Bloom and Jesus

James Wood has his fun with Harold Bloom in his TNR review of Bloom’s recent Jesus and Yahweh . Wood offers this parody of a typical Bloomian sentence: “Only Don Quixote can rival the fat knight, Sir John Falstaff, and even Emerson at his strongest – stronger, here, even than his belated rival, Nietzsche – is not quite a match for his ultimate precursor, J’s Yahweh, though I concede that the greatest Jewish genius after Jesus, Sigmund Freud, could not have agreed with my heretical opinion.”

Along the way, Wood lodges some telling criticisms against Bloom’s project. He criticizes Bloom’s notion of “strength,” which he says is defined not as “one’s ability to wrestle down the father figure and establish and un-neurotic identity, free of over-determination,” but simply “aesthetic power, the power to triumph aesthetically.” Thus, when he says that Tennyson is a “stronger” poet than Keats, he is simply “asserting that Tennyson is a better poet . . . , while not admitting that he is doing this.” He cannot admit this because “if he were just choosing one poet over another for purely aesthetic reasons, then he would have no need of his Freudian system of anxiety and repression.”

But even here there is ambiguity between “strength” as aesthetic success and strength as pragmatic success: “The Bible forces this question acutely on Bloom, and he ducks it. On the one hand, the New Testament is the greatest ‘strong’ misreading of a precursor text ever committed. On the other, it seems to Bloom a work palpably inferior to the Hebrew Bible. How, if this is the case, can it have been so successful? What does it mean to call is a ‘strong’ misreading?”

Ultimately, Wood argues that Bloom’s preference for the Yahwist over the New Testament is simply a theological judgment (while Bloom all the while is claiming that theology is what he’s resisting in the name of purely literary judgment in favor of the Old Testament): For Bloom, “Yahweh is God and Jesus is only a man pretending to be God: standard fare. What else can it mean to say that the New Testament is not as successful as the Torah because the Torah ‘is God’ whereas the New Testament merely argues that ‘a man has replaced Scripture’? Isn’t this just a way of saying that Jesus is not the Messiah?”