotes discontinuity: a radical alteration of modes of consciousness. Modernism, perforce, concerns itself with the problem of “belatedness.” But modernism and belatedness are notions foreign and irrelevant to the apperceptions of Judaism. Modernism and belatedness induce worry about being condemned to repeat, and therefore anxiously look to break the bond with the old and make over, using the old as the governing standard—or influence—from which to learn deviation and substitution. The mainstream Jewish sense does not regard a hope to recapture the strength, unmediated, of Abraham and Moses as a condemnation. Quite the opposite. In the Jewish view, it is only through such recapture and emulation of the precursor’s stance, unrevised, that life can be nourished, that the gift of the Creator can be received, praised, and fulfilled. Jewish thought makes much of its anti-antinomian precursors as given, and lacks both the will and the authority to undo or humble or displace them, least of all to subject them to purposeful misprision. A scribe with the Torah under his hand will live a stringent life in order not to violate a single letter. There is no competition with the text, no power-struggle with the original, no envy of the Creator. The aim, instead, is to reproduce a purely transmitted inheritance, free of substitution or incarnation.

But the idol-maker envies the Creator, hopes to compete with the Creator, and schemes to invent a substitute for the Creator; and thereby becomes satanic and ingrown in the search and research that is meant to prise open the shells holding the divine powers. This is the work of “misprision,” the chief Bloomian word. Misprision is to Bloom what Satan is to Milton. It is not an accident that the term—before Bloom exercises revisionary misprision upon it—denotes “felony,” “wrongdoing,” “violation.” These definitions proffer a critical judgment of reality; they point, simply, to an Abrahamitic or, better yet, Sinaitic “shalt not.” But when Bloom utters “misprision,” it is the spirit of Terach that orders it.

_____________

Bloom, then, is a struggler between Terach and Abraham. He knows, mutedly, what Abraham knows, but he wants, vociferously, what Terach wants. “To revise is not to fulfill,” he is heard to murmur in Poetry and Repression, in a voice transfixed by Jewish transmittal. But in all four Prophetic Books one hears, far louder than that, Terach’s transfiguring chant: clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis, apophrades. And in the end it is Terach who chiefly claims Bloom. Like Terach, like Freud, like Marx, like the Gnostics, like the classical Christian theologians who are the inheritors of the Gnostics, like the Kabbalists and the Hasidim who are similarly the inheritors of the Gnostics, like all of these, the Bloomian scheme of misprision of the precursor is tainted by a variety of idol-making.

Bloom, giving us Vico’s view, plainly gives his own: “The making that is poetry is god-making, and even the ephebe or starting-poet is as much demon as man or woman.” An idol, the product of the demonic yetzer ha-ra,⁶ is an internalized system which allows no escape from its terms; and if one tries to escape, the escape itself is subject to interpretation as being predictable within the system. All the avenues of a maze, both the traps and the solutions, belong to the scheme of the maze.

Or think instead of a great crystal globe, perilously delicate yet steadfast, with a thousand complex working parts visible within, the parts often exceedingly ingenious and the whole a radiant bauble: an entire man-made world, beautiful, above all rational, and complete in itself. But it draws one to intellectual slavery. It signifies bondage to the wheel of self-sufficient idolatry.

The most enduring configurations of Jewish religious idiom are not unfamiliar with Bloom’s inventions; they were considered and discarded as long ago as Abraham, and again in Egypt, and again in confrontation with the Hellenizers, and now again in confrontation with so-called modernism, which is only Gnostic syncretism refurbished.

Literature, one should have the courage to reflect, is an idol. We are safe with it when we let the child-part of our minds play with poems and stories as with a pack of dolls; then the role of imaginative literature is only trivial. But what Bloom, anxiously influenced, has done, is to contrive a system of magic set in rational psychological terms, and requiring (as the Jewish religious idiom never will) a mediator. For Freud the mediator or medium is the unconscious. For Bloom the mediator or medium is the precursor poem. But for each, imagination has devised an inexorable, self-sufficient, self-contained magic system, the most magical aspect of which is the illusion of the superbly rational.

Bloom himself has seen that he began as a desperately serious critic of literature and ended as one inflamed by Cordovero and Luria. Perhaps the trouble—it is every writer’s trouble—is that he should not have been serious about literature in the first place; seriousness about an idol leads to the misprision that is violation. As Bloom the system-maker, in book after book, more and more recognizes that what he has invented is magic, i.e., “practical Kabbalah,” he turns to the magic system of the actual and historic Kabbalah for confirmation. It is as if Harold Bloom suddenly woke up one morning to discover that he had concocted Kabbalah on his own; only it was already there. That is like Venus opening her eyes in a dawning Rome to learn that she is Astarte reborn. Astarte will always be reinvented. In the absence of the Second Commandment idolatry will always be reconstituted, if not in wood or stone, then in philosophical or political concept; if not in philosophical or political concept, then in literature.

Through his placing the critic in competition with the creator, Bloom is often regarded as having committed an act of artistic hubris; but those who look askance at Bloom’s belief that the poem’s interpretation is as much the poem’s life as the “original” ought to be more troubled by the hubris of the poet, which the whole body of Bloom’s work strives to emphasize and even enlarge. Bloom’s transmutation of critic into poet, after all, is not so innovative as it might seem; it is no news that a critic may feel himself to be in a clandestine contest with the creative artist by understanding himself to be still another creative artist. It is true that Bloom has significantly altered the meaning of what it is to be “original”; but whether or not his conclusions are found to be attractive or persuasive, what he has made his originals do can stop the breath. He has vouchsafed them the temerity to usurp the Throne of Heaven.

Now none of this is to accuse or blame Bloom’s position because it is on the side of this grandest usurpation of all. The Second Commandment runs against the grain of our social nature, indeed against human imagination. To observe it is improbable, perhaps impossible; perhaps it has never been, and never will be, wholly observed. But the Second Commandment is nevertheless expressive of one of the essential ideals of Judaism, and like most of the essential ideals of Judaism—consider in this light the institution of the Sabbath—it is uniquely antithetical to the practices and premises of the pre-Judaic and non-Judaic world. In short, it is the Jewish idiom—with regard to art as well as other matters—that is in its deepest strain dissenting, contradictory, frequently irreconcilable, and for Bloom and others to think of his system as “antithetical” is a sizable mistake. What is antithetical goes against the grain of the world at large, while to work at idol-making is not only not to go against the world’s grain, but to consort with it in the most ancient, intimate, sibylline, and Delphic way. Bloom stands on the whole as defense counselor for those eternally usurping diviners against whom Zechariah inveighed: “For the idols have spoken vanity, and the diviners have seen a lie, and have told false dreams; they comfort in vain.”

But if there can be such a chimera as a “Jewish writer,” it must be the kind of sphinx or gryphon (part one thing, part another) Bloom himself is, sometimes purifying like Abraham, more often conjuring like Terach, and always knowing that the two are icily, elegiacally, at war. Bloom as Terach: “The Kabbalists read and interpreted with excessive audacity and extravagance; they knew that the true poem is the critic’s mind, or as Emerson says, the true ship is the shipbuilder.” Bloom as Abraham: “The Talmud warns against reading Scripture by so inclined a light that the text reveals chiefly the shape of your own countenance.”

_____________

In an essay called “The Sorrows of American-Jewish Poetry,”⁷ Bloom writes: “There is no recovery of the Covenant, of the Law, without confronting again, in all deep tribulation, the God of the Fathers, Who is beyond image as He is beyond personality, and Who can be met only by somehow again walking His Way.”

These words, I think, constitute still another call for misprision; but there is no way they can speak against themselves, or be creatively misread. The recovery of Covenant can be attained only in the living-out of the living Covenant; never among the shamanistic toys of literature.

Alas, like all the others, we drift toward the shamans and their toys.

¹ An instance of Bloom's use of psychology: “I do not think that the psyche is a text, but I find it illuminating to discuss texts as though they were psyches, and in doing so I consciously follow the Kabbalists.”

² Bloom, though the most provocative, is not the only successor-rebel in reaction against the New Critics. I here propose to leave the cupboard bare of the others, but for a discussion of Bloom in conjunction with Northrop Frye, Paul de Man, Stanley E. Fish, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, Angus Fletcher, and—among influential foreigners—Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, see “Revisionist Literary Criticism,” by Irene H. Chayes, COMMENTARY, April 1976.

³ According to a Midrash, Terach was a maker and seller of idols. One day he left the boy Abraham to watch the shop. After remonstrating with one customer after another, Abraham picked up an ax and smashed all the idols but one—the biggest. When Terach returned, he angrily asked for an explanation. Abraham replied: “Father, the idols were hungry, and I brought them food. But the big god seized your ax, killed the other gods, and ate all the food himself.” “Abram,” said Terach, “you are mocking me. You know well that idols can neither move, nor eat, nor perform any act.” Abraham said: “Father, let your ears hear what your tongue speaks.”

⁴ This law of idolatry is again and again expressed with great precision by Bloom. Writing on the “revisionary ratio” he names “Apophrades, or The Return of the Dead,” Bloom reflects: “But the strong dead return, in poems as in our lives, and they do not come back without darkening the living. . . . The precursors flood us, and our imaginations can die by drowning in them, but no imaginative life is possible if such inundation is wholly evaded.”

⁵ The Midrash mentioned earlier also has Abraham asking the age of a man who has come to buy an idol to protect his house. “I am fifty years old,” says the customer, “and have been a soldier for more than thirty years.” “You are fifty,” Abraham scoffs, “whereas this idol was carved by my father only last week. And though you are a seasoned warrior, you ask protection from it!”

⁶ The impulse toward evil, related also to the creative capacity; the desire to compete with the Creator in ordering being and reality.

⁷ First published in COMMENTARY, March 1972.