Tribute to Harold Bloom

I first read Harold Bloom's essay "The Internalization of Quest Romance" in Nigel Alderman's seminar on William Wordsworth at Yale in the spring of 2003. There was no turning back. I had heard plenty of stories about Harold Bloom but I never appreciated him on a personal level, until then. I used to be a Dungeons & Dragons kid, and then I was an actor, starting with Romeo & Juliet. I always loved the story of Don Quixote because of the quest element and the love story. But Harold Bloom contained all of it when I finally read him at age 22. I read The Anxiety of Influence after graduating college and I could not stop. I had already encountered Ralph Emerson and Walt Whitman but Bloom knew them better than I could, and in a different way. He taught me about everything I thought I already knew. He compelled me to start reading Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane.

That was more than 20 years ago. I've spent the better part of my adult life in discipleship of Harold Bloom. I have suffered, personally and professionally, for defending the greatest critic of literature in any language since Samuel Johnson. I have been mocked many times and told that there is no future in the university for a disciple of Harold Bloom. Never mind all that. My purpose here is to open my reader's eyes to the future, to transume Bloom diachronically, insofar as I can in a short blog post.

I am a student of rhetoric. John Hollander, a close friend of Bloom's, wrote the following in his introduction to Bloom's 1988 volume The Poetics of Influence:

"[W]hat had been an art of purportedly potent political persuasion in classical times, the rhetorical art of the senator and the lawyer, became first the art of religious persuasion and then, in the Renaissance, the art of poetic persuasion (at least in that part of rhetoric known as elocutio.) Schemes and tropes were not used to manipulate other people's decisive actions (or at least, active decisions), but rather, in Renaissance and later rhetoric, to invade their workaday epistemologies through the arts of minute and even momentary fictions. For Bloom (as very differently for, say, Paul de Man), the literary study of rhetoric today is itself a trope of classical rhetoric -- the whole system is a figure of the former one, in that the persuasion is internalized. The writer is using figuration to persuade part of the reader's consciousness of the authority of the fiction (instead of using, as in classical rhetoric, the authority of the speaker, it is the authority of writing as truth-telling which enables the kind of lying that these minute fictions entail)."

Bloom and Hollander and Paul de Man are, in Hollander's phrase, engaged in the "literary study of rhetoric." Hollander's insight, and Bloom's, and for all romantics, is the internalization of persuasion, which places authority not in the speaker, but in the truth-telling of the written text as a persuasive fiction. It makes Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche the prophets of 20th century rhetoric, acknowledging the lie as essential and central to any coherent modern or post-modern theory of rhetoric.

We should forget about the labels of "Judaism," "Christianity," and "Islam." These are communal tropes which have little to do with the genius of God as Bloom conceives it. The Hebrew god has a name, and his name is Yahweh. As Bloom persuasively argues, "Yahweh addresses himself only to a handful, to his elite: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, and, by profound implication, David." We can imagine the entire will of God in the passage from Adam to David. The Christian messiah is inconceivable without the genealogy from Adam to David.

I cannot expound here on theology, but my point is to emphasize Harold Bloom's revision of "the stories we think we know: Eve, the serpent, Cain and Abel, Seth, Noah and the Flood, the tower of Babel, and something utterly new with Abraham." Bloom extends his originality throughout all of literature, everything he can touch, and he never stopped writing until the day he died in 2019.

In our uncertain days in higher education, those who have fled the Western Canon and Harold Bloom will find how misguided they were, if they are lucky enough to have that level of self-reflection. Either way, our academies will crumble to dust before the name of Bloom is scattered. Like Walt Whitman, Harold Bloom continues to wait for us down the road, whomever and wherever we are.