COMO CITAR:

Zenha, Miguel. «Harold Bloom, Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism». Forma de Vida, 2021. https://doi.org/10.51427/ptl.fdv.2021.0052 .



DOI:

https://doi.org/10.51427/ptl.fdv.2021.0052

Miguel Zenha*

(Versão em português / Portuguese translation)

Like Harold Bloom’s last book published in his lifetime, Possessed by Memory collects a set of over seventy texts, mostly brief and dating at least from 2013, spread over four parts and a coda. This book’s particularity is asserted right away in the preface: “[t]his book is reverie and not argument” (xx). Specifically, Possessed by Memory consists of a series of readings paying tribute to Bloom’s favorite authors, which anyone even slightly acquainted with his work will easily foresee. By “reverie” we have, then, testimonies or personal notes—that is to say, without concerns in delimiting a conceptual field—which end up being the aftermath of individuals and books’ perennial presence. Thus, Possessed by Memory aims to move away from any purpose mistaken with “a lamentation for my own generation of critics and poets. Instead, it hopes, in part, to be a living tribute to their afterlife in their writings” (xix).

The first part’s starting point, “A Voice She Heard Before the World Was Made”, deals with religious texts readings. As a prime example, we have “Thresholds to Voice: Augmenting a God in Ruins”, “More Life: The Blessing Given by Literature” and “Isaiah of Jerusalem: ‘Arise, Shine; For Thy Light Is Come’”.

 The first essay is an attempt to recover what is contained in the expression “before the world was made” through the problematization brought by “the ancient tradition of Hermetism” (p. 4). So, Bloom begins referring “Poimandres”, a traditional hermetic text, and the poem “Voyages V”, from Hart Crane, in order to stress an affiliation based on the original stance — “original” as both “inventive” and “initial”—of how they cope with loss and absence. The first one ties “Fall” and “Creation” together, creating “the First Adam, called Anthropos” (p. 5), and the second one comprises a “gentle resignation” (p. 6), i.e., a now spiritual presence of an ancient lover. According to Bloom, poetry as the “ultimate secular mode of what the Ancients called theurgy”, stands for the following guidelines: “augmentation of a god in ruins”, “the drawing down of a god who is too remote for our needs” and above all “a mode I would call world propping, in which our wounded cosmos is maintained” (p. 11). That is, “world propping” lies on a “conservation” process warranted by poetry, this being an idea reinforced when Bloom says that “as a literary and religious critic, I wish to rally a saving remnant” (idem). Therefore, Bloom is here resuming the “threshold” conception since its genetic character means that “Fall” does not inevitably implicate desolation.

“More Life: The Blessing Given by Literature” densifies, through the role played by conversion, the meaning of “presence”. In this text, “being blessed” means “our love for others” (p. 26), given that the relationship between “blessing”, “presence” and conversion is assured due to semantic and etymologic excursions. Right away, from “presence”, Bloom arrives at “teaching”—“ (…) the work of a teacher is to bring the student into a sense of her or his own presence” (p. 27)—and from its etymon—“to show” and “to say”—we are able to reach “blessing”, insofar as “blessing” stands for “a promise that your name will live on in the memory of others” (idem). As a pivotal example, Bloom points out the change, or conversion, of Jacob to Israel: Israel’s name materializes the “agon against the Angel of Death”, also “allegory […] of the struggle of every solitary deep reader to find in the highest literature what will suffice” (p. 29). The third text displays, then, the conversion’s synthesis of “sacred” into “secular”: the “advent of Incarnation” from “Second Isaiah” (p. 54) is on account of laying out the poetic, secular or Bloomean version in which one can both hear prophets or Whitman and Stevens.

Possessed by Memory’s second part, “Self-Otherseeing and the Shakespearean Sublime”, is worthwhile insofar as we pay attention to its unpretentious discursive attitude, i.e., disconnected from the inoperative idea of “self-otherseeing”, which does not have anything significant to add to Bloom’s Freudian element. In this way, the close-reading of “The Falstaffiad: Glory and Darkening of Sir John Falstaff”, reaffirming Falstaff’s centrality in literature, is the most solid essay.

In “In the Elegy Season: John Milton, the Visionary Company, and Victorian Poetry” is one of the book’s highlights, namely, “Paradise Lost: The Realm of Newness”. While availing Northrop Frye’s conception according to which, in Milton’s poem, “God the Father and the Son” are “aesthetic disasters” (p. 154), Bloom expands the figure of Satan. With Satan, Milton has created a hermeneutic device linking “newness”, “private gnosis” and “inward voice” (p. 157). What this device shows is the result of the birth of an innovative stance which, in turn, emerged from the interior of two entities: a monumental genealogy—“a Protestant stance free of all Protestantism” (idem), that is, “a pragmatic theodicy” (p. 163)—and the author himself—the influxes caused by the way in which he places himself before tradition. Since we are before a particular expression of creative disobedience, Satan was born not of a “myth” but a “heresy” (p. 158). This reactive motion—Satan vs. God, Milton vs. Shakespeare—only becomes effective by challenging the past from which it wants to be freed.

In addition to the tribute to Angus Fletcher and the readings of some A. R. Ammons’ poems, the three texts on Wallace Stevens in the fourth section, “The Imperfect is Our Paradise: Walt Whitman and the Twentieth-Century American Poetry”, are those here best vouching Bloom’s vitality. Albeit not dismissing—nor is that the aim—Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, these texts, with no more than four pages, are the “sudden ecstasies” (which we will find again in the coda) overlapping circumscription and extension flows. Especially noticeable—partly also in the texts on Blake, Coleridge and Keats in the previous part—is the renunciation of any claim concerning conclusive descriptions about authors or literary works whatsoever.

Finally, we arrive at the coda, “In Search of Lost Time”. As its title helps to infer, Bloom does fairly discuss Proust’s novel, but not exclusively. As a matter of fact, its final part bestows an accurate clarification of Possessed by Memory’s motives. Even though Bloom mentions the Augustian “autobiographical memory” (p. 471) and the “secular epiphany” (p. 473) of Rousseau, he ends up joining Proust’s “privileged moments, sudden ecstasies of revelation (p. 471). At stake are time and experience capsules in which a superior ground of life is achieved, that is, a “sublime lucidity” overpowering “dark inertia” (p. 475). Aside from the creation of characters that “change more radically for me than even the great Shakesperean figures” (p. 478) and being moreover an author “beyond anxiety” (p. 489), what Proust mainly does is to establish an immediate connection or an awareness between self and “the double aspect of time, destruction and creation” (p. 483). Thus, we can attempt finding in the Recherche the answer to the question that actually crosses Possessed by Memory as a whole: “[i]s there a relation between a writer’s immortality and a reader’s search for consolation in regard to the death of friends or family (…)?” (p. 505). Bloom rehearses an answer by leaning on Dr. Johnson—“the strongest critic in Western literary culture (…) my model” (p. 170)—, specifically referring to The Idler’s number 41. However, in what deals with the process implicated in “the work of mourning” (p. 506), a preference for the “patience and the deliberate pace of an aesthetic awakening” of Proust and Shakespeare wins over the Rasselas’s author melancholic tone.

In fact, Bloom had struggled during decades to render idiomatic that temporal ambivalence, namely throughout concepts like “influence”, “misreading”, “misprision” and “agon”. In Possessed by Memory, particularly since it is a tribute-book to friends and personal influences, we find a vocabulary which refers to an inwardly triggered regenerative dimension: “memory”, “inward”, “afterlife”, “voice”, “before”, “blessing”, “light”, “creation”, “propping”, “presence”, “name” and “newness”. And it is precisely through this dimension that the relationship between “author’s immortality” and “reader’s consolation” is qualified. Punctuated from time to time by biographic episodes—from students visits to hospitalizations resulting from a fall at home, up to night vigils in which Stevens brings a feeling of “deep peace” (p. 4)—Possessed by Memory can attain a superior degree of clarity if we think about Paul de Man, its most symptomatic absence. Although this is not the place for a full-blown discussion on the relations between them, it still seems key to underline, focusing on the premises of “Autobiography as De-Facement”, that an “autobiography” (which for de Man, as well as for Bloom, is not a true genre) carries out a tropologic “self-restoration”, “prosopopeia”  being its paradigmatic example. This concession or assignment of a “face” is precisely what is happening in this book: the vocabulary—from “memory” to “newness”—coincides with a set of tropes whose aim is to recover a series of presences, i.e., by a ‘disfiguration’ or revision, death gives place to memory. That is why we simultaneously witness Bloom self-restoring as an author, since “criticism” and “poetry” are associated by a background indistinctness. So, the “author’s immortality” is guaranteed by an inheritance, which is mainly the extension of a remissive table of contents towards a web of relations with other texts, enlivened when personally revised. As for the “reader’s consolation”, it may occur “when you have a poem by heart”, since “you possess it more truly and more strangely than you do your dwelling place, because the poem possesses you” (xx). In other words, the direct and individual bond that brings the reader and the poem together is quite enhanced. Accordingly, the following ideas are being stressed: interpreting begins with an insight, and a poem is neither a mere language artefact nor an end in itself.

Thus, Possessed by Memory will be praised and depreciated by the same public and for the same reasons as always. Hence whoever expects to find a different, regretful or bitter Bloom will be disappointed. And that consists exactly in the added value of this book: the best moments are an epilogue of the most interesting Bloom, the critic of The Ringers in the Tower, The Anxiety of Influence and The Map of Misreading, to Agon and The Anatomy of Influence. Thus, Possessed by Memory could have only been written at the end of life. It is an outcome of that “freshness of last things” (p. 346) since, while the reasons remain, we no longer have a belligerent urgency in imposing opinions. This is not a synonym of defeat but a serene feeling of mission fulfilled.

*PhD candidate funded by FCT (SFRH/BD/143281/2019). Program in Literary Theory, School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon

REFERÊNCIA:

Bloom, Harold. Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism. New York: Random House, 2020.