Before I offer the necessary explanations for these views, we should, I think, reach a sophisticated understanding of idols. An idol is obviously not only a little wooden graven image standing in the mud. Nor is an idol merely a false idea. An idol can be, and usually is, remarkably made, wonderfully persuasive in its parts, and in its parts often enough wonderfully true. An idol can have, above all, a psychological realism that is especially persuasive and seductive. And beyond this, an idol can be seen to work. (To illustrate most reductively: the Egyptian cat god tells us a great deal about cats, and something also about the mind of the Egyptian who worshiped it, and even more about the ingeniously imaginative mind that created it. Furthermore, it did its job in its time as a working divinity: it demanded awe and accommodation.)
The chief characteristic of any idol is that it is a system sufficient in itself. It leads back only to itself. It is indifferent to the world and to humanity. Like a toy or like a doll—which, in fact, is what an idol is—it lures human beings to copy it, to become like it. It dehumanizes. When we see a little girl who is dressed up too carefully in starched flounces and ribbons and is admonished not to run in the dirt, we often say, “She looks like a little doll.” And that is what she has been made into: the inert doll has become the model for the human child, dead matter rules the quick. That dead matter will rule the quick is the single law of idolatry.4 Scripture tells us that the human being is made in the image of God, and since we do not know how to adumbrate God, we remain as free, as unpredictable, as unfated in our aspirations as quicksilver. But when we make ourselves into the image of an image, no matter how flexible the imagination of aspiration, we are bound, limited, determined, constrained; we cannot escape the given lineaments, and no matter how multitudinous are the avenues open to us, they all come, as in a maze, to a single exit.
A second important characteristic of any idol is that it is always assumed to pre-exist the worshiper.5 An idol always has the authority of an ancestor or a precursor, even if it has just come fresh from the maker’s carpentry bench or brain-shop. In Rome, a just-hacked-out model of Venus has all the authority of a seven-hundred-year-old shrine to Astarte, because both rest on the precursor-goddess, the moon, which rules the tides of both sea and menstruation. Every idol is by nature an ideal, an image-known-before. Every idol is a precursor, and every idolator is a Johnny-come-lately, absorbing old news to refurbish for his instant needs.
A third characteristic of any idol is that, because it is inert, it cannot imagine history. It is always the same, no matter how multiform its appearances. It cannot create or alter history. When the God of the Jews said to Abraham, lech l’cha, Go forth, history was profoundly made, and continues to be made; the words lech l’cha, first heard five thousand years ago, at this moment agitate presidents, prime ministers, oil sheikhs, hawks and doves. But an idol, which cannot generate history, can be altered by it: from-the-sublime-to-the-ridiculous is the rule of every idol. Hadrian was a ferocious oppressor of Jews, and declared himself a god to be worshiped in statuary of mammoth beauty. Digging in the sand for old coins a few years ago, an American tourist in Israel drew up the great curly bronze head of the Emperor. He, the god, is reduced to curio.
A fourth characteristic of any idol is perhaps the most universally repugnant, because it demonstrates how the power of the (powerless) idol—i.e., the powerful imaginations of its devotees—can root out human pity. From this uniquely Jewish observation flows the Second Commandment. The Commandment against idols is above all a Commandment against victimization, and in behalf of pity. Pity, after all, is not “felt,” as if by instinct or reflex. Pity is taught; and what teaches it is the stricture against idols. Every idol is a shadow of Moloch, demanding human flesh to feed on. The deeper the devotion to the idol, the more pitiless in tossing it its meal will be the devotee. Moloch springs up wherever the Second Commandment is silenced. In the absence of the Second Commandment, the hunt for victims begins. The Second Commandment is more explicit than the Sixth, which tells us simply that we must not kill; the Second Commandment tells us we must resist especially that killing which serves our belief. In this sense, there are no innocent idols. Every idol suppresses human pity; that is what it is made for. When art is put in competition, like a god, with the Creator, it too is turned into an idol; one has only to recall the playing of Mozart at the gates of Auschwitz to see how the muses can serve Moloch—the muses, like the idols they are, have no moral substance or tradition. What the Second Commandment, in its teaching against victimization and in behalf of pity, also teaches, is the fear of godhood. And the “fear of godhood,” Bloom unequivocally writes, “is a fear of poetic strength, for what the ephebe enters upon, when he begins his life cycle as a poet, is in every sense a process of divination.” The strivings of divination—i.e., of God-competition—lead away from the Second Commandment, ultimately contradict it, and crush the capacity for pity.
These four essential characteristics of idolatry—that an idol can lead only to itself and has no meaning other than itself; that an idol always has an ideal precursor on which to model its form; that an idol can have no connection to human deed and human history-making; that an idol crushes pity—these are also the characteristics that, in Bloom’s scheme, mark the way of poems. Bloom tells us that every poem born into the world is, so to speak, the consequence of an idolatry, and has been made in the image of an older poem, a precursor-poem at whose feet the new poem has worshiped. And just as an idolator takes away from his contemplation of the idol whatever his psychological hungers require, so does the new poem take from the older poem whatever it needs for its life. Moreover, even when Bloom’s structures, unlike the actual Molochs of ancient, recent, and current history, appear to be socially harmless and gossamer, they nevertheless dream of a great swallowing and devouring. Even Bloom’s superficially bloodless “interpretation” turns out to be annihilation. (Cf., once again, kenosis and shevirat ha-kelim.) The sacrificial victim is endemic to the Bloomian system, and links it ineluctably with the pagan sacral.
So far I have been describing Bloom as Terach, the maker of idols. But I said earlier that he is also Abraham, who sees through the hollowness and human uselessness of idols. Like Abraham, Bloom recognizes that Terach is courting perversity, that Terach in his busy shop has put himself in competition with the Creator, luring away customers by means of loss leaders, that Terach refuses to accept Creation as given, and has set up counter-realities in the form of instant though illusory gratifications—namely, immediate answers to riddles. The answers may or may not be lies. Often enough the answer an idol gives is a workable answer. Doubtless fertility goddesses have been as responsible for as many births as any current fertility drug manufactured by Upjohn or Lederle. But they are exceptionally poor at urging the moral life, because to understand the moral life, one must know how to pay attention to, and judge, history—and at this idols are no good at all.
In a brief passage in his breathtaking albeit iconolatrous book The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom acknowledges how idols and icons—i.e., poems—are no good at all in urging the moral life. It seems to me this passage is the most significant commentary on Bloom’s system; in it he becomes Abraham and chases all the customers out of Terach’s shop. Above all, it is a statement that calls into question the entire volume that surrounds it, and all the subsequent volumes:
If the imagination’s gift comes necessarily from the perversity of the spirit, then the living labyrinth of literature is built upon the ruin of every impulse most generous in us. So apparently it is and must be—we are wrong to have founded a humanism directly upon literature itself, and the phrase “humane letters” is an oxymoron. . . . The strong imagination comes to its painful birth through savagery and misrepresentation. The only humane virtue we can hope to teach through a more advanced study of literature than we have now is the social virtue of detachment from one’s own imagination, recognizing always that such detachment made absolute destroys any individual imagination.<
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“The social virtue of detachment from one’s own imagination”—this splendidly humane sequence, set in a paragraph of clarified self-comprehension, expresses precisely the meaning of the Second Commandment. The “strong imagination,” born out of a “savagery and misrepresentation” neither yoked nor undone by the Second Commandment, created the earliest Moloch, the furnace-god, and encouraged mothers to throw their babies into the fire. The savagery is plain; the misrepresentation is the general conviction that throwing children into furnaces is a social good. Since, as we have seen, idols always imitate their precursor-ideals, it can be no surprise that the post-Enlightenment Moloch of the Nazis reproduced the very Moloch recounted in the Bible—not simply in the furnace (here “misprision” was introduced in the form of technological substitutions, perhaps), but also in the ideal of a service to society.
Based on Bloomian premises, it comes down to this: no Jew may be idolator or idol-maker; poems are the products of “strong imaginations,” and poets are dangerously strong imaginers, vampirishly living on the blood of earlier imaginers, from Moloch to Moloch; no Jew ought to be a poet.
One might want to intervene here with the reasonable reflection that “Tintern Abbey” is not yet Moloch. Quite. But push, push “Tintern Abbey” a little farther, and then a little farther, push the strong imagination of Nature a little farther, and one arrives finally at Moloch. “Tintern Abbey” assumes that the poet, in contemplating his own mind and seeking his own mood, inspired by a benign landscape, will be “well pleased to recognise / In nature and the language of the sense / . . . [the] soul / Of all my moral being.” But the ecstatic capacity, unreined, breeds a license to uncover not only joy, love, and virtue, but a demon. The soul’s license to express everything upon the bosom of a Nature perceived as holy can beget the unholy expression of savagery. It is not a new observation that the precursors of the Hitler Youth movement were the Wandervögel, young madcap bands and bards who wandered the German landscape looking for a brooding moodiness to inspire original feeling.
Still another passage from The Anxiety of Influence (this one on Terach’s side) introduces in detail one of the ingenious terms of Bloom’s special analytic vocabulary:
Kenosis, or “emptying,” at once an “undoing” and an “isolating” movement of the imagination. I take kenosis from St. Paul’s account of Christ “humbling” himself from God to man. In strong poets, the kenosis is a revisionary act in which an “emptying” or “ebbing” takes place in relation to the precursor. This “emptying” is a liberating discontinuity, and makes possible a kind of poem that a simple repetition of the precursor’s afflatus or godhood could not allow. “Undoing” the precursor’s strength in oneself serves also to “isolate” the self from the precursor’s stance. . . .
Historically, morally, theologically, one cannot be a Jew and stand by this passage.
To recapitulate the idea-germ that exploded into the brilliant hugeness and huge brilliance of the Bloomian system of analysis: a recognition that all of us are disconsolate latecomers; that we are envious and frustrated inheritors; that there have been giants on the earth before us; and what therefore shall we puny latecomers do, how shall we steal the fire that the great ones before us, our fortunate Promethean precursors, have already used up for their own imaginings? The answer comes through modes of discontinuity—kenosis, in the term Bloom borrows from Saint Paul, and shevirat ha-kelim, the “breaking of the vessels,” in the term he borrows from Kabbalah. But the discontinuity does not imply iconoclasm, the Abrahamitic shattering of the idol. On the contrary: it means reinvigorating the ideal of the idol in a new vessel, as Astarte begets Venus, as Rome, through Venus, feels itself possessed by its own goddess.
The notion of “ ‘undoing’ the precursor’s strength” has no validity in normative Judaism. Jewish liturgy, for instance, posits just the opposite; it posits recapturing without revision the precursor’s stance and strength when it iterates “our God, and God of our fathers, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Nearly every congeries of Jewish thought is utterly set against the idea of displacing the precursor. “Torah” includes the meanings of tradition and transmittal together. Although mainstream Judaism rejected the Karaites in favor of an interpretive mode, interpretation never came to stand for disjunction, displacement, ebbing-out, isolation, swerving, deviation, substitution, revisionism. Transmittal signifies the carrying-over of the original strength, the primal monotheistic insight, the force of which drowns out competing power systems. That is what is meant by the recital in the Passover Haggadah, “We ourselves went out from Egypt, and not only our ancestors,” and that is what is meant by the midrash that declares, “All generations stood together at Sinai,” including present and future generations. In Jewish thought there are no latecomers.
Consequently the whole notion of “modernism” is, under the illumination of Torah, at best a triviality and for the most part an irrelevance. Modernism has little to do with real chronology, except insofar as it means to dynamite the continuum. Modernism denotes discontinuity: a radical alteration of modes of consciousness. Modernism, perforce, concerns itself with the problem of “belatedness.” But modernism and belatedness are notions foreign and irrelevant to the apperceptions of Judaism. Modernism and belatedness induce worry about being condemned to repeat, and therefore anxiously look to break the bond with the old and make over, using the old as the governing standard—or influence—from which to learn deviation and substitution. The mainstream Jewish sense does not regard a hope to recapture the strength, unmediated, of Abraham and Moses as a condemnation. Quite the opposite. In the Jewish view, it is only through such recapture and emulation of the precursor’s stance, unrevised, that life can be nourished, that the gift of the Creator can be received, praised, and fulfilled. Jewish thought makes much of its anti-antinomian precursors as given, and lacks both the will and the authority to undo or humble or displace them, least of all to subject them to purposeful misprision. A scribe with the Torah under his hand will live a stringent life in order not to violate a single letter. There is no competition with the text, no power struggle with the original, no envy of the Creator. The aim, instead, is to reproduce a purely transmitted inheritance, free of substitution or incarnation.
But the idol-maker envies the Creator, hopes to compete with the Creator, and schemes to invent a substitute for the Creator; and thereby becomes satanic and ingrown in the search and research that is meant to prise open the shells holding the divine powers. This is the work of “misprision,” the chief Bloomian word. Misprision is to Bloom what Satan is to Milton. It is not an accident that the term—before Bloom exercises revisionary misprision upon it—denotes “felony,” “wrongdoing,” “violation.” These definitions proffer a critical judgment of reality; they point, simply, to an Abrahamitic or, better yet, Sinaitic “shalt not.” But when Bloom utters “misprision,” it is the spirit of Terach that orders it.
Bloom, then, is a struggler between Terach and Abraham. He knows, mutedly, what Abraham knows, but he wants, vociferously, what Terach wants. “To revise is not to fulfill,” he is heard to murmur in Poetry and Repression, in a voice transfixed by Jewish transmittal. But in all four Prophetic Books one hears, far louder than that, Terach’s transfiguring chant: clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis, apophrades. And in the end it is Terach who chiefly claims Bloom. Like Terach, like Freud, like Marx, like the Gnostics, like the classical Christian theologians who are the inheritors of the Gnostics, like the Kabbalists and the hasidim who are similarly the inheritors of the Gnostics, like all of these, the Bloomian scheme of misprision of the precursor is tainted by a variety of idol-making.
Bloom, giving us Vico’s view in quotation, plainly gives his own: “The making that is poetry is god-making, and even the ephebe or starting-poet is as much demon as man or woman.” An idol, the product of the demonic yetzer ha-ra,6 is an internalized system that allows no escape from its terms; and if one tries to escape, the escape it
self is subject to interpretation as being predictable within the system. All the avenues of a maze, both the traps and the solutions, belong to the scheme of the maze.
Or think instead of a great crystal globe, perilously delicate yet enduring, with a thousand complex working parts visible within, the parts often exceedingly ingenious and the whole a radiant bauble: an entire man-made world beautiful, above all rational, and complete in itself. But it draws one to intellectual slavery. It signifies bondage to the wheel of self-sufficient idolatry.
The most enduring configurations of Jewish religious idiom are not unfamiliar with Bloom’s inventions; they were considered and discarded as long ago as Abraham, and again in Egypt, and again in confrontation with the Hellenizers, and now again in confrontation with so-called modernism, which is only Gnostic syncretism refurbished.
Literature, one should have the courage to reflect, is an idol. We are safe with it when we let the child-part of our minds play with poems and stories as with a pack of dolls; then the role of imaginative literature is only trivial. But what Bloom, anxiously influenced, has done, is to contrive a system of magic set in rational psychological terms, and requiring (as the Jewish religious idiom never will) a mediator. For Freud the mediator or medium is the unconscious. For Bloom the mediator or medium is the precursor-poem. But for each, imagination has devised an inexorable, self-sufficient, self-contained magic system, the most magical aspect of which is the illusion of the superbly rational.
Bloom himself has seen that he began as a desperately serious critic of literature and ended as one inflamed by Cordovero and Luria. Perhaps the trouble—it is every writer’s trouble—is that he should not have been serious about literature in the first place; seriousness about an idol leads to the misprision that is violation. As Bloom the system-maker, in book after book, more and more recognizes that what he has invented is magic, i.e., “practical Kabbalah,” he turns to the magic system of the actual and historic Kabbalah for confirmation. It is as if Harold Bloom suddenly woke up one morning to discover that he had concocted Kabbalah on his own; only it was already there. That is like Venus opening her eyes in a dawning Rome to learn that she is Astarte reborn. Astarte will always be reinvented. In the absence of the Second Commandment idolatry will always be reconstituted—if not in wood or stone, then in philosophical or political concept; if not in philosophical or political concept, then in literature.
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