Harold Bloom: the critic as Gnostic.

A CHRISTIAN CRITIC confronting the work of Professor Harold Bloom may well find himself in a frame of mind analogous to the apostle, St. John: "Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name, who followeth not us; and we forbade him" (Mk. 9. 37). This critic may well fear the same rebuke that St. John received: "But Jesus said: Do not for bid him. For there is no man that doth a miracle in my name and can soon speak ill of me. For he that is not against you is for you" (Mk. 9.38-39; Lk. 9. 49-50). Bloom is, after all, the defender of the Western canon and scourge of "the Party of Resentment"--the Marxists, the feminists, and the new historicists who all strive to reduce literature to the ideological effluent of the material substructure or to patriarchal repression or to hegemonic power relations. This same Bloom is also, however, the author of The American Religion (1992), which identifies the faith of our country as Emersonian Gnosticism, and of The Book of J (1990), which speculates that "the original author of what we now call Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers" was a skeptical Hittite woman, whom he has subsequently decided to identify with Bathsheba. (1) At this point our Christian critic may reflect upon another Dominical utterance from the gospels: "He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth" (Mt. 12. 30; Lk. 11. 23).

Such is the dilemma posed by an era in which Harold Bloom, who proclaims himself a Gnostic and whose principal contribution to literary theory is a Freudian interpretation of the history of literary influence, is regarded as "a staunch defender of the Western literary tradition," "a powerful warrior on the literary field, always ready to raise his lance in the name of the Western tradition." (2) Bloom has not changed; he is in the situation of an aging revolutionary whose revolution has been overtaken and subverted by the next generation. Robespierre, one will recall, came to his end under the blade of the guillotine. It is a grimly ironic truth that Bloom's own Gnostic Freudian treatment of literature and, above all, of authors, opened the gates to the postmodern assassins of the Party of Resentment, who now conduct their scornful ritual over the "death of the author." Finally, it is precisely his hostility to Christianity and his effort to displace it, spiritually and intellectually, which has resulted in the most grievous damage to the literary tradition that Bloom claims to love. While he gazes unblinkingly at the devastation wrought upon the tradition by the postmodern assault, he is blind to the intimate and indispensable bond between the secular "canon" and the Faith informing its necessary model, the scriptural canon. Western civilization is the cultural embodiment of Christendom; when its cultural heart stops beating, all that is left is a corpse.

Bloom deserves commendation for identifying so explicitly and accurately the Gnostic roots of his spiritual orientation. Deriving from [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (gnosis), a Greek word for "seeking to know," "inquiry," "investigation," or simply "knowledge," Gnosticism essentially offers salvation on the basis of occult knowledge. As Elaine Pagels points out, one of the central texts of ancient Gnosticism, the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, identifies itself as a "secret gospel." (3) The secrets that Gnosticism imparts involve a denial of the Judaeo-Christian doctrine of God and creation and a catastrophic vision of humanity's relation to the spiritual powers that dominate the material world.

Gnosticism is a religious conspiracy theory. In what remains the definitive scholarly work on the subject, Hans Jonas points out that a "radical dualism" is the key to every facet of reality:

    The deity is absolutely transmundane, its nature alien to that of
  the universe, which it neither created nor governs and to which it is
  the complete antithesis: to the divine realm of light, self-contained
  and remote, the cosmos is opposed as the realm of darkness. The world
  is the work of lowly powers which though they may mediately be
  descended from Him do not know the true God and obstruct the
  knowledge of Him in the cosmos over which they rule. (4)

As a result, human beings are prisoners in a world of frustration and deception: "The universe ... is like a vast prison whose innermost dungeon is the earth, the scene of man's life." (5) Salvation requires the recognition that we are better than the situation into which we have been cast, and "The goal of gnostic striving is the release of the 'inner man' from the bonds of [the] world and his return to his native realm of light"--often entailing "intentional violation of the demiurgical norms"; that is, the natural laws of a wicked creation. (6)

Perhaps the version of Gnosticism most familiar to Christian readers is the Manichaeanism with which St. Augustine was involved in his young manhood and which he eventually rejected and refuted. (7) His experience is emblematic of the experience of the early Church: like the Church as a whole, St. Augustine had to recognize that the evil that mattered most was personal sin separating him from God; that is, salvation entails repentance, through the help of divine grace. The Gnostics' teaching, on the contrary, places the origin of evil, of pain and suffering, in the conditions of the material creation; salvation involves overcoming ignorance and escaping these external conditions by finding divinity within. Marxism is a good example of the similarity between Gnosticism and many modern ideologies: misery results from unfavorable economic conditions; "salvation" comes by seizing the means of production and remaking the material world that men inhabit in order to change their nature. (8) A sympathetic historian of Gnosticism, Elaine Pagels, calls attention to another version of modernity that shares the Gnostic outlook: "Many gnostics ... insisted that ignorance, not sin, is what involves a person in suffering. The gnostic movement shared certain affinities with contemporary methods of exploring the self through psychotherapeutic techniques." (9)

Early Christian fathers like Irenaeus tended to treat Gnosticism as if it were a Christian heresy, but Bloom is acutely aware that, despite its use of Christian language, figures, and stories, Gnosticism is the utter antithesis of Christianity. If the creation and the author of creation are evil, then human beings are only evil through contamination by the world, not because of the inherent sinfulness of their fallen nature. The Christian begins the path toward salvation in the humble realization of his own culpable estrangement from his loving Creator to whom he must submit absolutely and on whose gracious mercy he depends utterly. The Gnostic finds the beginning of the path to salvation in the realization that the world is a great imposture, a prison of pain and frustration. His escape lies in recovering the intrinsic goodness within himself, the principle of illumination that he shares with other enlightened spirits. "If you are not to be hedged in by God's incomprehensible power," Bloom writes, "then you must dissent from the doctrine of Creation. You must learn to speculate about origins, and the aim of your speculation will have to be a vision of catastrophe, for only a divine catastrophe will allow for your own, your human freedom." (10) Your own, your human freedom--not "the liberty of the glory of the children of God" (Romans 8.21).

Now the worship of a distant aloof spirit with no relation to all that disappoints and appalls in the material creation would be a rather abstract business, except that we come to know this ultimate luminous being by its likeness in ourselves--in the selves we recover through the growing awareness that we, too, are alienated from the wicked world of injustice and suffering. "Many gnostics," writes Elaine Pagels, "would have agreed in principle with Ludwig Feuerbach, the nineteenth-century psychologist, that 'theology is really anthropology'." (11) Worship of the "good" Gnostic God, of the God who does not create and is thus relieved of responsibility for the problem of evil, is essentially worship of the self. This point is not lost on Bloom:

  Freedom, in the context of the American Religion, means being alone
  with God or with Jesus, the American God or the American Christ. In
  social reality, this translates as solitude, at least in the inmost
  sense. The soul stands apart, and something deeper than the soul, the
  Real Me or self or spark, thus is made free to be utterly alone with
  a God who is also quite separate and solitary, that is a free God or
  God of freedom. What makes it possible for the self and God to
  commune so freely is that the self already is of God; unlike body and
  even soul, the American self is no part of the Creation, or of
  evolution through the ages.... No American pragmatically feels free
  if she is not alone, and no American ultimately concedes that she is
  part of nature. (12)

Christianity teaches that the only freedom that counts is freedom from sin, the spiritual cancer that consumes us from within unless we are irradiated by divine grace. Our only freedom is the freedom God grants us. Bloom maintains that this doctrine must be rejected on behalf of our own, human freedom--a freedom that is simply ours and that separates "the Real Me" from all the mishaps of our bodies and disgraces of our souls, a freedom that will not serve even God. Especially not God. St. Augustine has another name for this "freedom": "Two loves have, then, made these two cities. Love of self, namely, even to the contempt of God made the earthly [city], while love of God, even to contempt of self, made the heavenly." (13)

From here to Freud is only a short step. Psychoanalysis, especially according to Freud's later "structural" model of psychic processes comprising the ego, the id, and the superego, basically substitutes itself for examination of conscience and the work of grace. Analysis, instead of enabling the soul to conform to the divine wisdom of repentance, relieves the neurotic conscious mind of the pressure of inhibitions; that is, from the repression of instinctual drives or libidinous urges in the id or unconsciousness. As in Gnosticism, "salvation" is a matter of liberation of a true self that has been thwarted and occluded by a negative environment. Christian salvation from the bondage of sin is displaced, in the argot of vulgar Freudianism, by the satisfaction or self-fulfillment of "getting rid of your hang-ups." Bloom frames the issue with considerably more elegance, but without a really substantial difference:

  The pragmatic mode akin to art and ideology for most of us is no
  longer religion but Eros, or even the religion of Eros, or for many
  of us, psychoanalysis. This means that most of my own readers will
  have confronted revisionism primarily in their erotic lives, which
  are quite simply now our spiritual lives. (14)

The ancient Gnostics, Sigmund Freud, and Harold Bloom all share a loathing of the Christian vision of reality, which sees mankind's willful disobedience and fallen nature as the principal source of his misery and of the evil in a world created good. We are twice beholden to God as our creator and as our redeemer, and our only hope of restoration to his favor is submission to Him with self-effacing love. The alternative is the Gnostic and Freudian view, endorsed by Bloom, which urges us to satisfy our desires so far as we can amidst a hostile, threatening, and above all frustrating natural environment. Our hope lies not in acknowledging and submitting to the moral reality of our situation, but in overcoming or even transforming it.

Such a vision of human nature and the human condition has grave implications for a theory of literature, for a man's understanding of life and literature cannot possibly be hermetically sealed off from each other. In this respect the study of literature--as well as the rest of the humanistic disciplines--differs decisively from the scientific investigation of natural phenomena. Two equally competent microbiologists, one an atheist and one a Christian, will arrive at identical results in an experiment involving DNA if their equipment and laboratory conditions are equal. A Christian and an atheist will not, however, arrive at the same interpretation of Shakespeare's King Lear.

While we may debate endlessly over the precise modes and effects of mimesis or dramatic representation, it is undeniable that literature is in some important sense about life. Our conception of the one is inextricably linked to our understanding of the other. Now while an error about the nature and the purpose of human life has severe consequences for enterprises of far graver import than literature, one of the chief benefits of literary study is to provide a forum in which we may consider life's crucial questions and choices in a comparatively disinterested manner. King Lear is always there for my contemplation, and if I am wrong in my initial assessment, I can always reconsider it. The errors I make about the treatment of my parents, or my children, or my brothers and sisters--these I may find the grace to repent, but rarely to undo.

A central concern of this traditional mimetic theory of literature is necessarily validity in representation. Works of literature arise out of an attempt to grasp the truth of human experience in a verbal form that engages not only abstract rational apprehension, but also the senses and emotions. Literature thus enhances knowledge and understanding by representing what is concrete and specific in our lives in a mode available for imaginative contemplation, which is as important for the understanding of our lived experience as rational knowledge. The author must strive to be true to--to give an honest assessment of--not necessarily the "facts," whether historical or scientific--but the moral and the spiritual realities of human nature. Various poets give us varied accounts of the world because they are looking at different kinds of events in the lives of men and women, or they are looking at the same events from distinctive points of view. No poet, not even Shakespeare, "who," Dryden rightly says, "of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul" (15)--none can capture every facet of human life, because poets are finite, limited creatures like all of us. When a poet such as, say, Wordsworth writes under the influence of an earlier poet, such as Milton, the later poet reminds us of his predecessor because he is adopting elements of style, structure, and theme; but he is different because he has a distinctive, concrete perspective on a specific facet of human life. Wordsworth has not made Milton obsolete, but, while not as great a poet as Milton, Wordsworth is certainly worth reading because we encounter aspects of our own experience in The Prelude that are not available in Paradise Lost. Digital recording may have made analogue recording obsolete, but Bartok has not made Bach obsolete. To be sure, different works of literature are more or less satisfying, profound, moving, or convincing, and some are wholly inadequate or even despicable. We should apportion the time and the effort we devote to various authors with these factors in mind. Our criteria of judgment ought to be, however, the degree to which each has devised a faithful and compelling vision of the particularly human realities of our experience.

It ought to give us pause, then, that the first principle of Bloom's theory of literature is willful error, or, as he calls it, "misprision." Authors who count, in his view, are not true, but "strong," with the result that the relationships among them are all fundamentally antagonistic. What is more, both the writing and the reading of poetry are less concerned with coming to terms with a reality external to the self than with asserting the self's inner compulsions upon reality:

  Influence, as I conceive it, means that there are no texts, but only
  relationships between texts. These relationships depend upon a
  critical act, a misreading or misprision, that one poet performs upon
  another, and that does not differ in kind from the necessary critical
  acts performed by every strong reader upon every text he encounters.
  (16)

From a Gnostic perspective literature as expropriation is the only logical response to the condition of humanity. Trapped in a dark, dangerous, delusory realm--the state of a creature in the creation--why would anyone wish to achieve an imaginative harmony with reality by means of a faithful representation? Rather, an author must impose his authority and wrestle a recalcitrant external world into a shape agreeable to his own desires, and other men and women and their devices are a very prominent part of that rival reality:

  Let me reduce my argument to the hopelessly simplistic; poems I am
  saying, are neither about "subjects" nor about "themselves." They are
  necessarily about other poems; a poem is a response to a poem, as a
  poet is a response to a poet, or a person to his parent. Trying to
  write a poem takes the poet back to the origins of what a poem first
  was for him, and so takes the poet back beyond the pleasure principle
  to the decisive encounter and response that began him. (17)

Bloom is at his best as a critic of the Romantic poets, but he teases all of its Gnostic implications out of the Romantic notion that literature is self-expression rather than imitation of nature--the lamp rather than the mirror. The poet in the classical mimetic tradition is content to imitate the handiwork of God and pay homage to his poetic forebears; the Romantic, expressive poet--at least in Bloom's radical revision (to use his own term)--is discontented with a disappointing creation, which must be transformed, and threatened by his poetic predecessors, who must be displaced. (18)

Bloom envisions this conflict in Oedipal terms: "To live, the poet must misinterpret the father, by the crucial act of misprision, which is the re-writing of the father." (19) Moreover, the Freudian resonance is increased by what finally emerges as a preoccupation with death, or rather with the evasion of death. The discarding of literary representation is necessary to Bloom's theory of poetry because, he says, "a poem is written to escape dying. Literally, poems are refusals of mortality." (20) Bloom maintains overtly that poetry is an attempt to deny the reality of death; he opposes to "the darkest of Freudian formulae, that 'the aim of all life is death'" what he insists is "the inherent belief of all strong poets,... that death is only a failure in imagination." (21) Ironically, this blatant delusion is not incompatible with Freud, whose notion of the death instinct may be regarded as the embodiment of the ultimate destination of Gnostic pride: despair. Freud, like Bloom, is an antagonist of the Christian virtue of hope. In The Future of an Illusion--the "illusion" is revealed religion, specifically Christianity--Freud calls on man to escape "the retardation of sexual development and the early application of religious influence," which he attributes to repressive Christian civilization, and settle for a purely earthly existence:

  And as for the great necessities of fate, against which there is no
  remedy, these he will simply learn to endure with resignation. Of what
  use to him is the illusion of a kingdom on the moon, whose revenues
  have never yet been seen by anyone? As an honest crofter on this earth
  he will know how to cultivate his plot in a way that will support him.
  Thus by withdrawing his expectations from the other world and
  concentrating all his liberated energies on this earthly life he will
  probably attain to a state of things in which life will be tolerable
  for all and no one will be oppressed by culture any more. (22)

If Bloom is an example of anything, however, it is that man cannot "learn to endure with resignation" what Freud euphemistically calls those "great necessities of fate," and find it "tolerable." Bloom is certainly correct, therefore, in finding the mechanisms of Freudian analysis of the mind a grand scheme for denying mortality, in the struggle between Eros and death; "strong poets" are simply the most gifted illusionists.

To treat literature as a means of warping reality rather than figuring it forth affects adversely both the interpretation of individual poems and understanding of the place of literature in education and culture. One may surmise that Bloom's insistence on a competitive, agonistic paradigm for all reading and writing represents less an observation of the historical development of literature than a response to his own inner "agon"--the struggle between his often sensible, sometimes inspired intuitions about particular literary works and his preoccupation with making all these works lie down in the same Procrustean bed of Freudian angst. Indeed, psychoanalytic theory compels Bloom to conform his healthy insights about specific poems to the assumption that all "strong poets" suffer from a psychic malaise, an ego obsession that reduces them all to the level of Woody Allen.

The theory is a clanking bit of Rube Goldberg machinery. In 1973, in The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom introduced his "Six Revisionary Ratios," an odd assortment of terms and concepts wrenched out of their contexts in classical antiquity and turned into intimidating jargon: Clinamen, Tessera, Kenosis, Doemonization, Askesis, Apophrades. (23) Bloom's synopsis of one of these "ratios" should provide a sufficient sample to indicate the flavor of the recipe:

  Clinamen, which is poetic misreading or misprision proper; I take the
  word from Lucretius, where it means a "swerve" of the atoms so as to
  make change possible in the universe. A poet swerves away from his
  precursor, by so reading his precursor's poem as to execute a clinamen
  in relation to it. This appears as a corrective movement in his own
  poem, which implies that the precursor poem went accurately up to a
  certain point, but then should have swerved, precisely in the
  direction that the new poem moves. (24)

There is a rather amusing irony in the fact that Bloom has chosen for his primary "ratio" one of the most ridiculed terms in the Epicurean lexicon. Cicero calls the hypothesis of a "lateral swerve" among the atoms falling forever through space "wishing rather than arguing." If lateral movement among these atoms explains how the earth and its living inhabitants emerged from the collisions of atoms, what explains the "swerve" in the first place? (25) Or as the commentary in one edition of De rerum natura puts it: "Epicurus adopted a mechanistic system because he hoped by that means to eliminate fears and superstitions; and then introduced into that system an unmechanistic element, chance, in order to get rid of the blighting effects on the soul of philosophical determinism." (26)

Bloom's psychoanalytic use of the term is similarly equivocal: it suggests that the "strong poet" is governed by psychic chance precisely at the point at which he most assertively "revises" his paternal predecessor. Despite his repeated denials that his theory of influence is in any strict sense Freudian, Bloom's flourish of psychoanalytic terms nevertheless implicates even the strongest of poets in the toils of irreconcilable chance and necessity. Moreover, we may well ask why "the precursor poem ... should have swerved" at the same point as its successor. Why is it necessary that the "poetic father" be "misread," misprized, and displaced? Following Emerson and the extreme wing of the Romantic movement, Bloom assumes that each poet--each "strong poet" at least--stakes a claim to divinity. Since the divine is the absolute, no "divine" poet can brook the competition of another "god"; his creation must be unique and total. Such is the result of the Gnostic denigration--or, if you will, misprision--of the material creation: since the world is imperfect and evil, the poet is not imitating God's creation, but substituting his own; and the work of prior poets is from the perspective of each of their successors part of that botched realm of distress, dissatisfaction, and death.

To be sure, there are some fairly daring statements of the poet's creative powers in the Western literary tradition. Sir Philip Sidney favorably compares the poet's handiwork to Nature's: "Her world is brasen, the Poets only deliuer a golden"; but Sidney is careful to qualify his assertion:

  Neyther let it be deemed too sawcie a comparison to ballance the
  highest poynt of mans wit with the efficacie of Nature: but rather
  giue right honor to the heauenly Maker of that maker, who, hauing
  made man to his owne likenes, set him beyond and ouer all the workes
  of that second nature, which in nothing hee sheweth so as in Poetrie,
  when with the force of a diuine breath he bringeth things forth far
  surpassing her dooings, with no small argument to the incredulous of
  that first accursed fall of Adam; sith our erected wit maketh vs know
  what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth vs from
  reaching vnto it. (27)

For all the Gnostic overtones of Sidney's neo-Platonism, the Creation remains God's perfect conception, which fallen man in a fallen world can only imitate.

By contrast, Bloom proffers us what he calls "Whitman's accurate insight that all the gods, Jehovah included, were once men, rising to superb blasphemy." Bloom quotes from Section 41 of Song of Myself, which culminates thus: "The supernatural of no account, myself waiting my time to be one of the supremes." (28) Once the ultimate goodness has been detached from creation, and nature is deemed not merely fallen, but innately evil, no standard of judgment remains either for morals or literature. If nature is the devising of the wicked "god" of darkness and material corruption, then there is no natural law, no essential distinction between right and wrong, good and evil. In literature, the fidelity of a representation to nature or the human experience of reality no longer counts as a measure of the poet's success. All that remains is sheer force of will, and Bloom, for all his protests against "Gallic modes of recent interpretation," is not so different from Michel Foucault in claiming "that the love of poetry is another variation of the love of power." (29)

The tendency of this Gnostic theoretical posture is to cripple Bloom's interpretive skills even when his literary intuitions are at their most acute. His discussion of Jane Austen is quite sensible and sensitive: he astutely dismisses efforts to bind her novels in the chains of socioeconomic determinism, and even his comparison between Anne Elliot in Persuasion and Rosalind in As You Like It sheds light on both works. For Bloom, however, the central preoccupation of Austen's fiction is not the development and the manifestation of character in her heroines, but rather something he calls "Protestant will." Defending her from the strictures of Emerson, Bloom says that she "understood that the function of the convention was to liberate the will, even if convention's tendency was to stifle individualism, without which the will was inconsequential." He continues by maintaining that "Austen's major heroines--Elizabeth [Bennett], Emma [Woodhouse], Fanny [Price], and Anne--possess such inward freedom that their individualities cannot be repressed." (30) But in fact, Elizabeth and Emma have will to excess at the beginning of their respective tales; they must both acquire the virtue of humility, an element of good character, in order to find happiness. "Individuality"--Austen would probably say "willfulness"--is especially what Emma Woodhouse must forsake in submitting to the institution of marriage and the tutelage as well as the love of George Knightly. Fanny Price, on the other hand, is a character of such self-effacing patience that only extraordinary strength of moral character can steel her will to resist both the blandishments of Henry Crawford and the injunctions of her formidable uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram.

Bloom's insistence on seeing all literature in terms of Gnostic agon blinds him to the obvious in these novels, and this comment on Persuasion is simply bizarre:

  Since Austen is anything but an accidental novelist, we might ask why
  she chose to found Persuasion upon a mutual nostalgia. After all, the
  rejected Wentworth is even less inclined to a renewed affection than
  Anneis, and yet the fusion of memory and imagination triumphs over
  his will also. Was this a relaxation of the will in Jane Austen
  herself? (31)

Although Bloom makes some persuasive comparisons between Jane Austen and Wordsworth, he is certainly wrong to imply that Austen's fiction constitutes a prose Prelude, a "growth of the novelist's mind." Persuasion is by no means an account of "a schism in the self" of the novelist "with memory taking the side of imagination in an alliance against the will." (32) The novel is about how Anne Elliot reawakened Frederick Wentworth's love by demonstrating fortitude, patience, and maturity--in other words, character--that set her apart from all the other young women in the book. Of course memory is important in recalling to his imagination his abiding affection for her, but his choice comes of the realization that, even after eight years, with the freshness of her youthful beauty perhaps somewhat faded, her goodness and constancy make her more worthy the love of a prudent, sincere man than do the girlish charms of the frivolous Louisa Musgrove. The function of the trip to Lyme and Louisa's serious accident resulting from her recklessness is to fix the contrast between the two women in Wentworth's mind. Determined to see all literature as the expression of Gnostic discontent with creation, Bloom simply cannot see that Persuasion, like all of Jane Austen's novels, is fundamentally about character, not will, "Protestant" or otherwise.

Bloom's interpretation of Shakespeare, whom he rightly extols, is vitiated by the contamination of the same peculiar Gnostic ideology. The thesis of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is contained in the subtitle. Taken as routinely metaphoric shorthand for Shakespeare's innovative and unique gift for dramatic characterization, it is both unexceptionable and unoriginal. The Bard's unparalleled achievement in the depiction of vivid plausible individuals has been a given of literary scholarship since at least the days of Dr. Johnson. Wayne Booth, for example, in a discussion of "Types of Narration," first published in 1961, casually makes what he clearly takes to be a commonplace, self-evident remark: "Ever since Shakespeare taught the modern world what the Greeks had overlooked in neglecting character change (compare Macbeth and Lear with Oedipus), stories of character development and degeneration have become more popular." (33) What Bloom adds to this formulation, in addition to a certain portentousness, is the Gnostic disdain for creation in favor of personal re-creation on the part of the divine self:

  Literary character before Shakespeare is relatively unchanging; women
  and men are represented as aging and dying, but not as changing
  because their relationship to themselves, rather than to the gods or
  God, has changed. In Shakespeare, characters develop rather than
  unfold, and they develop because they reconceive themselves. (34)

Bloom is not saying that all Shakespeare's characters are like failed politicians or business executives who "reinvent themselves," in the current vulgar argot. He explicitly insists on treating what looks like a metaphor literally and makes it clear that he is considering our greatest writer in terms beyond mere literary criticism:

  I join Johnsonian tradition in arguing ... that [Shakespeare] went
  beyond all precedents (even Chaucer) and invented the human as we
  continue to know it. A more conservative way of stating this would
  seem to me a weak misreading of Shakespeare: it might contend that
  Shakespeare's originality was in the representation of cognition,
  personality, character. But there is an overflowing element in the
  plays, an excess beyond representation, that is closer to the
  metaphor we call "creation." The dominant Shake-spearean characters--
  Falstaff, Hamlet, Rosalind, Iago, Lear, Macbeth, Cleopatra among
  them--are extraordinary instances not only of how meaning gets
  started, rather than repeated, but also of how new modes of
  consciousness come into being. (35)

It is improbable that Dr. Johnson or many of his successors in "Johnsonian tradition" would find acceptable the notion that Shakespeare, rather than God, created our humanity; but Bloom's rejection of the divine creation of the world and its living denizens leads him to regard all worship as a form of idolatry, of obeisance to an idealized self: "A substantial number of Americans who believe they worship God actually worship three major literary characters; the Yahweh of the J Writer ..., the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark, and Allah of the Koran." (36) Bloom recommends that "Bardolatry, the worship of Shakespeare, ought to be even more a secular religion than it already is." (37)

Bloom's Gnosticism, his twisted view of reality, undermines the soundness of his literary judgment, and he is in peril of answering seriously L.C. Knights's jocular question, "How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?" (38) Nothing displays the folly of denying the divinely ordained limits of reality more forcibly than Bloom's obsession with Falstaff, whom he treats as somehow more real or authentic than actual human beings. Like Hamlet, Falstaff has a life outside the plays in which he is a character: "these two charismatics are in their plays, but not of them; Hamlet is a person, and Claudius and Ophelia are fictions--or Falstaff is a person, while Hal and Hotspur are fictions." (39) Reject God's natural creation, and you will find yourself setting up an alternative "nature" to rival it, not unlike Mammon in Book II of Paradise Lost. Not only does Bloom "exalt Falstaff above his plays" (as if he were the matinee idol who steps off the screen in the movie-within-the-movie in Purple Rose of Cairo), but also he calls this "salvation" and brooks no heresy: "Those who do not care for Falstaff are in love with time, death, the state, and the censor. They have their reward." (40)

Bloom has fallen into the same error in making Falstaff the hero of the Falstaffiad as he does in making Satan the hero of Paradise Lost, and it was an error that C.S. Lewis clarified years before Harold Bloom had published a line:

  Before considering the character of Milton's Satan it may be desirable
  to remove an ambiguity by noticing that Jane Austen's Miss Bates [in
  Emma] could be described either as a very entertaining or a very
  tedious person. If we said the first, we should mean that the author's
  portrait of her entertains us while we read; if we said the second, we
  should mean that it does so by being a portrait of a person whom the
  other people in Emma find tedious and whose like we also should find
  tedious in real life. For it is a very old critical discovery that the
  imitation in art of unpleasing objects may be a pleasing imitation.
  (41)

Unlike Miss Bates, Falstaff is not "tedious"; he remains, however, like Miss Bates, a fiction. He is in fact a brilliantly conceived and executed representation of the kind of man who is jovial, engaging, and likable, but also irresponsible, greedy, and exploitative. Prince Hal, on the other hand, embodies the melancholy truth that popular, effective rulers are often inscrutable and ruthless. Most readers and theatre-goers are going to like Falstaff more than Hal, but even Bloom would be reluctant to trust the fat knight with his car keys or his credit card. Why should King Henry V--no longer "Hal"--entrust to him a position of power and influence at court? We can appreciate the irony in applying the phrase "the mirror of all Christian Kings" to Henry V and still acknowledge that dismissing Falstaff is the King's only alternative to becoming another Richard II.

What makes Shakespeare such a great poet and dramatist is not that he "invented" the human or human personality, but that his plays embody so concretely and convincingly the tensions between personality and character, moral integrity and personal inclination that are among the most vexing aspects of the human condition. We know almost everything about the deficiencies of Bloom's criticism when he defends Falstaff's unreliable, self-centered dishonesty, dissolution, and corruption by remarking that personality is more important to him than character. (42)

In conclusion, the Christian surveying the numerous books by Harold Bloom will find much to admire and much to raise his spirits in Bloom's shrewd mockery of the institutional nihilism that pervades the postmodern literary establishment. What is more he amply displays the quality he most admires in poets; he is a very "strong" reader of literary texts and often sweeps his own readers along with the passion and the eloquence of his rhetoric. His theory of literature, however, his view that literary influence may be reduced to an intergenerational struggle between "strong poets" turns literature into a psychic manifestation of the poet, above all of his anguished flight from the inevitably of death, rather than a representation of reality. Bloom's theory, with all its secular Freudian trappings, is fundamentally a Gnostic theology rejecting the divine creation, regarded as the source of human death and despair. Poetry is the protest against this unsatisfactory creation, which reminds human beings of their creaturely status. This warped vision of the human situation distorts Harold Bloom's view of literary works, especially of the moral standing of literary characters, making him an unreliable guide to the Western Canon he so prizes, whose greatest classics are Christian in their spiritual sources and traditional in their moral orientation. In fine, a man's view of literature is inevitably controlled by his vision of life.

1. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York / San Diego / London, 1994), 5. 2. These phrases come from Jennie Rothenberg, "Ranting Against Cant," an interview with Harold Bloom in Atlantic Unbound, http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/int2003-07-16.htm. 3. The Gnostic Gospels (New York, 1981 [1979]), xiii. 4. The Gnostic Religion (2nd ed. Boston, 1963), 42. 5. Ibid., 43. 6. Ibid., 44, 46. 7. See Confessions IV-VII. 8. See Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago & London, 1987 [1952]) for an account of modern ideologies as versions of Gnosticism. 9. The Gnostic Gospels, 149. Cf. R.V. Young, At War with the Word: Literary Theory and Liberal Education (Wilmington, Del., 1999), esp. 14-18 for further reflections on Gnosticism in contemporary intellectual life. 10. Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (New York / Oxford, 1982), 78. 11. The Gnostic Gospels, 148. 12. The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York, 1992), 15. 13. De Civitate Dei 14. 28, Patrologia Latina 41. 436: "Fecerunt itaque civitates duas amores duo; terrenam scilicet amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei, coelestem vero amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui." 14. Agon, 49. 15. Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson (London, 1962), I, 67. 16. A Map of Misreading (Oxford / New York / Toronto, 1975), 3. 17. Ibid., 18. 18. For standard accounts of the transition from classic to romantic, see M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York, 1953); and Walter Jackson Bate, From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1961 [1946]). For a more sober account of what Bloom calls the "anxiety of influence, see Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (New York, 1970). 19. A Map of Misreading, 19. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 13. 22. The Future of an Illusion (1927), trans. W.D. Robson-Scott (Garden City, N.Y., n.d.), 85, 89. 23. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (2nd ed., New York / Oxford, 1997), 14-16. 24. Ibid., 14. 25. De Fato 20.46: "'Declinat', inquit, 'atomus'. Primum cur?... Quae ergo nova causa in natura est quae declinet atomum (aut num sortiuntur inter se quae declinet, quae non?) aut cur minimo declinent intervallo, maiore non, aut cur declinent uno minimo, non declinent duobus aut tribus? Optare hoc quidem est, non disputare." 26. William Ellery Leonard and Stanley Barney Smith, ed., T. Lucreti Cari De Rerum Natura Libri Sex (Madison, Wis., 1942), 333. 27. An Apology for Poetry, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (London, 1904), I, 156, 157. 28. The Western Canon, 270. 29. The first phrase comes from The Breaking of the Vessels (Chicago and London, 1982), 29; the second from Agon, 17. 30. The Western Canon, 258. 31. Ibid., 259. 32. Ibid. 33. The Rhetoric of Fiction (2nd ed., Chicago & London, 1983), 157. 34. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York, 1998), xvii. 35. Ibid., xviii. 36. Ibid., xviii-xix. 37. Ibid., xvii. 38. Explorations (London, 1946), 1-39. See Bloom, Shakespeare, 522, where he does speculate on Lady Macbeth's marital history. 39. Shakespeare, 279. 40. Ibid., 314, 288. 41. A Preface to Paradise Lost (New York, 1961 [1942]), 94. 42. Shakespeare, 313. This paragraph and its predecessor are in part adapted from R.V. Young, "Shakespeare with Tears," an essay-review of Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Ben Jonson Journal 6 (1999): 319-25.

R.V. YOUNG is Professor of English at North Carolina State University and author of At War With the Word (1999).