The Privileged Moment in Bloom: Possessed By Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism

I begin with a 1963 poem by A. R. Ammons, "Moment," included in his famous 1965 volume, Corsons Inlet (apostrophe deliberately dropped by the poet). This poem delineates the central trope of romanticism from Blake to Ammons himself, as Bloom would have it:

Moment

He turned andstood

in the moment'sheight,

exhilarationsucking him up,

shuddering andlifting

himjaw and bone

and he saidwhat

destruction am Iblessed by ?

(Ammons 2017, 90)

For Bloom, as the Coda IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME here underscores with a vengeance, conceives and reads literature in all its forms (lyric, narrative, dramatic, critical) as a moment of vision, what Blake calls (as Bloom reminds us) the "pulsation of the artery." The moment is a creative moment of life, more life, lived and imagined, manifesting itself as an epiphany, as being, a timeless instant of possibility's realization of what feels eternal, the power of the imagination, hopefully to transume past masters. Such a moment is sublime, and originally in mythic or religious contexts, sacred, a moment of election, perhaps even self-election. Like Saul's being struck down on the road to Damascus, however, it is a moment of vision that speaks, a fiery image of voice, inspiring and confirming a special identity upon the prophet, the saint, the poet, the critical disciple of romanticism in its modern and post-modern forms. In the Coda of Possessed By Memory, Bloom not surprisingly focuses on Proust's analysis of the vicissitudes of involuntary memory in "The Intermittencies of the Heart" chapter from the great multi-volume novel whose title gives to this Coda a name.

What we see in Ammons' poem is the radiant gist of this privileged or sublime moment, available to any and all. This "height" is "exhilaration" that is exaltation, a dizzying falling upward, as if the vacancy of space were sucking into orbit the poem's "he" about which the poet-speaker speaks almost objectively. Emerson's erect position of the protestant individual believer, not the rote genuflection of the Catholic masses, takes center stage. The essence of the moment is not dogma or idea, but experience, and eventually declaration of sheer destruction, the non-spiritual identity being purely wiped out by the sublime moment, being so uplifted and cancelled out that, dialectically enough, jaw and bone work to raise the Job-like question: "what/destruction am I/blessed by?" For Bloom, throughout his career and in this his forty-fifth book par excellence, literature in the Western tradition and generally now in other traditions as well anchors itself always in such moments of vision, just read differently as the different contexts permit or encourage.

Possessed by Memory makes it clear in its epigraph from Oscar Wilde's "The Critic as Artist" that this book is a spiritual form of autobiography, composed out of those passages (read "moments") that have translated Bloom into vision: "That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is more concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography, as it deals not with the events, but with the thoughts of one's life; not with life's physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind" (Intentions, 1891). This is why we find our critic discussing in Part One (A VOICE SHE HEARD BEFORE THE WORLD WAS MADE): Gnosticism, Kabbalah, The Hebrew Bible, especially of course the Prophets, but also Job, The Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes. (Each part has a title in all caps).

Of course, Bloom next discusses Shakespeare in Part Two (SELF-OTHERSEEING AND THE SHAKESPEAREAN SUBLIME), making clear that what marks his sublime moments is what Bloom names the concept of "self-otherseeing," by which he means and we are to understand those moments precisely of uplift that alienate us profoundly from ourselves...