Read Online The Ritual of New Creation by Norman Finkelstein - Free Book Online
Authors: Norman Finkelstein
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it to be, because what we know and value most truly about the text is lost to canonization, then the entire process may as well be viewed as influence anxiety, an endless sequence of psychohistorical caricatures.
And yet somehow the capable self continues to emerge, and strong poems continue to be written:
A strong poem, which alone can become canonical for more than a single generation, can be defined as a text that must engender strong misreadings, both as other poems and as literary criticism. When a strong misreading has demonstrated its fecundity by producing other strong misreadings across several generations, then we can and must accept its canonical status. 45
This tautological definition indicates that, since misreading is the only means through which we can achieve enabling psychological
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authority, canonization too, despite its enervating effect, may as well be regarded as a wholly pragmatic process. The generative fecundity of strong misreading becomes the final arbiter of cultural value: if the text proliferates through its legible afterlife, then it has won canonic status. Bloom's formulation of canonization may be seen as a darker (or misread) version of Gershom Scholem's, as it appears in "Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism":
In the process of this renewed productivity, Holy Scriptures themselves are sometimes enlarged; new written communications take their place alongside the old revelation and the tradition. A sort of no-man's-land is created between the original revelation and the tradition. Precisely this happened in Judaism, for example, as the Torah, to which the quality of revelation was originally confined, was "expanded" to include other writings of the biblical canon that had first been subsumed, completely and emphatically, under the heading tradition and considered merely repositories of this. Later, the boundaries often shifted: the canon, as Holy Writ, confronted tradition, and within the tradition itself similar processes of differentiation between written and oral elements were repeated. 46
For Scholem, this process of expansion, leading to the convention of commentary as the complement of revelation, is the means of providing individual freedom within the bounds of communal and historical authority. Scholem's expanding commentary becomes Bloom's several generations of misreadings: the self in its struggle against anteriority is preserved and remains viable, but, as we have seen before in Bloom's agonistic humanism, the historical, the communal, and the political dimensions recede into the background. In this case, canon formation becomes solely a psychohistorical study, a self-implicating continuum of stronger or weaker personalities.
Even within the bounds of pragmatism, this is a severely limited view. While the study of influence as it develops in Bloom's theory (part Freudian, part kabbalistic, but wholly American) is crucial to an understanding of canon formation, it lacks the political insights that are the necessary complement to any individualistic psychology. If the crisis of humanism is a crisis of cultural authority, and if canons of sacred or secular literature serve as the vehicles for such authority, then Bloom is telling only half the storyfor textual power is as
Page 41
much a matter of communal consensus as it is psychic struggle. As Gerald L. Bruns says in his consideration of the Hebrew Scriptures:
To inquire into the canonization of the books of the Torah is to ask how they came to possess their power over a nation and people. What did it mean for these books to become binding? More important, what were the conditions under which such a thing occurred? 47
It is symptomatic of Bloom's individualistic ideology that he rarely makes such inquiries, despite his professed concern for literary traditions. And while I think we must respect Bloom's reverence for the heroic voice and its "lie against time," we must also recognize that
And yet somehow the capable self continues to emerge, and strong poems continue to be written:
A strong poem, which alone can become canonical for more than a single generation, can be defined as a text that must engender strong misreadings, both as other poems and as literary criticism. When a strong misreading has demonstrated its fecundity by producing other strong misreadings across several generations, then we can and must accept its canonical status. 45
This tautological definition indicates that, since misreading is the only means through which we can achieve enabling psychological
Page 40
authority, canonization too, despite its enervating effect, may as well be regarded as a wholly pragmatic process. The generative fecundity of strong misreading becomes the final arbiter of cultural value: if the text proliferates through its legible afterlife, then it has won canonic status. Bloom's formulation of canonization may be seen as a darker (or misread) version of Gershom Scholem's, as it appears in "Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism":
In the process of this renewed productivity, Holy Scriptures themselves are sometimes enlarged; new written communications take their place alongside the old revelation and the tradition. A sort of no-man's-land is created between the original revelation and the tradition. Precisely this happened in Judaism, for example, as the Torah, to which the quality of revelation was originally confined, was "expanded" to include other writings of the biblical canon that had first been subsumed, completely and emphatically, under the heading tradition and considered merely repositories of this. Later, the boundaries often shifted: the canon, as Holy Writ, confronted tradition, and within the tradition itself similar processes of differentiation between written and oral elements were repeated. 46
For Scholem, this process of expansion, leading to the convention of commentary as the complement of revelation, is the means of providing individual freedom within the bounds of communal and historical authority. Scholem's expanding commentary becomes Bloom's several generations of misreadings: the self in its struggle against anteriority is preserved and remains viable, but, as we have seen before in Bloom's agonistic humanism, the historical, the communal, and the political dimensions recede into the background. In this case, canon formation becomes solely a psychohistorical study, a self-implicating continuum of stronger or weaker personalities.
Even within the bounds of pragmatism, this is a severely limited view. While the study of influence as it develops in Bloom's theory (part Freudian, part kabbalistic, but wholly American) is crucial to an understanding of canon formation, it lacks the political insights that are the necessary complement to any individualistic psychology. If the crisis of humanism is a crisis of cultural authority, and if canons of sacred or secular literature serve as the vehicles for such authority, then Bloom is telling only half the storyfor textual power is as
Page 41
much a matter of communal consensus as it is psychic struggle. As Gerald L. Bruns says in his consideration of the Hebrew Scriptures:
To inquire into the canonization of the books of the Torah is to ask how they came to possess their power over a nation and people. What did it mean for these books to become binding? More important, what were the conditions under which such a thing occurred? 47
It is symptomatic of Bloom's individualistic ideology that he rarely makes such inquiries, despite his professed concern for literary traditions. And while I think we must respect Bloom's reverence for the heroic voice and its "lie against time," we must also recognize that
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