Kabbalah rising : a study of Harold Bloom's early criticism

A majority of Romanticism students have difficulty understanding the practical criticism of Harold Bloom. The reason for this difficulty is that Bloom bases his practical criticism on a very unique theory of criticism. The purpose of this study is to sift from the practical criticism from 1958 to l97l the theory and explain it both in terms of Bloom's development of his ideas through his criticism and in terms of the isolated idea and its relationship to modern thought. This study will focus on four fundamental ideas of his theory: imagination, Romanticism, influence, and text.

Bloom's notion of text develops from his very early reaction to New Criticism and Structuralism. Against these schools of criticism Bloom develops the notion that a text contains no meaning, unity, or form. Meaning exists only in the dialectical relationship between texts. That is, any sign (e.g., word or poem) means nothing in and of itself; it is only in the process of signification that meaning exists. A sign is a two-faced coin, a real artifact that means nothing without a giver and a taker. Bloom develops his ideas of text and meaning as usage, in part, from the ideas in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Thus, Bloom bases his ideas on criticism as being nonreferential,

Bloom's idea of influence is derived from his understanding of many precursor poets and critics. But his principle sources are Blake, Frye, and Freud. His basic idea is that an ephebe (a poet before his creation) begins to write a particular poem but feels anxiety due to the fear that the father-precursor poets (also called the Covering Cherub) have stated the idea before. So he rewrites his percursor and alleviates his anxiety by purposely misreading the precursor poems, a swerve from the original, a type of fall, that he calls clinamen. The clinamen is one of two revisionary rations he uses; the other is tessera, the notion that the ephebe reads his father poet as somehow incomplete, like a beautiful urn with a fragment missing. The ephebe alleviates his anxiety by providing the fragment and thereby completing the precursor poem.

Bloom's theory of Romanticism is based upon his ideas of influence and text; it is also very similar to other theories of Romanticism (especially those of Northrop Frye and M. H. Abrams). For Bloom, however, the theory of Romanticism is the theory of imagination. Thus, the story of the imagination is the story of Romanticism. This story has several stages, but a few are very important. The first stage is the recognition of limitations and of the world as

fallen and fragmented. A possible next stage, for the intermediate stages may occur in any order, is the attempt to create paradise on earth in nature. A third possible stage is that of Prometheus, the stage of revolution and titanic defiance. A fourth stage is Purgatory. In this stage, the poet recognizes the limitations of either the Promethean or the Beulah stage, the stage of paradise in nature, and attempts to move out of it into another. The poet may move back to Beulah or to the final stage of Apocalypse. This stage is the one in which the poet seems to recreate time and space. The most successful imagination moves through all stages and resides in the last. For Bloom, there has never been a more successful imagination than Blake's.

Bloom's method of interpretation requires a collapsing of the previous four ideas. . This method is twofold: explaining and assessing. He describes a work by using other texts and analyzing the process of signification that he perceives and by charting influences. He assesses a work by how powerfully Romantic it is. If it is of the first order, it evokes the sense of apocalyptic humanism; that is, it evokes the sense of the ending of time and space in a way that benefits mankind, for it moves him out of solipsism and fragmentation into a perception of unity.