Harold Bloom’s Spark
This week, we’re thinking about conversations with the late Harold Bloom, the controversial and legendary literary critic. Listen today at 2 pm or anytime on our website.
Over the years, Harold Bloom became the challenging, irreligious preacher in Open Source’s literary world, and a friendship grew with each conversation about Emerson, Whitman, Melville, the Bible, Hart Crane, baseball, jazz, and more. Bloom’s death at the age of 89 was a profoundly felt loss, and we wanted to remember him in the best way we knew—by revisiting those conversations where he held forth with such glittering wisdom.
Bloom’s role in literary history is so wide-ranging that it hardly seemed possible to do it justice in one hour—the renegade Romanticist was also a major force in pop literary discussion and in studies of the literary tradition of Jewish mysticism. A close of friend of Bloom’s, the poet Peter Cole (a leading translator of Kabbalistic literature) helped by speaking with us about the light, along with the insatiable questing for that light, in Bloom and Bloom’s work.
Those who studied with Bloom—David Bromwich and Jenn Lewin—told us of different Blooms, too. Bromwich spoke of the different phases of Bloom’s career, and Lewin told us of the search for something beyond loneliness that motivated Bloom’s literary experience. And Rosanna Warren described how Bloom saw something more than disputation in scholarly conversation—some engagement with a force of communication and readerly experience that might expand our sense of what’s important.
We had some fun re-listening to years of Chris’ conversations with Bloom; there’s quite an archive now on our website. Chris called himself a late Bloomer, a belated student; their friendship took off in 2003 on the 200th birthday of Ralph Waldo Emerson, but we first met Harold Bloom in 2000 when he came on The Connection. We dug up the show and aired a portion of it; you’ll hear Harold being Harold, putting down listeners for their literary preconceptions. It’s all in good fun, and for the record, we did let Harold go to the restroom during a live radio hour (we also let Art Spiegelman dash out for a smoke). What a guy. What a brain!
Read: Kabbalah and Criticism
Peter Cole told us how the study of Kabbalah informed Bloom’s critical attention. The literary tradition of Kabbalah values cracking open the nut, as Cole puts it, of a treasured text, in order to locate the text’s light and vitality, and this is something like Bloom’s critical, analytical approach to all kinds of literature. But how can work from a religious tradition contribute to writing or thinking that goes beyond the boundaries of normative religion?
In Kabbalah and Criticism, Bloom offers some strategies for hurling yourself into aesthetic intensity in a way that crosses the lines between the secular and the spiritual. The book’s underlying idea is that Kabbalah tells us of a system of emanations, from God, called the Sefirot, which, Bloom writes,
are primarily language, attributes of God that need to be described by the various names of God when he is at work in creation. The Sefirot are complex figurations for God, tropes or turns of language that substitute for God. Indeed, one can say that the Sefirot are like poems, in that they are names implying complex commentaries that make them into texts.
And so Kabbalah becomes a literary rather than religious field for Bloom, who you can hear on our latest episode dismiss distinctions between the secular and the spiritual. Language did spiritual work for the Kabbalistic thinker; a chain of language linked the critical reader into a chain of emanations coursing throughout creation.
Watch: The Brood
Back to the Halloween season! In The Brood, David Cronenberg’s horror movie from 1979, Kubrickianly framed shots of a geometrically graceful, snowy psychological institute—and generally of quiet Canadian life—build a cinematic world out of elegant images, wherein you follow the perspective of a curious, often in-motion camera. But you’ll hear lushly sinister music by Howard Shore, and you’ll find that the psychosomatic experiments of the film’s psychological institute have terrifying ramifications. The film’s physical world, visually rendered so deftly, proves continuous with the psychological realm, and the result is shocking.
The realm of transporting, Bloomian aesthetic reverie, in this case, comes with something upsetting — aesthetic delight at an expertly realized film is accompanied by misery. Here, the enjoyment of stepping away from your familiar self entails the terror of stepping away from your familiar self; what you encounter on your mind-adventure into an artfully realized world is never wholly separate from the mind you sought to escape from the start.
Watch: Bigger than Life
The Brattle Theater in Cambridge screened this film this weekend, with live commentary from the writers Jonathan Lethem and Susan Choi (both have been on Open Source shows). Directed by Nicholas Ray and starring James Mason as a schoolteacher hooked on Cortisone, it’s a trippy thriller from the 50’s that flopped at the box office initially but wound up on Jean-Luc Goddard’s top ten list. Candy-colored images of small town life juxtapose with the sinister lighting of something closer to German Expressionism inside the home—public and private life exist in a tense interrelationship until an explosive conclusion.
Listen: Spacebridge
Literature, as Harold Bloom saw it, might be an arena for conversations across centuries—from Chaucer to George Eliot to Toni Morrison—but how do communication systems (not just art or literature) link us to eras long past? The podcast Spacebridge tells the story of how our Internet communications originated through decades-old, sometimes New Age responses to geopolitical tensions.
From their website:
Spacebridge tells a largely-forgotten saga of the late Cold War, when despair about the prospects of a nuclear conflict gripped the world. Both Soviets and Americans grasped at emerging communication technology via satellite and early Internet “spacebridges” that brought together citizen diplomats ranging from New Agers to tech-enthusiasts to astronauts. The urge to “just connect” helped tilt the world from top-down broadcasting to the more horizontal, Internet-levelled society where we all now live…for better and/or for worse.
Listen: Passenger List
This one got Mary McGrath through a root canal this week. Literally. It’s a fiction pod about a sudden disappearance of a transatlantic flight. The acting and sound design are first rate, and the story is bingeworthy. Radiotopia captain Julie Shapiro’s cameos in the ads (in-flight announcements) are novel and fun.
This Week’s Ephemeral Library:
Over at n+1, Marco Roth includes an insightful overview of the difference between Harold Bloom’s writing about “the canon” and the fascinating early career of Harold Bloom:
The vociferous canon debates, both at the time and ongoing, slowly took the place of the conversations within canons that Bloom thought made original writing possible. And Bloom, with his lists and rankings and fiat value judgments, even when he could always back them up, contributed greatly to this, and so, ultimately, to the misunderstanding and outright decanonization of his own early work.
Laurel Berger goes to Paris in 1961. Interpret endlessly Peter Cole’s “Coexistence: A Lost and Almost Found Poem.” Is it true that “Deepak Chopra Has Never Been Sick”? One giant leap for womenkind.We’re watching the Tulsi v Hillary dustup. Sarah Jones dissects the myth of Trump Country.
That’s it for this week, folks. Like, tweet, subscribe, support, shout out, and get outside and enjoy the leaves before they all fall down.
Your Open Source literary lions.
