Bloom: Out of Panic, Self-Reliance

[Michael Bailey]

Tim Strzechowski wrote:
>
> Op-Ed Contributor
> "Out of Panic, Self-Reliance" by Harold Bloom (10/11/08)

> http://tinyurl.com/49h8uy
>

nice essay, thanks!

link didn't work for me;
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/12bloom.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

is where I found it.

tying in to the focus of this list, I wanted to point at
a concern of style that perhaps shines through in Pynchon's prose from
time to time,
which Emerson's words, quoted in Bloom's essay, remind me of.

I think of it as "high diction", but perhaps there's a better term.

ie, some phrases in the Emerson passages that Bloom quotes
read as if one might, or should, know them well already
- partially like the way Latinate phrases and Biblical references
shine through in much English and American prose, but also
sometimes as if they are cliches of a culture more ideal than ours or
King James's
or Rome's...

example -
"Let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it
instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plow and the ledger
referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing."

bristling - like the way iron filings bristle when magnetized? (by
trifle, does he mean pudding?)
"ranges it instantly on an eternal law" - is "ranges" short for "arranges"?
"referred to the like cause by which" - archaic diction even then, I suspect,
    but just try to say it more economically, preserving the full
meaning, in modern words

--------------
or, this passage:
"Inasmuch as the soul is present there will be power not confident but agent."

- by agent, does he mean something like "active"?
- (old religious distinction, isn't there, between "action and passion"?)

- if "agent" is an adjective modifying "power", then so is "confident"

- the meaning that bubbles up for me is something like
"it's not that I'm _relying_ (holding confidence in, depending on) on
the soul's power
as if it were something outside me --
but that the soul itself is acting (is that which is doing the things I do)"

That's a good line, methinks. It works on restating his main theme
("Self-Reliance")
by questioning his terms and even denying them - yet somehow
buttresses the point(s) he's making.
(very post-modern (-;))

anyway, the authoritative use of language like that,
speaking from his idealism and sounding like it,
 is one of the things
I see and enjoy in Pynchon's prose as well.


-- 
"He ain't crazy, he's a-makin' pottery" - Finley Peter Dunne