Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism

What are the prerequisites for performing a strong reading of this strongest of critics? Wherefore the mirth and mettle to become equal to Bloom's (at times) terrifying paradigmata for the belated student of literature? Bloom acknowledges Neil Hertz for likening his books to a perverse blend of Piransi and Rube Goldberg, dismissing our critic's oeuvre as a scatterbrain "melange of homemade contraptions and imaginary spaces." Bloom's response to this is characteristically funny and ingenious, not to mention invigorating. "I accept this but universalize it.... The triumphant point of a Rube Goldberg is not that it is a twittering machine, or that it goes through amazing, far-fetched convolutions in order to perform a simple operation in a howlingly complicated way, BUT THAT IT WORKS -- not by getting the job done, but by an audacious inventiveness that exposes, however parodistically, the truth that the job's aim cannot be distinguished from its origins"(45). A critical pragmatist will derive the means of his analysis out of the special requirements demanded by the text under review. If, for example, the poetry of William Blake seems to call for the disinterment of certain secular religious traditions (whether Gnostic, Kabbalistic, or Freudian), the critic has every incentive to explore and enlarge upon these paradigms, to bring the spiritual history of mankind to bear upon the younger text. Virtually all of Bloom's detractors refuse to come to terms with his bare-bones speculative Pragmatism, wherein a theory's "truth" lies in its workability and use-value, rather than on a logical schemata of spec and modelization. "Poetry and criticism are useful not for what they really are, but for whatever poetic and critical use you can usurp them to, which means that interpretive poems and poetic interpretations are concepts you make happen [poetry], rather than concepts of being [philosophy]"(39). The transmittance of power from master to ephebe entails the birth-pang zero-hour of "catastrophe-creation," a breaking open of the visionary structure in order to reassemble oneself into a stronger, more originary consciousness, where the ephebe must come to terms with the epistemological brainwashing performed on him by Academe, by his previous, idealizing views of literature and the arts, by friends, family, and other institutional bric-a-brac which mediate (and derange) the Gnostic self, the soporific realm of our Lethean, amnesiac culture. Bloom's criterion is elitist and solitary, the nonpareil of a re-visionary Gnosticism which he's powerfully and complexly developed over the past thirty years.... And as any student of religious tradition can attest, one should *never* (as the previous reviewer has) mistake spiritual difficulty for theoretical vagueness, which is to say, unless one has read and reread all of Bloom from *Anxiety*(1973) to *Omens*(1996), he or she should refrain from making superficial judgements on thi

--Professor Bloom has been educating me for so long that I often lose sight of his exhilarating strangeness and originality. Whatever his professional destiny as critic, scholar, university professor, editor, book reviewer, et al., the total simultaneous shape of his Oeuvre is what will swing into focus for posterity - we will come at length to an astounding prayer. AGON is the capstone to Bloom's vision of literary history, sweeping us away in a critical saga whose heterodoxy could overtake Gravity's Rainbow. Hellenistic Gnosticism as "a way of telling a story," Lurianic Kabbalah as a paradigm for reading poetry, William Blake and the empyrean cinema of cosmic catastrophe, Sigmund Freud's defensive trend-to-disorder as the genesis of all creative drive, and this in the first hundred pages! Bloom's rhetoric is dense, difficult, Promethean in its striving to induce fire in the proper reader. His procedures are undersung by a desire and affinity for Gnosis, a literary knowledge which is "better and older than the stars." --Whether his cathedral of brilliant minutiae is ever wielded into a whole, three hundred pages later, is open to debate. What remains regardless is in my view the strongest example of literary criticism published in the 1980s - grandiloquence stamped to search and burn the world.