The Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction

Chapter Three: Life and Death in Deconstruction: From Hegel to de Man

Chapter 3 Life and Death in Deconstruction: From Hegel to de Man Tell all the Truth but tell it slant— Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth’s superb surprise As Lightening to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind— —Emily Dickinson, “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” Who could want to be . . . a memorial volume with a blurred inscription? —Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition It is as if I were made of stone, as if I were my own tombstone, there is no loophole for doubt or for faith, for love or repugnance, for courage or anxiety, in particular or in general, only a vague hope lives on, but no better than the inscriptions on the tombstones. —Franz Kafka, The Diaries Literary theorists often agree that Harold Bloom is somehow too idiosyncratic to be approached in what they may call a proper theoretical way. Being so contrary, almost to the point of a spitefulness that pushes him to write in spite of every possible received opinion, he puts himself in the uncomfortable position of someone who actively hinders his own interpretation. His kabbalistically complex trope of poetic influence 109 seems to be so closely linked to his own private idiom that it hardly survives as a scheme. It would almost seem that, by implicating his position in an endless, quasi-midrashic self-commentary, Bloom does not wish to be repeated or, at least, makes repetition extremely difficult. There is something in his idiom that resists repetition and defies all attempts to elaborate a “Bloomian theory,” in which his own original inscription would have to be blurred in order to give way to abstract schemes. Unlike de Man, who gave rise to a powerful school of deconstruction , Bloom’s own effort to dismiss deconstruction never managed to bloom into a proper antideconstructive theory. The theoretical interest in Bloom waxed and waned in the ’70s, trying and failing to repeat fruitfully what has been said in his famous tetralogy, and since then (i.e., from the beginning of the ’80s), there has appeared no single serious attempt to continue Bloom’s speculation.1 This is why I do not propose here to repeat what from the very beginning was doomed to failure. I do not want to isolate a scheme based on Bloom’s vision of influence; I intend to follow a different path of repetition. I wish to examine what made this failure inevitable, namely: Harold Bloom’s most vitalistic ingredient, his famed contrariety. Self-Sacrifice and Its Rewards This impossible position is precisely the figure, the trope, metaphor as a violent—and not as a dark—light, a deadly Apollo. —Paul de Man, “Shelley Disfigured” But what contributes most of all to this Apollonian image of the destroyer is the realization of how immensely the world is simplified when tested for its worthiness of destruction . . . No vision inspires the destructive character. He has few needs, and the least of them is to know what will replace what has been destroyed. —Walter Benjamin, “The Destructive Character” It is easy to understand why de Man’s writings could deliver a secure canvas for his pupils’ philosophical elaboration, but it is a much more difficult task to understand Bloom’s relative defeat. This difference, however, boils down to one seminal opposition: whereas de Man’s theory is founded on the gesture of renunciation, the ascetic sacrifice of one’s individual self, which acknowledges its own erasure in the moment of 110 agon with the deadly angels naming, Bloom’s speculation relies on defiance, an equally archetypal, lingering gesture of refusal to offer one’s own self for the benefit of abstraction. Whereas de Man’s attitude is a complex contemporary version of the ascetic imperative that preaches truth as the highest value, however negatively or implicitly, Bloom’s position is a revision of the Nietzschean antithetical ideal, which praises the value of resistance and, most of all, a resistance to the temptation of truth. And it is obviously easier to follow the pattern than to follow the resistance against the pattern; it is easier to be in the company of masters than in the impossible company of rebellious hysterics. For Nietzsche, who at the beginning of Beyond Good and Evil famously stipulates, “Suppose truth to be a woman . . . ,” truth is feminine precisely because it poses...