Souls at the White Heat

Abstract

Souls at the White Heat Daniel T. O’Hara (bio) The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime Harold Bloom Spiegel and Grau www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books 544 Pages; Print. $35.00 What the daemon knows is, of course, literary greatness and the American sublime. So what is the daemon? It is that creative power which arises when writing and reading that transports us beyond the everyday self. Author and reader become amalgamated (but not one), in the moment of vision, which is a passage marked by imaginative genius. So great is this experience of knowing (and being known, as Bloom has taught us), that it feels like we tap into another realm of, perhaps even beyond, being. This uncanny, and often terrifying recognition, following Longinus’s lead, is “the sublime tribunal” of judgment: “more, less than, incommensurate.” Bloom, borrowing here primarily from Orphic myths, presents this sublime knowledge of our own divinity in the figure of the daemon: the poet as poet. We often feel that such power is borrowed or stolen. Guilt at not being able to reciprocate can accumulate to paralyze, so built up to become resentment at others’ gifts, and self-destruction of one’s own. This complex belief is no organized religious faith, but is a creative fiction known to be a fiction, composing a rough ethics of revisionary reading. One of the lasting healing effects of Bloom’s work, however, is that this distinction between reading and writing, between mere passive reception and active creative imagination, can no longer be made with categorical certainty. However, in particular instances, we must make them. We thereby read in thanks, due to Bloom, with a greater sense of life within us, even as we read without softening illusion about the costs of ecstatic flights. The Daemon Knows consists of six large “chapters,” pairing twelve incontestably great American writers, as follows: Whitman and Melville, Emerson and Dickinson, Hawthorne and James, Twain and Frost, Stevens and Eliot, Faulkner and Hart Crane. I use scare quotes around “chapters” because when the longest is 120 plus pages in print, a chapter is more like a small book. To his credit and the reader’s enlightenment, Bloom keeps connecting his authors, looking ahead, back and forth, via both critical remarks but also many personal ones, which connect not only these authors to each other, but his life and his conversations with other critics, especially Kenneth Burke and Angus Fletcher (two of my own favorites). The reader, in this fuller way, thus feels capable of also connecting to his or her own life of reading. The most extraordinary thing about the book is that, in writing about figures he has often discussed, Bloom gives us new insights. Whether it fits neatly with what he has said before matters not. What matters is the cast of new insights. No foolish consistencies haunt him. We see a great critic, who is in his mid-eighties, animatedly at work learning anew. In following him, we can also incorporate both the particular insight and the greater lesson of being open to such humanistic continuities. For instance, Bloom changes his mind about figures, including T. S. Eliot, whom he admits into his personal pairings (Bloom refuses the term “canon,” rightly, given that idea’s distractions). Reading “Little Gidding,” the last of Four Quartets, he celebrates Eliot’s achievement in the “familiar compound ghost” section, even as he concludes by condemning him, despite his “daemonic gift,” for his Anti-Semitism and misogyny. The Daemon Knows is so copious, Rabelaisian in this respect, I cannot hope to encompass its new riches. The long first part on Whitman and Melville alone is filled with them and is sure to inspire many other critics’ books. But I can give some taste of them by what is a return for me to Emily Dickinson, about whom I once wrote for a special journal issue devoted to “revising the tradition.” In “‘The Designated Light’: Irony in Emily Dickinson,” I was inspired to do so by Bloom’s two-week visit to the university where I then happened to be an assistant professor. Along with giving two...