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Harold Bloom

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Kabbalah and Criticism (Continuum Impacts, 33) Paperback – August 23, 2005

by Harold Bloom (Author)

4.2 9 ratings

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While Bloom is appreciated for his originality, range and clarity, less notice has been taken of the remarkable unity that is displayed in his writings from the earlier studies on Shelley, Blake and Romanticism, up to A Map of Misreading. That unity is brilliantly highlighted in Kabbalah and Criticism. Providing a study of the Kabbalah itself, its great commentators, the 'revisionary ratios' they employed and of its significance as a model for contemporary criticism, Kabbalah and Criticism is an indispensable book for all students of literature as well as for all those who are fascinated by this singularly rich body of mystical writings.

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About the Author

Harold Bloom (b. 1930) is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, Berg Professor at New York University, and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. He is the author of more than twenty books, including The Anxiety of Influence; Deconstruction and Criticism; The Book of J; The Western Canon; Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human; and Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, Berg Professor at New York University, and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Continuum (August 23, 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 74 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 082641737X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0826417374
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.21 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.06 x 0.17 x 7.81 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,394,721 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #141 in Jewish Literary Criticism (Books)
- #1,133 in Kabbalah & Mysticism
- #1,603 in American Literature Criticism

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4.2 9 ratings

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Harold Bloom

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Harold Bloom is a Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His more than thirty books include The Best Poems of the English Language, The Art of Reading Poetry, and The Book of J. He is a MacArthur Prize Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, including the Academy's Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, the International Prize of Catalonia, and the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico.

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Frank C Rac
Welcome to the Finest Lens
Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2013
Verified Purchase
At his inmost heart, Bloom is a Kabbalistic Mystic (he would say Gnostic) - if you are as well, meet your Reb.

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Laurence Goldstein
Not an easy read
Reviewed in the United States on August 16, 2020
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Harold Bloom, “Kabbalah and Criticism.” Per Bloom Tanach is text, Oral Law is commentary, Kabbalah is revisionist text (note, e.g., the differing creation stories (In the beginning God created OR In the beginning God held his breath and shrank). The text is different for you and for she. If you both write your specific analysis, then the text is different for each of her readers’ and for yours. This happens in Kabbalah and in criticism of a text. Kabbalistic tools used by strong readers produce strong criticism albeit with lotsa jargon. No easy read. No index. No bibliography.

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Tony Daley
MUCH NOTHING TO LITERARY MUMBO JUMBO
Reviewed in the United States on January 5, 2014
Tony Daley, Novelist, Scripter, Poet, Short Story Writer Weighs In: The idea of art is to enrich, expand, and enlighten while performing that most difficult of functions, to entertain the audience.
Harold Bloom, sprightly, cantankerous, and as rueful as he claimed was one of his finest protégé critics, Tom Disch, remains the effervescent, sallying knight. He could no more lay down the lance nor keep it from cracking against the bulwarks of ignorance, stupidity, and splintering the moon (to crib from Harry’s favorite, Shakespeare) than another of Bloom’s loved ones, Don Quixote, could abjure his paladin’s endeavors. Bloom, the perdurable cannon blasting at the canon for himself to gain the sort of canonization reserved for Dr. Johnson, understands, as did Oscar Wilde, that all “literary criticism” is founded on personal wealth of wisdom, grace, charity, pragmatism, and a sense of sublimity as regards aesthetics. Moreover, at the crux, is Harry the Harry always feting and following Falstaff, that supremely corpulent and cormorant individualist. One must therefore read into whatever Harry writes, the makings of informed opinion resting on specialized knowledge contained within an infinite individuality and apolitical virtuousness, for true virtue blooms only in the individual thing, not the seasoned collective. Bloom knows the same thing any honest member of the modern scholastic scene (so-called ACADEME), which is to say, that no such thing exists as “literary theory” for the facts of theoretical bases, functional experimentalism, and empirical inquiry. One cannot—at least not yet—so refine, reduce, observe, differentiate, classify, or demarcate a “work of art.” Art is not a lepidopterist’s pastime, aside from Nabokov. On some level, certainly, the “work” itself, as Gore Vidal called it, remains subject to a practical dispensing of analysis based on some fundamental, mechanistic, craft-oriented aspects of the “praxis” of “art.” However, at the sublimity of creation (cf. Longinus) one finds only a sort of sublimation of haggard, human reflexive perception, and, accompanying this, RECEPTIVITY to grace, beauty, and wisdom, otherwise one cannot begin to become aware of, or apprehend fully, the components that make for enduring “wisdom literature” of which actual verbal articulations remain only part of such a total body. Wisdom is something hard to come by, of course, and Harry B. knows it well enough. For most of today’s jejune “critics” and “teachers,” time will, in the Chinese fashion of impartial passage, not kindly accommodate mere nodes and iotas of fame, fortunes, and tenure within the historical record, which stretches both ways, like an infinitely bounding number line, into past and future. Whatever prompted Harry to write about the “anxiety of influence” at the beginning of his academic career, he seems to have shed such ideology of his own, or mediated it, realizing, perhaps, that playing such puny whore’s wars in the “groves of academy” lead to lacunae, never enlightenment, that enlightenment itself is antithetical to true wisdom. Shakespeare obviously knew, as did the redactors of Jesus’s words, that parables of common sense make the best teachers, that common sense if not reducible by “theoreticians” and their jargon, and that at its best, the arts—literature, music, and plastic arts—teach us by portrayal, mimesis, and example to transcend our arrogance. Humbled and abashed, in the face of art, we open our eyes and ears to revelation of the comic panoply of human existence. I am not hard to bring to weeping by means of art, but I must attribute my recent tears and shivering cascade of gooseflesh along my arms, while reading of Coriolanus’s declarations of humility and service to erstwhile noble foe Aufidius of the Volsces, and of Aufidius’s returning declarations of love to Marcius, to a bringing to keen awareness of the a verisimilitude of moral and ethical spirits in men of honor, as to cause an emotional release of gratitude. Against such moments of truth, the truth being the thing always resurgent, recursive, and returning no matter of the repression of ideology and cant, no critic’s “political correctness” may stand. Whether Shakespeare was Catholic is moot beside his obvious catholicity, which is, shall we say, the sort of common sense enough of which comprises, as commented Einstein, genius. Bloom, for his stylistic peculiarities and obvious biases, remains, in the West, at least, one of “our” premier “critics,” or, shall we say, tenderly learned observers and rueful admirers of art as expression of consistent, coherent thinking. While finishing my own recent book, I have attempted to hew to coherent thinking as much as possible, and for most of his career as an artistic critic, Harry Bloom has himself hewed to such sensibleness, except, again, when he spends so much time on what some may justifiably refer to as incantatory nonsense.

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benjamin
The Messiah Never Comes
Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2007
This short little book contains three essays that move from the exoterically esoteric to the downright incomprehensible. Like Kabbalah itself is often assumed to be, Bloom's thinking is like a Gnostic nugget - albeit without the imaginative cosmology that Gnosticism historically had - where the first essay is like the outside of the pomegranate, the second essay like the layer around the pomegranate and the third essay the actual fruit. Kabbalah and Criticism is set within a Scholem-esque historiography but with one thing missing: the Messiah which, in Bloom's work, never appears - indeed, one can wonder whether or not the Messiah is ever coming at all! The actual fruit turns out to be empty and emptying; rather than taking us anywhere, Kabbalah and Criticism simply leaves the reader hanging.

The first essay is an explanation of the major themes in Jewish mysticism/Kabbalah, focusing primarily on its Zoharic (13th century) and Lurianic (15th & 16th century) manifestations. Kabbalah is usually considered fairly esoteric; ironically, this essay is the most exoteric in the entire book. It is clear that Bloom has digested the writings of Gershom Scholem - the brilliant mind who first brought Jewish mysticism into academic credibility in the 20th century - and it is from within this Scholem-esque framework that Bloom operates.

In the second essay, however, Kabbalah is clearly shown to not actually be a map of the world, but a type of two-dimensional signifier in which the various interactions between the the Ten Sefirot exist not as signifiers pointing to the reality of God, but as signifiers pointing to the fact that texts themselves interact with each other and that the interaction is not found first and foremost in the texts or the Sefirot, but in the space between them. Thus Kabbalah, rather than speaking of God, becomes a springboard for a literary theory. Why it is that Kabbalah ought to be this springboard is never explained; given the commodification of all things Kabbalistic today, it seems that Bloom is no different, for Kabbalah is entirely unnecessary for his theory - it's just a useful heuristic, and nothing more.

The heuristic, furthermore, never actually serves to take the reader to any point of understanding. Thus, for Bloom, Kabbalah is a series of symbols that interact within one another ad infinitum but because they are never anything more than that, nothing ever arrives in Kabbalah any more than in any text. In short, Bloom's theory is entirely devoid of a Messiah: just as the symbols symbolize unendingly in Bloom's Kabbalistic maze (something that Scholem would have found quite hard to accept), so too does the text itself continually exist in need of re-reading - or, as Bloom prefers, *mis-reading*. Literature is a series of misreadings, a confusion of interpretation with text by insisting that all interpretation *is* the text that is being interpreted. By the time Bloom gets to this essay, he is so far from the Jewish mysticism that he began with that it becomes quite clear that Kabbalah is really quite superfluous to his whole theory. He *mis-reads* Kabbalah and, in doing so, is only capable of arguing that interpretation - mis-reading - justifies itself.

If one is interested in Harold Bloom, the back of this book claims that "Kabbalah and Criticism may justly be regarded as the cardinal work in Harold Bloom's enterprise." I honestly can't understand why anyone would bother, though, for its Kabbalism is vacuous and its criticism vapid. Bloom is a brilliant guy, but because his Kabbalism lacks the possibility of a Messiah - a reading in which the text and the reader meet in a moment of deep meaning - Kabbalah and Criticism simply wanders in a desert of thin symbols lifted out of their historical context and it therefore begins to look not just like the Messiah will never come, but that there is no historical world for him to even come to.

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Douglas A. Storm
Reconstitution
Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2000
This is by no means a review. I find Bloom stimulating in all his various books even if frequently obscure and discursive. He incites me to want to know more. This book is no different. Don't know much about Kabbalah? Well, don't look here for answers (Bloom himself encourages you to seek out Gershom Sholem's work in the field). Instead you'll find insights into reading and interpretation, for this is what Bloom's entire oeuvre is really about--how we discover meaning in all aspects of human endeavor.
This book is a wonderful tease on one hand--name-dropping in an esoteric field is always interesting and makes me want to search out those "formidable" authors--and an attempt to fill in some of the gaps in Bloom's readers' knowledge--he's been talking Kabbalah from the beginning and in this dedicated volume you begin to really understand its hold on him.
Short and sweet and worth the effort.

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