The Anatomy of Bloom by Heys Alistair

Author:Heys, Alistair
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

6

Bloom and Protestantism

Bloom asks this provocative question of American culture: “How can any societal over-determination account for the phenomenon of any solitary genius?”1 In the remainder of this book, I explore this paradox by examining Bloom’s relationship with Protestantism; the thread through the maze is that Bloom’s autobiographical criticism sifts through the over-determinations of post-Puritan American culture that affected him from infancy onwards. My discussion begins with a short definition of Protestantism; it then charts Bloom’s childhood recollections of reading alone, his vocation to write criticism, and his apprehension of an American religion of the Whitmanian self. After this, I investigate his truculent relationship with the New Critics, which was characterized by a memorable defense of displaced Protestant poetry. From here, I proceed to his marriage of Yeatsian Gnosticism to Emersonian transcendence and his Gnostic definition of the American Sublime in Whitman and Stevens. I argue that displaced Unitarian and Quaker ideas underpin American poetry at its most formative moments and analyze Bloom’s contention that the aforesaid poets freed imagination and discarded Christianity. Further thoughts on Gnosticism in Agon and elsewhere are considered before an analysis of The American Religion in terms of Bloom’s synopsis that native-American religious movements are a combination of Protestant tradition and Gnostic theology. Bloom’s hyperbolic championing of Shakespeare as the inventor of the modern self is compared to prior instances of inwardness in the Protestant tradition. The book ends with a treatment of Bloom’s anti-Platonic writings, which epicurean stance indicates his Falstaffian unease with certain branches of ascetic thought. Overall, Bloom attempts to redefine Protestantism in America as a type of Emersonian Gnosis, but herein dwells a further paradox. Material pleasure is a sin from the perspective of Pauline Scripture and in its most extreme form this doctrine leads to Ahab-like iconoclasm; the puritan anxiety as to election produces hard work from the inner machinery of faith and yet scorns the showy fripperies of wealth. Gnostics hate the material world and this attempt to explain the problem of evil ultimately recapitulates the Second Commandment; thus, the graven image of England in the wicked Manichaeism of Emerson becomes the psychological block that prevents divination. Hatred of material culture gives birth to modern consumer society and yet I argue that Bloom craves more than epicurean delight; he wishes for metaphysical materialism.

Blake declared that he must invent his own system, or else be enslaved by another man’s; ironically, there can be no better indication of Non-conformism. The Latin root Protestantem means declaring in public; thus, Protestants often portray themselves as vocal revivalists of the earliest form of Christianity. This makes Protestantism fundamentally opposed to Popery and Roman Catholic dogma that mortgaged souls to pay for the High-Renaissance artworks decorating the Sistine Chapel. Although my definition can only be a rough guide to the fundamentals, already, it contains punning overtones of Protestant Romantic poets breaking with the florid poetry of Alexander Pope in their desire to enact a renaissance of the English Renaissance. Distant memories of my Methodist upbringing

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