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  • Harold Bloom Responds
  • Harold Bloom (bio)

Dear Dan,

I begin with my old friend Agata Bielik-Robson who wrote a powerful book called Harold Bloom and Deconstruction. Agata is immensely learned in philosophy, Jewish studies, and the entire history of literature. She gets one thing wrong. I go on teaching and am better at it because I have learned to listen. At eighty-nine I do not have the firepower that once was mine. That which I have, I have.

Agata clarifies for me my stance of Niphal, Biblical Hebrew for the vacillation in-between doing and not doing, active and passive moods of the verb. I do not read Niphal as either/or but as both/and.

When Agata speaks of Walter Benjamin's gnosis without pneuma, I reflect that while he always fascinates me, I rarely agree with him. I find this odd since I almost always agree with Gershom Scholem, while he and Benjamin were almost (but not quite) as one. Like Scholem, I dispense with Benjamin's Marxism. It comes down to setting aside utopia and accepting mortality, but only in Freud's sense of making friends with the necessity of dying.

If you have lived a long life absorbing what Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Montaigne, Milton and their few peers, something close to wisdom in you goes on seeking a possible transcendence.

Bob Caserio, an old friend whom I miss, also helps me in self-clarification. Like him I read John Cowper Powys and worship William James. Pragmatism is shrewd on Walt Whitman though, as James knew, Walt is so large that his self-contradictions scarcely matter.

At seventy-five, Bob retains all his acumen and exuberance. Fourteen years further on, I long for exuberance but rarely can summon it. Still, I hope Possessed by Memory is not a gloomy book. I did not want it to be that.

I regret that I have never encountered Jeffrey R. Di Leo. His review is gracious and his social concern is commendable. That said, I totally dissent from his conclusion. It would not be literary criticism in the Johnsonian sense when he calls for a discourse to ameliorate our Trump-infested and deeply hurt nation. We have much more than enough amateur sociology, anthropology, political science, and passionately committed resentment. [End Page 351] We do not need it from the literary critic. Her function is to appreciate the cognitive power, originality, and beauty of the highest literature.

I am obliged to Ranjan Ghosh for enlightening me on the visionary concept of Sahitya. The OED rather unhelpfully defines this Sanskrit word as literature or lyric. I alas am ignorant of Sanskrit but at eighty-nine am too old to mend that lacuna. Ghosh is subtle and I hope I do not perform misprision but I think he defines the visionary idea as a gnosis, a being-with that becomes a knowing when you are possessed by memory.

Gina Masucci MacKenzie earns my gratitude by her highly sensitive and generous account of what I feared might be most difficult in the book: the concept of self-other seeing in Shakespeare. Her sensibility would seem to be attuned to that of Samuel Beckett, whose plays might also be illuminated by this concept. There is a charming, light touch to her prose and her mind moves ineluctably.

Daniel Rosenberg Nutters, who I believe visited me briefly, is so humanely generous that any response is difficult. I think I like best his emphasis on our need to rally a remnant of deep readers, who are scattered everywhere. His emphasis on the divine Oscar Wilde heartens me. We should remember the judgement of Jorge Luis Borges: "Oscar Wilde was always right."

I am so close to Daniel O'Hara in thought and feeling that his insights can still startle me. His emphasis on the privileged moment or secular epiphany clarifies my own obsession with those times of inherent excellence. Like me, he is in the elegy season, and his voice gains resonance from its dark overtones.

Alan Singer startles me since in some ways he seems to understand what I am doing perhaps more than I do. I am torn between Jewish...

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