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Chapter Seven: Tainted Love: A Psycho-Kabbalistic Reading of the Poetic Scene of Instruction
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Chapter 7 Tainted Love: A Psycho-Kabbalistic Reading of the Poetic Scene of Instruction The Cherub, in Ezekiel, is a guardian of Eden who has fallen into the role of Satanic hinderer. Poetic influence and Romantic love . . . may be the same process; at least they are similitudes verging toward an identity. —Harold Bloom, Yeats Wer war es, der zuerst Die Liebesbande verderbt Und Stricken von ihnen gemacht hat? —Friedrich Hölderlin, Der Rhein The whole of Bloom’s idiom is a living confirmation of the famous apothegm of William Blake, who claimed that it is wiser to be a tiger of wrath than a horse of instruction. It is through and through militant and agonistic—yet, being so tigerlike, it cannot always successfully avoid its uneasy place of origin: the Scene of Instruction to which he, as well as all the poets he writes about, are tied. Wrath is a dialectical denial of this primary encumbrance—but it also has a deeper and more rebellious meaning which Hölderlin, talking bitterly about Prometheus inaugurating the Age of Iron, called “shattering the bonds of love,” a primary sin of modern Entzauberung. Is Instruction merely a source of bondage and burden the ephebe has to fight against to become free—or is it “the bond of love” which has to be cared for and cherished so it can grow into a mature form of dependence? Which language describes it better? The thoroughly disenchanted modern idiom of the struggle for emancipation —or the premodern, mythical speech of election and belonging? 291 Perhaps the Bloomian teaching on influence needs both: tigers of wrath and horses of instruction, the disenchanted discourse of agon and the archaic language of love, if only in order to pass beyond this opposition. Just as in the last two chapters, we will focus our analysis on two revisionary ratios: the remaining ratios being the second, tessera, and the sixth, apophrades. They enjoy a peculiar, rather cumbersome position within the revisionary agon: tessera is the first attempt at completion, that is, of making whole again what has been broken by the first, aggressive ratio of clinamen, and apophrades is the final moment of identification between the ephebe and the precursor, which ends the agonistic cycle. Both these ratios seem, at least prima facie, reparative and as such less negative than the other four, which are propelled by open aggression toward the work of the precursor. Or, are they? Bloom’s rhetoric admits the possibility of restoration and reconciliation with such slow reluctance , indeed with such “recalcitrance in the self” (RT, 22), that it allows the scattered sparks of love to show only in the midst of his deepest denial. TESSERA, or Antithetical Completion It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves. —Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist The North-American savages kill their parents; we do the same. —G. W. F. Hegel, Jenenser Realphilosophie (Jena Real Philosophy) Bloom’s style is the one of stylus: it is a battling instrument. He himself likes to portray his efforts in terms of “wrestling,” which puts him in the same honorable line with Jacob and “Wrestling Sigmund”: “Battle between strong equals, father and son as mighty opposites, Laius and Oedipus at the crossroads; only this is my subject here” (AI, 11; my emphasis ), says Bloom, leaving no doubt as to his total immersion in the sphere of a never-ending agon. A few chapters later he will prove his point even clearer, by attacking the classical Freudian notion of the “normal” sublimation : “Whether sublimation of sexual instincts plays a central part in the genesis of poetry,” he will say, “is hardly relevant to the reading of poetry, and has no part in the dialectic of misprision. But sublimation of aggressive instincts is central to writing and reading poetry, and 292 wrestling harold [44.223.94.103] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:04 GMT) this is almost identical with the total process of misprision” (AI, 115; my emphasis). But the crucial word here is “almost.” Is struggle really the only subject of Bloom’s theory of poetic revision, or is there something else, suggested by the imprecision of the latter statement, some silent remainder? Bloom himself seems aware of the insufficiency of his wrestling rhetoric , for already in A Map of Misprision, the next work in the tetralogy written in 1975, this silent remainder finally gains voice. Bloom returns to the motif of falling in love, which occurs at the beginning...