Review_of_The Breaking of the Vessels by Harold Bloom

8/12/2019 Review_of_The Breaking of the Vessels by Harold Bloom

1/5

South Atlantic Modern Language Association

Review: [untitled]Author(s): Wallace JacksonReviewed work(s):

The Breaking of the Vessels by Harold BloomSource: South Atlantic Review, Vol. 50, No. 3, Convention Program Issue (Sep., 1985), pp. 90-93Published by: South Atlantic Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3199434Accessed: 09/02/2010 09:38

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless

you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=samla .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

South Atlantic Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to South Atlantic Review.

http://www.jstor.org
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3199434?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=samlahttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=samlahttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/3199434?origin=JSTOR-pdf


2/5

Book ReviewsookReviews

came "as close as possible to the interpretation Euripides may have givenof the ancient myth ...

blendingthe ideals of classical

poetrywith modern

art "(189-90).In her introduction Petrovska reminds us that there are no twentieth-

century plays based on the Merope theme. One wonders, then, why shehas chosen in her conclusion- a sort of curious addendum to her work-to discuss Camus's Le Malentendu. The play's relation to Greek tragedy (inparticular to anagnorisis) and to the question of maternal love is strikingenough, but her final chapter seems strained and unconvincing. Itperhaps would have been more valid, at this juncture, to explain in moredetail how the story of Merope succeeds as a

tragedyof events and

situation but fails, in a more universal sense, because it does not expressany of the principal conflicts in the condition of man.

For the comparatist, particularly, Petrovska's volume is a welcomecontribution to the study of an important but neglected motif. It isunfortunate that the book, badly in need of editing, is flawed by asometimes quaint, sometimes awkward diction, as well as by a pedestriantone that diminishes the effect of an otherwise competent study.

James H. Davis, Jr., University f Georgia

D The Breaking of the Vessels. By Harold Bloom. Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1982. i-ix + 107 pp.

De Sade asks, "What able-bodied man ... does not wish ... to bedevilhis ecstacy?" Rage and pleasure being, in his view, correlative, I amreminded, reading Bloom, that poetic ecstacy is always (if the poet isstrong) bedeviled. I do not mean of course to insist too much upon akinship of violence, though anyone might notice the daemonic

(sexual-ized) that underlies Bloomian struggle. Strong sons wrestling with strongfathers for possession of the muse-mother is the arena in which poems arecreated. In this fact is Bloom's beginning. For him all acts--all poeticacts--are variations of displacement and substitution, and poets arealways journeying toward an origin they must revise in order to possess.The programmatic possibilities are summed up by Kierkegaard: "Hewho is willing to work gives birth to his own father" (The Anxietyof Influence26). Movement is thus from anxiety to power (which is health), anovercoming of belatedness (which is inevitable and in which anxietyresides), and thus to the worship of "the beautiful lie of the Imagination"(A Map of Misreading 66). The relation of poet to poet is always antitheti-cal, and all meanings derived from the precursor are usurped from him orimposed by him. The former condition defines strength; the latter

came "as close as possible to the interpretation Euripides may have givenof the ancient myth ...

blendingthe ideals of classical

poetrywith modern

art "(189-90).In her introduction Petrovska reminds us that there are no twentieth-

century plays based on the Merope theme. One wonders, then, why shehas chosen in her conclusion- a sort of curious addendum to her work-to discuss Camus's Le Malentendu. The play's relation to Greek tragedy (inparticular to anagnorisis) and to the question of maternal love is strikingenough, but her final chapter seems strained and unconvincing. Itperhaps would have been more valid, at this juncture, to explain in moredetail how the story of Merope succeeds as a

tragedyof events and

situation but fails, in a more universal sense, because it does not expressany of the principal conflicts in the condition of man.

For the comparatist, particularly, Petrovska's volume is a welcomecontribution to the study of an important but neglected motif. It isunfortunate that the book, badly in need of editing, is flawed by asometimes quaint, sometimes awkward diction, as well as by a pedestriantone that diminishes the effect of an otherwise competent study.

James H. Davis, Jr., University f Georgia

D The Breaking of the Vessels. By Harold Bloom. Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1982. i-ix + 107 pp.

De Sade asks, "What able-bodied man ... does not wish ... to bedevilhis ecstacy?" Rage and pleasure being, in his view, correlative, I amreminded, reading Bloom, that poetic ecstacy is always (if the poet isstrong) bedeviled. I do not mean of course to insist too much upon akinship of violence, though anyone might notice the daemonic

(sexual-ized) that underlies Bloomian struggle. Strong sons wrestling with strongfathers for possession of the muse-mother is the arena in which poems arecreated. In this fact is Bloom's beginning. For him all acts--all poeticacts--are variations of displacement and substitution, and poets arealways journeying toward an origin they must revise in order to possess.The programmatic possibilities are summed up by Kierkegaard: "Hewho is willing to work gives birth to his own father" (The Anxietyof Influence26). Movement is thus from anxiety to power (which is health), anovercoming of belatedness (which is inevitable and in which anxietyresides), and thus to the worship of "the beautiful lie of the Imagination"(A Map of Misreading 66). The relation of poet to poet is always antitheti-cal, and all meanings derived from the precursor are usurped from him orimposed by him. The former condition defines strength; the latter

900


3/5

SouthAtlanticReview

weakness. It is obvious, I suppose, that Bloom's own predecessor-pro-

genitoris Freud, the father who has instructed him in the

realityand

pervasiveness of trauma, the root reality of Bloomian belief Thus onesins against the past because the past sins against oneself merely by beingwhat it is, and the present suffers the diminished sense of its ownhumanity, being something less than it might have been were it not for anaccident of begetting. From the various strategies of revisionary ratiosarise the presences that move through Bloom's myth as its chief enacters:Oedipus, Adam, Prometheus, Narcissus. All such radical heroes areradical victims, the latter partly at least because of the extensiveness of

guiltin Bloom's

philosophyof

compositionand the exercise of the

poeticwill which is, "in each strong poet, his maturely internalized aggressive-ness" (Anxiety 19).

Perhaps there should be some place in Bloom's mythology for thesingle poetic figure composed of a Theotormon and an Oothoon; that is,self and antithetical self bound back to back, a tragic figure of Siamesemagnitude, which ever and forever denies the freedom of the ephebe. Butthere is no such figure in Bloom; rather, there is the ever-enduringaggression of misprision, the paradoxical ground of poetic freedom.

The Anxietyof

Influence old us that in the rabbinical tradition thecherubim "symbolize the terror of God's presence" 37). "The CoveringCherub ... is a demon of continuity; his baleful charm imprisons thepresent in the past" (39). In literary history such presence is what ismeant by "influence," but influence is what Bloom calls the "blockingfigure of the Precursor" (Anxiety 152). Thus as Covering Cherub orProtestant God the result is the same: the isolation of"His children in theterrible double bind of two great injunctions: 'Be like Me' and 'Do notpresume to be too like Me"' (152). Bloomian psychodrama therebyresembles a Blakeian

nightmareof

spectres:of love that is

reallymore like

hate, of acceptance that is really more like rejection. The Oedipus whomust go back to origins and the Adam who must go forward to his ownpossibility are heroic twins of Bloom's vision, defeating in turn (or hopingto do so), Sphinx and Covering Cherub.

The title of the present work is taken from Isaac Luria's sixteenth-century theory of creation, explained in A Map of Misreading s havingthree stages, the second of which, Shevirath hakelim, is "the breaking-apart-of-the-vessels, a vision of creation-as-catastrophe" 5). That is, the"breaking-apart and replacing of one form by another, which imagisti-cally is a process of substitution" 6). Substitution, I take it, is consistentwith usurpation, a projection of the self in another variation of therevisionary rope.

In A Map ofMisreading here is a particularly brilliant argument in the

91


4/5

Book Reviews

chapter, "Milton and His Predecessors," which is the germ of the newbook. The earlier work elucidates Milton's debt to the Bible, to Homer,Virgil, Ovid, and others, but it is not allusion in which Bloom isinterested, but rather the transumptive mode by which successor is made

precursor, assuming thereby a priority that is not his except as he hascommanded it to be his: "The Wild Men, Polyphemus, the Cyclops, andthe crudely proud Orgoglio, as well as the Catholic and Circassian

champions, Tancredi and Argantes, all become late and lesser versions ofMilton's earlier and greater Satan" (135). "Ratios," the first chapter in The

Breaking f the Vessels, s a rationalization of revisionary ratios and of power,a radical

aspectof which I have just cited in the Miltonic reversal.

Obviously, energy and life are correlative terms, even as the humanincreases according to the displacing power it commands. The moresuccessful the revisionary ratio the more complete the overthrow of

precursor and the radical role reversal that is implicit in Milton's coup.Suffering, it would seem, is also a transumptive mode, and it is what is

imposed upon the precursor."Wrestling Sigmund" (chapter two) advances the position. It is a

meditation on anteriority, a breaking of cultural vessels such that the"Freudian

tropeshave assumed the status of

priority,while

nearlyall

precedent tropes seem quite belated in comparison" (63). None of theearlier six revisionary ratios offered a victory quite this complete, though"Apophrades, or the return of the dead" seems to provide a modestlyproximate version: "as though the later poet himself had written theprecursor's characteristic work" (Anxiety 16).

To my mind the most impressive chapter is the third and last, a lovelyexploration of the trope of blankness (chiefly) within the transumptivechain leading from Milton to Coleridge to Emerson to Stevens. Tran-

sumption is in fact a form of apophrades, for "the ratio of making the

precursors return from the dead in one's own colors, or one's own blank, is

obviously related to the image of temporality, or earliness balanced

against belatedness, that marks every Miltonic and post-Miltonic in-stance of transumption" (88). Yet I take this invocation as equally an

acknowledgment of precursor power, a restoration of the livingness of

precursor within what a more conventional critic would call tradition andattribute to influence. Bloom means it, I think, as a haunting, a figurationin which the successor speaks his own strength or, as the case might be(and is, in the blank Coleridgean eye of Deqection), a confession of

precursor power and ephebe weakness.We move, in brief, between the polarities of displacement and haunt-

ing; to dislodge the precursor is to suffer his return, even to commemo-rate it in such a way that the successor is defined (to himself and to others)

92


5/5

SouthAtlantic ReviewouthAtlantic Review

by the recognition and transumptive enlistment of the precursor trope. Itis not news, I think, that Bloom's contexts

gravitate alwaystoward crisis.

Wrestling together, Jacob and the angel create a blessing, "the name ofIsrael" (57), though Jacob suffers the wound that sends him on his way"limping on his hip" (55). Coleridge wrestling Milton suffers only thewound, forcing the cry: "And still I gaze - and with how blank an eye "The transumptive series beginning with Milton's "universal blank" ("Na-ture's works to me expunged and razed, / And wisdom at one entrance

quite shut out") compels the Coleridgean anguish: "I see them all so

excellently fair, / I see, not feel, how beautiful they are " Bloom com-ments:

"Coleridgethus refuses

transumption,and

accepts poeticand

human defeat" (85). Yet defeat is (inevitably?) voiced as an acknowledg-ment of precursor power. Perhaps Bloom comes close to explaining whythis is so: "Poems, as I apprehend them, are not tropes of being or of

knowledge, but rather are tropes of action or of desire" (103). Maybe so,but meditating Coleridge's refusal one might add that they are also tropesfor the failures of desire, for the blankness within, for blessing denied,wound received.

Not recommended for weak readers.

WallaceJackson, Duke University

D Texts of Terror: iterary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives. By PhyllisTrible. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984. xiv + 128 pp. Paper $9.65.L Women Writers nd the City. Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism. Edited bySusan Merrill Squier. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984.306 pp. Cloth $22.95; Paper $9.95.

As literary criticism the slim volume Texts of Terror s simple, neat,carefully executed, and absolutely shocking. Phyllis Trible has taken fourstories of women in the Old Testament and subjected them to rigorousrhetorical analysis and a feminist perspective. This method of analysis isconventional, but the combination of close reading of the text and

interpretation by a contemporary feminist mind produces tales that havenot been told before and certainly would never be told in patriarchalhermeneutics.

Trible explains that her "task is to tell sad stories as [she] hear[s] them."Each of her sad stories features a victimized woman from the sacred

scriptures of synagogue and church. As Trible explains in her introduc-tion, "These narratives yield four portraits of suffering in ancient Israel:

Hagar, the slave used, abused, and rejected; Tamar, the princess rapedand discarded; an unnamed woman, the concubine, raped, murdered,

by the recognition and transumptive enlistment of the precursor trope. Itis not news, I think, that Bloom's contexts

gravitate alwaystoward crisis.

Wrestling together, Jacob and the angel create a blessing, "the name ofIsrael" (57), though Jacob suffers the wound that sends him on his way"limping on his hip" (55). Coleridge wrestling Milton suffers only thewound, forcing the cry: "And still I gaze - and with how blank an eye "The transumptive series beginning with Milton's "universal blank" ("Na-ture's works to me expunged and razed, / And wisdom at one entrance

quite shut out") compels the Coleridgean anguish: "I see them all so

excellently fair, / I see, not feel, how beautiful they are " Bloom com-ments:

"Coleridgethus refuses

transumption,and

accepts poeticand

human defeat" (85). Yet defeat is (inevitably?) voiced as an acknowledg-ment of precursor power. Perhaps Bloom comes close to explaining whythis is so: "Poems, as I apprehend them, are not tropes of being or of

knowledge, but rather are tropes of action or of desire" (103). Maybe so,but meditating Coleridge's refusal one might add that they are also tropesfor the failures of desire, for the blankness within, for blessing denied,wound received.

Not recommended for weak readers.

WallaceJackson, Duke University

D Texts of Terror: iterary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives. By PhyllisTrible. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984. xiv + 128 pp. Paper $9.65.L Women Writers nd the City. Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism. Edited bySusan Merrill Squier. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984.306 pp. Cloth $22.95; Paper $9.95.

As literary criticism the slim volume Texts of Terror s simple, neat,carefully executed, and absolutely shocking. Phyllis Trible has taken fourstories of women in the Old Testament and subjected them to rigorousrhetorical analysis and a feminist perspective. This method of analysis isconventional, but the combination of close reading of the text and

interpretation by a contemporary feminist mind produces tales that havenot been told before and certainly would never be told in patriarchalhermeneutics.

Trible explains that her "task is to tell sad stories as [she] hear[s] them."Each of her sad stories features a victimized woman from the sacred

scriptures of synagogue and church. As Trible explains in her introduc-tion, "These narratives yield four portraits of suffering in ancient Israel:

Hagar, the slave used, abused, and rejected; Tamar, the princess rapedand discarded; an unnamed woman, the concubine, raped, murdered,

933

Documents

Review_of_The Breaking of the Vessels by Harold Bloom