A Book of Revelation

There is indeed a final book of the New Testament. It doesn't so much testify to the inevitability of a final word, confirming the truth of everything precedent, so much as it imaginatively persists into an illuminable future. After all, the religiosity contained within The Book of Revelation is progressively memorial, apocalyptic and prophetic. There is a similar religiosity afoot in Harold Bloom's latest book, By Memory Possessed: The Inward Light of Criticism. In this volume we have a kind of summa of his life as a reader which leaves one with the impression that the prophetic mode is the dialectical issue of memory and apocalypse. This is to say that, like "John's" book of revelation, Bloom's Possessed By Memory is far from final, except in the most banally ordinal scheme of things. The "inward light of criticism" shines outward into the future of literature.

"How can you come to the end of it" Bloom asks (2019, 144) about reading the literary text which always comes back to one's self in memory as something else. Is this not inherently prophetic and simultaneously antagonistic to the idea that the act of reading the text will ever end at the end, even for a self-characterizing old man for whom endings are already a frivolous nostalgia. Aptly, Bloom speaks of his fervor for Dante's Paradiso as scriptural, as testimony to his personal sense of religiosity: "Old age has not reconciled me to it. But then I am a Jew who evades normative Judaism. My religion is the appreciation of high literature. Shakespeare is the summit. Revelation for me is Shakespearean or nothing (144)."

So it does not surprise us, reading Bloom's memoir of the reader as an ever-older man, that the most resonant and arguably rejuvenating revelation of the book comes in the section entitled "Self-Otherseeing and the Shakespearean Sublime." Certainly memory and apocalypse have been understood as elements of the sublime since Longinus tutored Posthumius Terentianus to appreciate how the sublime requires memory of what serves self-expression in order to "scatter[s] everything before it like a thunderbolt and in a flash reveal[s] the full power of the speaker" as someone other than he might recognize as himself (Longinus 1973). What is original to Bloom's mind is the way in which his deployment of the concept self-otherseeing portends more than the mere more, that is the signature of sublimity. Here Bloom is arguably more Nietzschean than Longinan. Unlike Longinan sublimity, the Shakespearean sublimity that Bloom tells us arises from self-otherseeing is not a sudden electrical burst of feeling, scattering the self beyond its boundaries. For it does not preclude the exercise of a still human volition. In the state of ongoingness that we perhaps know best from Beckettian theater, it matters that we know what is happening to us in a way that is more than any merely apocalyptic happening.

Certainly Bloom exhibits a more theatrical turn of mind than Longinus. Self-otherseeing "…has to do with our impulse to stage [my emphasis] our own suffering and our crises. By self-otherseeing, whether in Shakespeare or in life, I mean the double consciousness of observing our own actions and sufferings as though they belonged to others and not to ourselves, while being aware we possess them" (2019, 80-81). But why must one stage one's suffering since suffering is already the most lamentably ineluctable condition of fallen mankind? Nietzsche's answer, in his caricature of resentful human nature—already a theatrical gesture, a canny ventriloquism—is that we must stage our suffering so that it might accrue to someone else's expense. Of course Nietzsche means for us to act otherwise, unresentfully, to be less reactive, to understand acting as the actor understands her vocation: the one who is saying her lines is one who knows herself as if she were not only herself. And this, as Bloom understands so well, means the actor is always overhearing herself as herself, listening for herself, cognizant that there are more ways to know oneself than can be learned...