Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays - Cynthia Ozick 2016

The Rhapsodist
Monsters

This rounded, wet, weedy, windy earth, with its opposing poles, was born into contraries: Apollo and Dionysus, Talmudist and Kabbalist, sober exegete and rapt ecstatic. Harold Bloom, who bestrides our literary world like a willfully idiosyncratic Colossus, belongs to the party of rapture. He is himself no Whitman or Melville, no Emily Dickinson or Robert Frost or Wallace Stevens; no Hart Crane or Emerson. And yet he seems at times almost as large as any of these, so vital and particularized is his presence. If, as Emerson claims, the true ship is the shipbuilder, then is the true poem the critic who maps and parses and inhabits it? Can poet and critic be equal seers?

Read Bloom, and you may be led to suppose it so. “Walt Whitman,” he writes, “overwhelms me, possesses me, as only a few others—Dante, Shakespeare, Milton—consistently flood my entire being… . Without vision, criticism perishes.” And: “I rejoice at all strong transports of sublimity.” And again: “True criticism recognizes itself as a form of memoir.” And finally, emphatically: “I believe there is no critical method except yourself.” It is through intoxicating impulses such as these that Bloom has come to his formulation of the American Sublime, and from this to his revelation of the daemon: the very Higgs boson of the sublime. Bloom’s beguiling daemon can be construed as the god-within; he is sire to the exaltations of apotheosis, shamanism, Gnosticism, Orphism, Hermeticism, and, closer to home, Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” He is made manifest through the voices of poets and in the chants of those weavers of tales, like Melville and Faulkner, who are kin to poets.

The Daemon Knows, the enigmatic title of Bloom’s newest work of oracular criticism, is strangely intransitive. What is it that the daemon knows? We are meant to understand that the daemon is an incarnation of an intuition beyond ordinary apperception, and that this knowing lies in the halo of feeling that glows out of the language of poetry. “To ask the question of the daemon is to seek an origin of inspiration,” Bloom instructs, and his teacherly aim is to pose the question in close readings of twelve daemon-possessed writers whom he interrogates in pairs: Whitman with Melville, Emerson with Dickinson, Hawthorne with Henry James, Mark Twain with Frost, Stevens with T. S. Eliot, Faulkner with Hart Crane. He might well have chosen twelve others, he tells us, reciting still another blizzard of American luminaries, but dismisses the possibility “because these [chosen] writers represent our incessant effort to transcend the human without forsaking humanism.” (A question Bloom does not put—we will approach it shortly—is whether shamanism, Orphism, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and all the other mystical isms, including the idea of the daemon, do in fact cling to humanism.)

For Bloom, the origin of inspiration is dual: the daemon that ignites it from within, and the genealogical force that pursues it from without. The bloodline infusion of literary precursors has long been a leitmotif for Bloom, from the academic implosion of The Anxiety of Influence more than forty years ago to the more recent The Anatomy of Influence. Here he invokes the primacy of Emerson as germinating ancestor:

For me, Emerson is the fountain of the American will to know the self and its drive for sublimity. The American poets who (to me) matter the most are all Emersonians of one kind or another: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, John Ashbery, A. R. Ammons, Elizabeth Bishop, May Swenson, Henri Cole. Our greatest creators of prose fiction were not Emersonians, yet the protagonists of Hawthorne, Melville, and Henry James frequently are beyond our understanding if we do not see Hester Prynne, Captain Ahab, and Isabel Archer as self-reliant questers.

Though Bloom’s persuasive family trees are many-branched, the power of influential predecessors nevertheless stands apart from daemonic possession. According to Bloom, the daemon—“pure energy, free of morality”—is far more intrinsic than thematic affinity. However aggressively their passions invade, it is not Whitman alone who gives birth to Melville, or Emerson to Dickinson, or Hawthorne to James, or Mark Twain to Frost; and certainly it is not the lurid Faulkner, all on his own, who rivals the clay that will become Hart Crane. Literary heritage is half; the rest is the daemon. “Moby-Dick,” Bloom sums up, “is at the center of this American heretical scripture, our worship of the god-within, which pragmatically means of the daemon who knows how it is done.” But there is yet another pragmatic demonstration to be urged and elaborated. “Hart Crane’s daemon,” he adds, “knows how it is done and creates an epic of Pindaric odes, lyrics, meditations, and supernal longings without precedent.”

Without precedent: surely this is the earliest key, in Bloom’s scheme, to the daemon’s magickings. Theme and tone and voice may have authorial ancestors; what we call inspiration has none. Turning to one of his two commanding touchstones (the other is Whitman), Bloom cites Emerson: “This is that which the strong genius works upon: the region of destiny, of aspiration, of the unknown… . For the best part, I repeat, of any life is not that which he knows, but that which hovers in gleams, suggestions, tantalizing unpossessed before him.” So when Bloom tells us that there can be no critical method other than the critic himself—meaning Bloom—we should not take it as blowhard hyperbole. With Emerson, he intends to pry open the unpossessed and to possess it, and to lead the reader to possess it too: a critical principle rooted in ampleness and generosity.

In this way, the illustrative excerpts Bloom selects from the work of his hallowed dozen are more than concentrated wine tastings; they are libraries in little. In considering Hawthorne, he discusses—in full—“Wakefield” and “Feathertop,” two lesser-known stories, as well as The Blithedale Romance, The Marble Faun, and the canonical The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. In his discant on James, Bloom supplies entire scenes from The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, and The Wings of the Dove, in addition to long passages of “The Jolly Corner.” And in crisscrossing from Hawthorne to James and back again, he leaves nothing and no one unconnected. “Where indeed in American fiction,” he asks, “could there be a woman loftier, purer, as beautiful and as wise as Hester Prynne? Isabel Archer is the only likely candidate,” though he goes on to lament her choice of the “odious Osmond.” For Bloom, Moby-Dick consorts with Huck Finn, and Emily Dickinson with Shakespeare, while Whitman underlies, or agitates, Stevens, Hart Crane, and, surprisingly, T. S. Eliot.

Of all Bloom’s couplings, Stevens and Eliot are the oddest and the crankiest. Despite the unexpected common link with Whitman, the juxtaposition is puzzling. Bloom’s veneration of Stevens, sometimes “moved almost to tears,” is unfailing. “From start to end, his work is a solar litany… . He has helped me to live my life,” he confesses. Yet nearly in the same breath Bloom is overt, even irascible, in his distaste for Eliot, partly in repudiation of “his virulent anti-Semitism, in the age of Hitler’s death camps,” but also because of his clericalism: “Is it my personal prejudice only that finds no aesthetic value whatever in the devotional verse of T. S. Eliot? … He brings out the worst in me. His dogmatism, dislike of women, debasement of ordinary human existence make me furious.” In the same dismissive vein, he disposes of Ezra Pound: “I at last weary of his sprawl and squalor.” Nowhere else in this celebratory volume can such a tone—of anger and disgust—be found. Not even in Bloom’s dispute with what he zealously dubs “the School of Resentment” (the politicization of literary studies) is he so vehement as here.

Still, emotive disclosures are not foreign to this critic’s temperament. He has, after all, already told us that criticism can be a form of memoir. “I am an experiential and personalizing literary critic,” he explains, “which certainly rouses up enmity, but I go on believing that poems matter only if we matter.” Out of this credo grows a confiding intimacy: “The obscure being I could call Bloom’s daemon has known how it is done, and I have not. His true name (has he one?) I cannot discover, but I am grateful to him for teaching the classes, writing the books, enduring the mishaps and illnesses, and nurturing the fictions of continuity that sustain my eighty-fifth year.” A touching reminder of the nature of the human quotidian, its riches and its vicissitudes, its successes and its losses: tangled mortal life itself, pulsing onward in the daylight world of reality. But is this what Bloom’s exalted twelve have taught of how the daemon, that rhapsodic creature of “pure energy, free of morality,” is purposed? The daemon who is trance, who is the mystical whiteness of the white whale, who is harp and altar of Hart Crane’s bridge, and who enters solely into seers and poets? Can the daemon’s lover—who is Bloom—harbor the daemon in himself? Or, to put it otherwise: may the professor of poetry don the poet’s mantle?

Meanwhile, the daemon knows, and Bloom knows too, who are his most dedicated antagonists. They are those verifiable humanists, the rabbis who repudiate the Kabbalists, who refute the seductions of Orphists and Gnostics, who deny the dervishing god-within and linger still in that perilous garden, birthplace of the moral edict and the sober deed, where mortals dare to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and daemons of the sublime are passing incantatory delusions.

And there are no poets.