Bloom's Sopistic Inflow & Angst

[Narcoleptic Fat Boy & Black Pip]

Harold Bloom said,  "Pynchon is a Gnosis without
transcendence." 

At the end of his brilliant study of Pynchon Dwight Eddins
says, he sort of agrees with Bloom, BUT, 

"it is a gnosis haunted by the possibility thereof-both
positively and negatively-and by a characteristically
modernist nostalgia fort a quality of human consciousness
that a logos beyond human agency seems once to have
empowered." GP.154

A logos. 

Bloom's affection for gnosis is exceeded only by his is
reverence for the pre-Socratic sages, Empedocles (the
reality substrate he also admires in both Freud and
Nietzsche) and the Sophists who followed him, and his love
of Shakespeare. 

This should not surprise us because Harold Bloom's approach
to literature is in his own sense of these terms, a filial
anxiety and influence of the great tradition of Sophists
plus the reality substrate.     

1. The Sophist's subjective perspective---Emerson

He admires Emerson's Personal  Perspective, the eye ball. In
fact, he says that the personal perspective is omnipresent
in  American Poetics and he attributes it, calling it a
solipsism that involves a transcendental ME and Not-Me, to
Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, and Crane.  


2. The Sophist's The Agonistic Method-Freud/Hamlet

He turns Hamlet against Freud, Homer against Plato, 
Hemmingway against his followers. 
"The dead may or may not return, but their voice comes
alive, paradoxically never by mere imitation, but in the
agonistic misprision performed upon powerful forerunners by
only the most gifted of their successors." 
Nietzsche's disciple, Yeats, and Freud's disciple, Otto
Rank, show a greater awareness of the artist's fight against
art, and of the relation of this struggle to the artist's
antithetical battle against nature. 


The Creative Principle---Shakespeare

Bloom's awe for the creative principle in Shakespeare is his
defense for his claim that Shakespeare not only created US,
he contains US.  
The Substrative Reality-Nietzsche/Freud
Sublimation and the covering cherub. 
On Misreading
The strong misreading comes first; there  must be a profound
act of reading that is a kind of falling in love with a
literary work. That reading is likely to be idiosyncratic,
and it is almost certain to be ambivalent, though the
ambivalence may be veiled. 

On Heresy & Revisionism

Poetic Influence, as time has tarnished it, is part of the
larger phenomenon of intellectual revisionism. And
revisionism, whether in political theory, psychology,
theology, law, poetics, has changed its nature in out time. 
The ancestor of revisionism is heresy, but heresy tended to
change received doctrine by an alteration of balances,
rather than by what could be called creative correction, the
more particular mark of modern revisionism, Heresy resulted,
generally, from a change in emphasis, while revisionism
follows received doctrines along to a certain point, and
then deviates, insisting that a wrong direction was taken at
just that point, and no other.

PS looking for books on Native American Land Ownership and
the Law.  

Trying to learn more about this curious history:  that the
principle of the right to own property in conglomerate form
for the benefit of those with a shareholder's undivided
interest in the whole was a basis of the American corporate
system that developed even as it dismantled the Indian
system that was bases on that same principle. Or something
like this....

Thx, 

The Pickwick Castaways Pip & Fatboy