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Elohim and the Plural of Elemenstor
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by Tim 15 years, 11 months ago
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Elohim and the Plural of Elemenstor
Harold Bloom's review of Book 3. The book attracted his attention because of the daring decision to publish it before Book 2. In his review, Bloom praises Brahe's profound sense of irony and loss, as well as his deep knowledge of the Classics. The most commonly-mentioned quote from the review is that it "is the product of a mind that has clearly marinated in the best juices of the Western canon."
| Does anyone have the text of this review? I just remember the jist of it. |
| Yeah. Wasn't there something about a Gnostic Cross? |
| It's typical Bloom. He completely misses the point of it, reducing it to yet another narrative in the Western epic myth tradition. We'd be so much better if he'd crawl under a rock and die. A new volume of essays responding explicitly to Bloom on the topic should be out from Harvard University Press later this year. At that point this entire article should be scrapped and re-written. Until then, I don't see how enlightening this particular article is -joam |
| I found Bloom's early interest in the cycle to be of far more interest than the body of writing exemplified by "Refractions in the Scattered Light of Metallic Rainbows; A Retrospective Look at the Artistic Undercurrents of Tycho Brahe's Elemenstor Saga and Their Interplay with New Critcism, Marxist Theory, and the Emergent Domain of Contemporary Virtue Ethics and Platonic Character Actualization; Or, How I Learned to Ride Dragons". Although my own sympathies may be with the aspirations of the latter article, it seems to me that Bloom's early endorsement more fully reflects the problematic and regressive potentials of the saga: the tendencies toward elitism that later manifest in the fandom's wrangling over canonicity, an obsession with lineage, the openings to solipsism and the consequent blindness to the late capitalist social structures that are the pre-conditions of the series and its commentaries. Whatever critical energies are to be wrested from the series are constituted through our own reactions in and against it, rather than through illusions regarding their essence. Of course, so little as the "progressive" readings of the saga foster illusions about the saga itself, so little are they to be eschewed. But I'm just cribbing this directly from an early draft of Simon Jarvis's "Negative Dialectics of the Elemonstorohimists", which provides the sort of defense of Bloom's views for which Bloom could hardly be grateful. I hear that the essay will be included in the forthcoming volume from Harvard University Press. dan, dan.heck |
| Simon Jarvis' article (I had the profound joy of seeing him present it at MLA this year) could have been subtitled "Bloom: A Stopped Clock Is Right Twice a Day." I'm grateful that the anonymous commenter brought it up. Yes, it will appear in the forthcoming volume, though in a slightly expanded version. Let's not forget, though, that Jarvis' main point is to discuss the notion of canonicity and its meaning to the various readers of the Elemenstor works. Certainly I applaud his inclusive spirit, though I admit I find the sentence: "There are at minimum as many Elemenstor Canons as there are readers, and countability is too capitalistic to constrain the notion of shared experience," to be too sophilistic for my own taste. The notion of drawing a circle around a set of texts on some obvious, empirical dimension (like, for example, everything before the drinking and pill binge) and saying "this is the core of the cycle" is necessary to throw certain psychotextual motifs into light. Again, this is straight out of Lacan, Derrida, and Reinulf--basic deconstructionist techniques. That Bloom also draws circles around his favorite texts and writes in English doesn't mean that because I (or Wendy Plodd, or Simon Jarvis) do also write in English mean we have anything like intellectual alliance with Bloom, to say nothing of the fact that I am not an elitist. -joam: PS: Sign your comment, anonymous commenter! We need more insight like yours! |
Elohim and the Plural of Elemenstor
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