Harold Bloom's Analysis of the Bible as a Work of Literary Genius

Review: Harold Bloom's "Book of J" and the Bible as Literature
Reviewed Work(s): The Book of J by Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg

Review by: Steven Helmling
Source: The Sewanee Review, Vol. 104, No. 2 (Spring, 1996), pp. 312-325
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27547195
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312 ARTS AND LETTERS
HAROLD BLOOM'S BOOK OF J

AND THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE
STEVEN HELMLING
The twentieth century, having dismissed the Bible's claims to sacred

revelation, has sought to reappropriate this turbulent collection of
texts to its own secularizing purposes by reading it "as literature."
Harold Bloom scorns the distinction between literature and (the polar
term I will use here) scripture, seemingly in behalf of literature: for
Bloom, all any text ever can be is "literature," more or less "strong."
Yet Bloom's conception of literature is fundamentally scriptural, pro
foundly un-literary (even anti-literary), in all the senses these anti
thetical terms have developed in dialectical relation with each other
in the past couple of centuries.
For a millennium and more, literature was conceived on the model
of scripture, and valued (like scripture) as a repository of important
truths : profane wisdom complementing sacred wisdom. But language?
that ideally transparent but actually muddy medium?presented dif
ficulties: what if effects available in one language aren't reproducible
in another? Can wisdom be lost in translation? In the eighteenth century
writers like Dryden and Johnson considered that translation could be
a test of wisdom: an untranslatable effect was "false wit," a merely local
linguistic accident?not universal, and so not true, or "true wit." Whereas
when Robert Frost, two centuries later, remarked that poetry is precisely
what gets lost in translation, everybody nodded assent to what still
seems a declaration of consensus. Between Dryden and Frost the idea of
literature as a thesaurus of eternal, universal truths lost power to a
rival view of literature as not a vehicle of instruction, like a sermon,
enforcing a lesson or moral extracted from experience, but as itself a
kind of experience. In the wake of the romantic poets, intensity dis
placed truth as a term of praise; and by midcentury De Quincey had
shrewdly distinguished "the literature of knowledge" from "the literature
of power."
Ever since, the power, not the knowledge, has been the point. For
John Stuart Mill literature's value as an "education of the emotions" lay
not in any Thou shalts or shalt nots addressed to the cognitive faculties
but inhered in its effects on the moral sensibility. So literature was as
Harold Bloom, The Book of /, translated by David Rosenberg. Vintage Books,
1991. 340 pages. $12.
ARTS AND LETTERS 313
simulated "to performative arts without propositional meaning?to music

(Pater's "All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music"), to
dance (Yeats's "O body swayed to music"), or even to mere objects (Wil
liam Carlos Williams's "No ideas but in things"; MacLeish's "A poem
should be palpable and mute/Like a globed fruit").
Interest was passing from the message to the medium. If the point of
the story was the moral, why read the whole thing? Why not ingest the
moral directly, and devote the time saved to other pursuits, like reading
literature? T. S. Eliot called for a poetry of "immediate experience"
that eschews not only a moral, but meaning itself, which Eliot likened
to the meat the burglar brings to pacify the house dog. Some poets,
Eliot explained, "become impatient of this 'meaning' which seems super
fluous, and perceive possibilities of intensity through its elimination."
Many grumbled at Eliot's elimination even of a plain prose meaning?
you can paraphrase the Immortality Ode but not The Waste Land?but
paraphrasability had already become a negative test of literary value.
The Russian Formalists systematized the shift from a semantics of lit
erary truth to the semiotics of its power; and by now it is a virtual
orthodoxy that literature should mean nothing, but instead enact the
inevitable aporia of any meaning-making enterprise.
These movements and their makers were revolting against traditions
of reading and writing formed by centuries of reading and interpreting
scripture. When Keats deplored the text that "has a design upon us,"
few can have failed to think of the Bible; and when Shelley rejoiced
that "the poetry of the religion of the antient world had [not] been
extinguished with its belief," free-thinkers thrilled at the suggestion
that the world-inventory of defunct "belief" increasingly included the
dogmatic deposit of Judeo-Christianity. Literature, it was agreed, should
eschew didacticism, the business of preachers, not artists.
This revolt against scriptural traditions of reading and writing coin
cided with the scientific challenge to the biblical cosmology advanced
by Lyell, Darwin, and others. Just as the Bible's claim to literal truth
was eroding before scientific inquiry, the literary avant-garde increas
ingly located the interest of literature not in its message, but in its artful
ness?not in its truth, but in its fictiveness. To call literary works fictions
was to praise them relevantly; whereas to scan them for their truth
value?especially if truth meant (natural or historical) fact?was to look
for the wrong thing, in the wrong place. This attitude rebuked utilitarian
sneers at literature as mere fable, as against hard fact; but it also opposed
a Christianity committed to valuing the Bible precisely (and wrongly) as
fact. Matthew Arnold prophesied that poetry would fill the void left
by the bankruptcy of religion: "Our religion has materialized itself in
the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact,
and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything. . . .
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.
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"
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.
"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,
Kabbalah and Criticism, Map of Misreading, and Poetry and Repres

sion), in which Bloom reconsidered why we read and write. Earlier
Bloom had been interested (as disciple/apostle) in apocalyptic writings
bearing redemptive, world-changing messages; now he regarded all lit
erary (poetic or prophetic) ambitions psychologistically, as sublimations
of a much more primal "drive," namely To Be A Great Writer?to com
pete with the writers whose greatness inspired (and threaten) the am
bition.
Bloom now began to speak freely, and he still does, of "fictions." But
his inflection on the word is very different from Kermode's "fictionalism"
or Richards's "pseudo-statement," with their air of brahmin disillusion,
of "seeing through" naive commitments and passions. Bloom's talk of
fictions expressed a post- (or hyper-) Freudian pathos of wisdom wracked
by desires, fantasies, and passions it knows to be neurotic?fictional in
the sense that they are mere accidents of case-history?but which it is
unable, and does not altogether desire, to escape.
Bloom presents such passions as fictional in the further sense that, like
fictions, they can be literalized. We all have known people who experi
ence their passions as imperatives dictating life-scenarios, opportunities
for crushing the reality principle under their heels. The desires projected
by the sexual drive, Bloom observes, are necessarily ideal?that is, fic
tions born of need?yet we must seek their fulfillment literally, with
actual people. When such quests seem to Bloom naive, he excoriates
the questers as literalizers and idealizers, the words in which he now
dismisses the apocalyptic romantics he himself idealized and literalized
in his younger years. But the pathos of such a quest can also appear to
Bloom as heroic. Yeats, for example, whose reservations about Blake
Bloom once damned, more recently figures as a hero of "belated" imag
ination, suffering commitment to the romantic fictions of redemption
only the more heroically for knowing them to be fictions. Bloom's
(typically recherch?) name for this heroism is Gnosticism?a way of
making heroic the Beckettian "absurd" (I-can't-go-on-I'll-go-on) that he
had rejected when existentialism was current.
Bloom's midcareer talk of fictionalism may look like a shift away
from scripture and toward literature, but it is not. Pie now talks of the
fiction, rather than the truth, of the message; but it is still the message,
the content, that matters, not the medium or style. Only once that I
know of does Bloom even acknowledge such a distinction, in his essay
'Inescapable Poe," in which it arises because Bloom finds Poe's writing,
as writing, so bad. "The critical question," says Bloom, "surely must be:
How does 'William Wilson' survive its bad writing?" He answers that
"the tale somehow is stronger than its own telling, which is to say that
Poe's actual text does not matter. What survives, despite Poe's writing,
are the psychological dynamics and mythic reverberations of his stories."
Bloom sounds here as if the style/content distinction were an oddity
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
delights in anticipating howls of pious protest when he avows that J's

Yahweh is "a literary character," and when he asserts that J is neither
theologian nor moralist, nor even "a believer in Yahwism," but "a writer
above all else"; and throughout he asks such questions as "Why does
Yahweh almost murder Moses? How can God sit under the terebinth
trees at Mamre and devour roast calf and curds? What can we do with
a Supreme Being who goes nearly berserk at Sinai and warns us he may
break forth against the crowds, who clearly fill him great distaste?" The
point is to embarrass "normative" interpretation, and its need for the
ological correctness.
Just as Bloom's midcareer embrace of fictionalism almost seemed a
defection from scripture to literature, so The Book of J's jibes at norm
ative interpretation can look like an assault on interpretation and mean
ing as such. But once again Bloom's approach to "indeterminacy," "play,"
and "textuality" turns out not to be for their own sakes. In The Book of J
he jibes at normative interpretation in tones suggesting that the reduction
of J's vitalist narrative to bloodless abstractions is a sin against the spirit;
but the pose proves merely tactical when Bloom turns right around to
offer interpretations of his own. So while Bloom seems to promise a
literary rather than a scriptural reading?he calls for readers "prepared
to read the Bible in something like the same spirit in which they read
Shakespeare"?what he actually does with J is interpretation very much
the same in kind, however different in detail, as that given us by the
normative tradition. We get a world-view with a moralism attached,
"an earth-centered vision, naturalist and humanistic, profoundly monist
... a monistic vitalism that refuses to distinguish between flesh and
spirit." In like manner J has a "social vision" growing out of the glory of
the reign of David. It's better called a "vision" than a "doctrine," but
in Bloom's exposition, no less than in the normative commentary he
deplores, J's vision becomes the commentator's doctrine. Bloom promises
to do for the book of J something like what Nietzsche did for the Greeks
?to locate it beyond (normatively Judeo-Christian) good and evil; but
what he actually produces, to quote David Stern's shrewd review (The
New Republic, February 4, 1991), is "an audacious if flawed attempt at
theology."
There is no need to expound Bloom's theology; he's been doing a fine
job of it himself for years. But dealing with J has put Bloom in some
interesting positions. For one thing it involves him in interpreting nar
rative. Since about 1970 Bloom has interested himself chiefly in non
narrative texts; but even when he has dealt with narratives?whether
Blake's and Shelley's before 1970, or Nathanael West's and Kafka's after
?his interest has been not in the kinetics, so to speak, of the narrative
action, but in the (more statically conceived) vision or doctrine it ex
presses. Hence the remarks above on Poe: the telling doesn't matter,
only the myth, which we can tell ourselves in our own words. J forces
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
ing to which the fetishization of authorship supports an historically

recent bourgeois ideology conjuring with the politically pernicious fan
tasy of the individual's autonomy from culture. (Bloom is indifferent to
politics?one spectacle where the pathos of trying to realize, or literalize,
Utopian impulses or fictions leaves him cold.) Likewise the contention
that the J text constitutes not a cento of folktales but a book of J strikes
a blow against the Barthesian slogan "from work to text." For Bloom
J's book is a unitary work written to express a "vision" emerging from
a "remarkably unified consciousness, not a bevy of Yahwists or a desul
tory network of legendary gossipers, but a single, magnificent mind."
Which means that Bloom must explain away any inconsistency, in J as
well as in J's "characters," including not only Adam and Eve, Abraham
and Sarah, Jacob, Joseph, Moses and so on, but Yahweh himself. For
example, Abraham argues with Yahweh about the fate of Sodom, but
accedes without a whimper to the sacrifice of Isaac; no fiction workshop
would accept this, and so Bloom improvises what J must originally have
written, explaining that J's original narrative must have been bowdler
ized by priests to give us the received text. Bloom refuses to consider
that the inconsistency expresses a diversity of folk traditions, and a
milieu without our kind of subjectivity and thus without our expecta
tions of a literary character.
These would be merely debating points of the kind that altogether
misses the interest of Bloom's best work if they didn't also indicate the
conditions of his best work. I make them here on the way to explaining
why Bloom's best work is beginning to seem to me a thing of the past.
Bloom's work has always been an allegory of Bloom's own ambitions:
the motives the young Bloom ascribed to Shelley were the young Bloom's
motives, just as the motives Bloom now ascribes to J are Bloom's present
motives. Idiosyncratic, impassioned, antiacademic yet hyperacademic
at the same time, Bloom's work has been from first to last a conf?teor of
ambition, of (his phrases) "creative envy," "revisionist agon," and "the
anxiety of influence." What distinguishes Bloom's best work is the
leavening of anxiety. As we've seen, Bloom has always been in revolt
against an anglophile academic establishment, with its chilly decorums
always lowering the emotional temperature. Bloom wanted to impas
sion literary study, to celebrate the passion of great authors, to express
the passion he himself felt reading them; and in anxiety his work found
not only its theme but its energy. Confessing what scholarship-as-usual
denies, Bloom ascribed to the poets he adored an ambition like his own,
and made their work a vehicle for dramatizing his own ambitions and
the anxieties attending them. Bloom's deconversion around 1970 from
the romantic humanism of his earlier books to the "gnosticism" he first
protested in Yeats, but embraced thereafter, came at an anxious time
(the Kennedy and King assassinations, Chicago, Nixon, Vietnam, Kent
State), and in such a "dark time for the imagination," as he called it,
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.
The "anxiety," in short, is gone. Bloom's insistence on the "strong"

author, for example, used to be a declaration of anxious faith: it ex
pressed Bloom's desire that such authorship, such selfhood, should be
possible, including for him. It evolved, as Bloom said all "strong" imag
inative stances must, "antithetically," in combat with a new fashion of
regarding "the subject" as a mere epiphenomenon of historical and cul
tural forces, and the "author" as not a master of the word but a creature
of it, not a speaker of language but spoken by it, not a writer of lit
erature but written by it. Not a cause, in short, but an effect. The author,
like God a century earlier, was dead. To all this, Bloom's J-as-author
bids defiance. But back in the early seventies, when theory was new,
Bloom's account of literary history agreed that the "author," entoiled in
"agon" with "strong" precursors, was necessarily a theater where "in
fluences" contended. That subjectivity is necessarily "intersubjective"
Bloom seemed to protest by saying that imaginative strength proves
itself in the effort to escape "influence" and achieve a more authentic
selfhood. But this way of putting it did not rebut the arguments from
across the sea: instead it granted their premise, but as a doom we should
resist, rather than a prescription we might as well obey. Bloom pro
nounced this struggle futile, its animating constructs fictions, but only
the more heroic for that.
The anxieties about "intersubjectivity" were more explicit in Bloom's
version of "intertextuality": the meaning of a poem can only be another
poem, a "misreading" of a precursor poem, and so on. When Bloom
advised that no poem can be what its author wants it to be, namely
"original," he sounded like the reality principle pronouncing stoically
but sympathetically on the pathos of the imagination's needs and plight.

But that was then, this is now: pathos and sympathy have given way
to schadenfreude. Bloom now speaks not as anxious contender in a
high-stakes agon, but as the gloating victor in an interminable postfight
interview. Harold Bloom, culture-hero, superstar professor, certified
MacArthur "genius," and now best-selling author, has won the title
bout; and he parades his crown as if in defiance of angry and envious
crowds who are in fact positively gushing with approval. Bloom's ideal
ization of authorship is no longer the signifier of his own anxious am
bitions but a personal dogma ratifying and ratified by his achieved
success. Hence J's agon?not with strong precursors, but with trivial
followers?is paradigmatic of Bloom's own present-day agon: once a
titanic struggle, it is now no more than a turkey shoot.
The fuss over The Book of J did seem a gobble-gobble affair. Bloom's
supposed sacrilege provoked not wailing and rending of garments from
pulpits and seminaries, but thrilled applause from the middlebrow press,
whose readers and writers evidently imagine that serious biblical schol
ars are still upholding Sunday school bromides. From the point of view
of Time and Newsweek, who know a PR coup when they see one,
Bloom's naughtiest stroke was the contention that J is a woman?a
point not disprovable, though the grounds on which Bloom argues it
(J's interest in and sympathy with women) may tempt some cultural
archaeologist of the future, surveying biblical commentary of the late
twentieth century, to conjecture that Harold Bloom must have been a
woman.
Robert Graves would have done it better: more entertainingly and
to that extent, more persuasively. With Bloom there's no sense of wh
beyond the provocativeness, J's gender matters. (Graves, after all, fe
inized not the scribe but the Divinity.) Surely no feminine principl
enlivens Bloom's own imagination; in his construction "agon" is
clusively a male-on-male affair. For all it projects a female J, The Bo
of J seems to solemnize Bloom's descent along a too-familiar mascul
trajectory, from the passion of a Miltonic Luciferian to the straiten
righteousness of Milton's God.
And yet, as recently as in the 1990 interview included in Mark Ed
mundson's Wild Orchids and Trotsky, Bloom sounds attractively like h
younger self, insisting that literary criticism is neither literary nor c
icism if it isn't prompted by a text's powerful effect on the critic. Cr
icism, he suggests, should be written from love, not from some politically
motivated disillusion (or, as T. S. Eliot, demurred, illusion of disillusio
of "a hermeneutics of suspicion," or a reductive will-to-ideological e
pose. Love must be love of the particular; theory's domain is necessari
that of the generic. "More substance in our enmities/Than in our love
Bloom, alas, seems to have taken infection from that very "school o
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.
THE MIRACULOUS CONJUNCTION

EARL ROVIT
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.

Harold Bloom's Analysis of the Bible as a Work of Literary Genius

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Harold Bloom's Analysis of the Bible as a Work of Literary Genius

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Review: Harold Bloom's "Book of J" and the Bible as Literature

Reviewed Work(s): The Book of J by Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg

HAROLD BLOOM'S BOOK OF J

The twentieth century, having dismissed the Bible's claims to sacred

simulated "to performative arts without propositional meaning?to music

Kabbalah and Criticism, Map of Misreading, and Poetry and Repres

delights in anticipating howls of pious protest when he avows that J's

ing to which the fetishization of authorship supports an historically

The "anxiety," in short, is gone. Bloom's insistence on the "strong"

but sympathetically on the pathos of the imagination's needs and plight.

THE MIRACULOUS CONJUNCTION

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