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3 Wrest(l)ing Authority The Agonism of Harold Bloom Harold Bloom's work over the last decade or so leaves his readers in no doubt as to his interest in, and indeed commitment to, Jewishness. Looking back, one gets a sense of growth, a veritable burgeoning of this new tendency. It is most recently, indubitably, and controversially there in The Book ofJ (1990)/ where, in an odd if fascinating historical reconstruction, Bloom ends up making the bizarre "feminist" claim that the biblical J-writer or Yahwist was a woman. Bloom's Norton Lectures, delivered at Harvard during 1987 and 1988 and later published as Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present,2 begin and are suffused with Jewish themes. And the title of a slim, privately published and distributed edition ofthree lectures given at City College of New York in 1985 clearly declares the nature of its concerns and bespeaks Bloom's anything but orthodox approach to Jewish subjects: The Strong Light ofthe Canonical: Kafka, Freud, Scholem as Revisionists ofJewish Culture. At the end of this book, he ruminates upon his Jewish students and the ways in which their Jewishness seems to manifest itself nowadays, that is, "confusedly, ambivalently, ambiguously and partly." His concluding sentences read as follows: That is the way things are, the way they are going to be. What offers itself as normative Judaism does not speak to them, as it does not speak to me. Kafka, Freud, and Scholem, unlikely but inevitable triad, do speak to my students, and do speak to me. Jewish high culture, intellectually speaking, is now an amalgam of imaginative literature , psychoanalysis, and a kind of Kabbalah. How a Jewish high culture can continue without a Judaism is a most curious question, but if a Judaism yet develops to 127 128 Chapter three meet this question, it seems unlikely that such spirituality will have much continuity with the normative tradition. More likely, any such spirituality will receive its Jewish information from the writing ofKafka, Freud and Gershom Scholem.3 To readers who have accompanied me this far, this may no longer seem like an unusual claim; indeed, if there is chutzpah in Bloom's insistence on the Jewish importance of Kafka, Freud, and Scholem, there is, if anything, rather more of the same in my claims on behalf of Bloom, Cavell, and Bercovitch! To many orthodox or traditional Jewish adherents, however, such forms of canon building will certainly seem strange, not to say heretical. This would not trouble Bloom; he is hardly a stranger to controversy. More important, however, is the fact that until a certain moment in his career, about a decade and a half ago, Bloom would probably not have ventured to speculate about or revise a Jewish canon at all. He was certainly not always as forthcoming about Jewish issues as he has become, and one of the claims of this chapter will be that his path toward dealing openly with such subjects, which are clearly so close to his heart, was smoothed by an immediately precedent and concomitant concern with certain American literary personae, particularly the Transcendentalist figures of Emerson and Whitman. For, if a certain "Judaization" is a recent trend in Bloom's writings, it should be noted that in the course of its development , Bloom's career also underwent a dramatic and decided Americanization, what we might call an American naturalization. The form this took was a kind of transatlantic crossing, which ensued only after a prolonged earlier engagement with the tradition of British Romantic poetry. This is reflected both in the order of Bloom's critical engagements with individual authors and in the way he contextualizes and exemplifies his by now well-known historical schemata of influence and revisionism. Bloom had, after all, written books on Shelley, Blake, and Yeats4 well before he produced his monumental work on Wallace Stevens, The Poems ofOur Climate,5 and it is not until the publication of both Agon6 and The Breaking of the Vessels7 in 1982 that a specifically American poetic lineage is seen to fully eclipse its British counterpart and capture his complete attention. It is no exaggeration to say that this American "conversion" was for Bloom nothing less than an embrace of Emersonianism, and this is congruent with one of his own claims, namely, that Emerson was the "founder ofthe American religion, fountain ofour literary and spiritual elite" (A, p. 170).8 Wrest(l)ing Authority 129 It was...

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