Possessed by Sahitya

I think my relationships with mentors and friends changed only after they died. I am not an occultist nor a medium, but somehow they speak to me from the beyond. They are no different except perhaps a touch more urgent.

—Harold Bloom (Giraldi 2019)

The past is never dead; listening to the past has no expiration either. So when Harold Bloom stays possessed by memory, he professes his love with "with." I am tempted to see Bloom engaging with sahitya with its Sanskritic origin and valence that I have argued elsewhere as sahit (being with) and vidya (knowing).¹ Possessed by sahitya here is the vital nexus. Interestingly, Bloom's "listening" to the voices and narratives in and from the past is integral to the formation of his sahitya, his connect with the inner self, his construction and conditions of knowing. Being possessed by memory is being possessed by listening—the powers and affect of an endo- and exotelic listening, a listening across, listening beyond. Literature reveals spaces as much as it casts spells to help listening to continue and grow in different proportions and degrees. Bloom is convinced that "high literature has three prime attributes: cognitive power, originality, aesthetic splendor. Only by a disciplined harnessing of emotion can any of these three come forth. What you call our 'new autocracy of emotion' is just stylized noise. It cannot touch the interdependence of criticism and literature because it is mindless. Culture is now cut off from fashion. Popular culture has become an oxymoron. Bad taste is not culture. There are still many valuable writers of imaginative works in our society. It seems to me that they prosper best when they take a stance apart from the immediate moment. Distraction is the enemy. I see no crisis in the reciprocity of literature and criticism because the culture industries are irrelevant to it" (Giraldi 2019). So "highest literature speaks to ourselves" and listening is as much a cultivation as it is a necessity. Listening for Bloom is critical attentiveness. Possession is not mere occupancy but staying occupied in and out of time, in indexes and indices of the "untimely." It is through such listening as possession and being possessed as listening that literature begins to think.

Bloom points out that "deep and constant reading fully establishes and augments an autonomous self" (Giraldi 2019). It is a whole fresh debate, however, on how we configure and problematize "autonomous self." This "deep" reading is plastic in that sahitya reaches us in multiple ways as much as we reach sahitya in diversely invested persuasions. This accommodativeness of sahitya is possible both in its usefulness and uselessness, through unexpected wonder and "nexus"; it is about an experience of "reading" where changes occur on both ends of the interaction—sahitya changes our memory of it and simultaneously our possession of sahitya alters too. This projects the "interiority" of literary experiences contributing to the construction of the "autonomous self"—an aesthetic occupancy that teaches one to speak to oneself. Perhaps, Bloom's understanding of the autonomous self is closer to the conative and projective powers of the "literary" and the "post-literary." If writing is about building a revolt against the imperative of the given and the conventional, the quotidian and the obvious, then the struggle is to live in the interiority of sahitya; it is here that the post-literary becomes alive as well. If I were to go by Martin Heidegger's observation that a great thinker keeps recurring and expanding on "one great thought," Bloom's "possessed by memory" is another version of "anxiety" with a difference—a vexed sahit with the canon. "Literary" gnosis is a contributory paradigm to such formations of interiority where the "deep reading of a poem" becomes a way of knowing the "Real Me or self or spark."² Here the endotelic listening to the "spark" generates the "knowing," the subject of poetic possession: this irreducible aesthetic oversights the ideological and the societal and corresponds with the spiritual. So the attentiveness to writers that Bloom confesses to having stayed possessed by keeps augmenting his "inner self" (Bloom 1994, 28). Would canon...