All Flesh is Grass (Classics of Literary Criticism Revisited)
Classics of Literary Criticism Revisited All Flesh is Grass Harold Bloom: The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of King James Bible [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011] How does an engaged work transcend skepticism and faith alike? There is only one way—by immersing itself in the eloquence and beauty of the subject. Literary appreciation is foremost this act of immersion, especially if you value discrimination and judgment. The King James Bible (henceforth, KJB) is an adroitly woven revisionist tapestry and Harold Bloom has taken it upon himself to probe into a blessing called literature by digging into its innards, which might also be a way of confronting the fullness of our lives. Originally the culmination of one strand of Renaissance English culture, the KJB is a fundamental source for Whitman and Melville, Emily Dickinson, Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy, Milton, William Blake, Henry James, Joyce and Atwood among others. It is important to state right at the outset that a literary appreciation of the Bible does not seek faith and revelation. For the faithful, a literary appreciation is redundant. But a literary scholar enters the terrain of the Bible as a pilgrim, seeking to unearth sublime fiction. But even as we begin to appreciate the narrative tropes, the rhetorical strategies, the lyrical ardour, the fiery prophecies and the pungent proverbs in the text, the problem of its spiritual codes lurks and abides. Literary criticism cannot be made into religion and yet all of Shakespeare and Dante constitute Bloom’s guiding set of Gnostic scriptures. The belief lies in the resurrectionist powers of the arts. Historically speaking, the KJB (also called the Authorized Version) is an English Protestant disputation against contemporary Catholic and Jew alike.It is an English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England, begun in 1604 and completed in 1611.The KJB includes the 39 books of the Old Testament, an intertestamental section containing 14 books of the Apocrypha and the 27 books of the New Testament. King James had expressly instructed the translators that the new version ought to conform to the ecclesiology and reflect the Episcopal structure of the Church of England and its belief in an ordained clergy. This instructed piety recedes as we immerse ourselves in the narrative and the poetry within. The translation was done by 47 scholars, all of whom were members of the Church of England. Bloom has delved into those which have the strongest literary possibilities. Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) and KJB are for Bloom rival aesthetic eminences, even as he constantly compares and contrasts the language and individual thrusts of four other versions: the Greek New Testament, the Tyndale, the Geneva and the Myles Coverdale translation. The breathtaking erudition of Bloom apart, much of the charm for the readers is to share with him the realization that KJB was a culmination of two millennia of collective work done by writers, composers, redactors and editors, and yet the result has been surprisingly aesthetic, and its power original. Blessing is an eloquent concept in the Torah—the first five books of the Old Testament, from Genesis through Deuteronomy. There are at least four voices in the Torah: the Yahvist who tells us remarkable stories of a wondering people—the Jews, as they try to become Hebrews through their journey towards the Promised Land. The Priestly voice, on the other hand is about wisdom, restraint and genealogy. The other two are the Elohist and the Deuteronomist. The idea of the blessing for the Priestly writer is “be fruitful and multiply.” In the Yahvist writer—blessing is “more life into a time without boundaries.” Your name will not be scattered if you have blessing. To this end Bloom nominates Jacob to be the symbol of Jewish consciousness proper, more than Moses or David, archetype of Freud, Kafka and Einstein. Jacob is a survivor who becomes Israel—both a nation and a people of survivors. In Thomas Mann’s narrative tetralogy, Joseph and his Brothers, written between 1926 and 1942, Bloom discovers the best interpretation, the reincarnated spirit of the Yahvist writer. Terror and comedy mingle in Jacob, who passed on the blessing both to his fourth son, Judah, and in a literary sense to Paul. Mann’s Jacob, increasingly as he ages, ponders his own stories, seeking to gain power over their elucidation. In both Mann and the Yahvist, ironies flourish, usurpations are rampant and cunning rather than sanctity is the pragmatic qualification for election: “If Israel is the alternative name of the nameless angel, then Jacob has usurped the identity of what, following Wallace Stevens and Freud, could be called the angel of reality,” says Bloom. The Blessing means survival—though Jacob shall limp for the rest of his life after a fatal embrace with Yahweh. Does Yahweh play the role of the Angel of Death? Perhaps Jacob has made allies of what Freud regarded as reality-testing. This brings us to the second serious question that the book probes: what might luck be? Oscar Wilde nominated Jesus as the Supreme aesthete and Bloom assigns Yahweh the role of the notorious narcissist playing favourites—the creator-by-catastrophe. Much of Exodus, and all of Numbers after it, is a recurrent juxtaposition between revelation and wilderness. Bloom ponders: “Since my long-ago childhood, I have wondered at a forty years’ wandering back and forth in the Sinai, between the symbolic extremes of Egypt and Canaan. The outrageousness of what Yahweh imposes upon his wretched chosen people somehow has escaped commentary, ancient and modern, rabbinical and scholarly. Who can journey forty years in the waste lands without anguish and discontent? Is that part of the Blessing?” For a book that is supposed to be garnering wisdom and poise, the KJB iterates that we are far from dealing in exemplary characters. But we are witnessing the journey of people who are confronting the fullness of life and its many shades. Deceit and shrewdness, jealousy and back-stabbing, revenge and lust continuously make this a supremely human tale. And circumscribing ritual markers leading to the formation of a commune—painstakingly, is also a way of confronting