Ruin the Sacred Truths

Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present

Harold Bloom

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1991
• ISBN:
  9780674252547
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Harold Bloom surveys with majestic view the literature of the West from the Old Testament to Samuel Beckett. He provocatively rereads the Yahwist (or J) writer, Jeremiah, Job, Jonah, the Iliad, the Aeneid, Dante's Divine Comedy, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, the Henry IV plays, Paradise Lost, Blake's Milton, Wordsworth's Prelude, and works by Freud, Kafka, and Beckett. In so doing, he uncovers the truth that all our attempts to call any strong work more sacred than another are merely political and social formulations. This is criticism at its best.

VI

FREUD AND BEYOND

FREUD speculated that what we first forget, and only subsequently remember, is the most important element in a dream, or perhaps in any other representation of our desires. “Important” here means central for an interpretation. Freud’s theory of repression, or unconscious yet purposeful forgetting, is at the center of his vast speculative project. Consequently, we know a great deal about Freudian forgetting, yet remarkably little about what might be termed Freudian remembering. Since Freud’s was anything but a psychology of historical changes, we might have expected that his view of people as immutable through the ages would have concerned itself with what most makes for the immutable, which is memory and its discontents. If we have an unchanging nature, then the past should have unchallenged authority for us. But Freud’s therapeutic design intends the undoing of our histories. Not only is individual sexuality to be liberated from the family romance, but thought itself is to be freed of its necessarily sexual past—freed at least in a few elite individuals strong enough to bear their own freedom.

Freud refused to study the nostalgias. He hated the past, and he hated the United States, perhaps because he feared that it was the future. But his hatred of America was founded upon ignorance, while he knew the past, and so hated it with reason. Jews are urged by their tradition to remember, but very selectively. Freud was peculiarly Jewish, in profound ways that we begin only now to understand. We note and commend Freud’s ingenuity in having transformed the initial prime obstacle to psychoanalysis, the transference, into the pragmatic prime instrument of analytical therapy. If there is something ineluctably Jewish about that transformation, then perhaps we can take it as a synecdoche for all the Jewish metamorphoses of exile into achievement. The wandering people has taught itself and others the lesson of wandering meaning, a wandering that has compelled a multitude of changes in the modes of interpretation available to the West. Of these changes, the Freudian speculation has been perhaps the most influential in our century, if only because we now find it difficult to recall that psychoanalysis, after all, is only a speculation, rather than a science, a philosophy, or even a religion. Freud is closer to Proust than to Einstein, closer even to Kafka than to the scientism of Darwin.

What marks the Freudian transference, above all, is ambivalence, which is also the particular mark of Freud’s mythological version of the taboo (in his seminal cultural speculation, Totem and Taboo). Ambivalence, in Freud’s sense, is simultaneous love and hatred directed toward the same object. The transference and the taboo alike are variations upon Freud’s central vision of psychic ambivalence, the Oedipus complex. Transforming an obstacle to analysis into a technique of analysis is therefore equivalent to converting the Oedipal intensities from a human burden into a human release. If this element in Freudian praxis truly is indebted to the wisdom of the Diaspora, in very broad cultural terms, then Freud is another of the authors of the Jewish myths of exile, and psychoanalysis becomes another parable of a people always homeless or at least uneasy in space, who must seek a perpetually deferred fulfillment in time.

Whether there is a specifically biblical basis for the Jewish discontent with visual space, and the Jewish creative obsession with hearing in time, is disputable. Most attempts to contrast Hebrew and Greek thought, on the supposed basis of crucial differences between Hebrew and Greek as languages, have been demonstrated to be illusory. Yet the intellectual and spiritual conflict between Jew and Greek is anything but illusory, and indeed still seems irreconcilable. Western conceptualization is Greek, and yet Western religion, however conceptual ized, is not. Freud curiously reduced all religion to the longing for the father. Whatever we may think of this reduction, it is not Greek. Nor is the Freudian Eros at all Greek, since Freud interprets every investment of libido as a transaction in the transference of authority, which always resides in figures of the individual’s past and only rarely survives in the individual proper. It is not Greek to vacillate between the need to be everything in oneself and the anxiety of being nothing in oneself. That vacillation helps account for what Freud called repression or defense, the flight from forbidden representations of desire. The theory of repression is coherent only in a psychic cosmos where absolutely everything is meaningful, so that a dream or a joke or a symptom or a transference can sustain a level of interpretative intensity akin to the rabbinical procedures for unpacking Torah. “Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it,” the sage Ben Bag Bag remarks of Torah in Pirke Abot. This aphorism could have served as epigraph to Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, but only because Freud, like the rabbis, had placed everything in the past.

To ask whether there is a specifically Jewish attitude toward time is to ask the even more problematic question: What is it to be Jewish? Does one intend the biblical, or the normatively rabbinical, or something more belated by the question? Three thousand and more years of apparent continuity mask astonishing discontinuities, as many of them ancient as modern. The clearest answer ought to be religious, but the phrase “the Jewish religion” is itself misleading. Generally, the phrase refers to what the Harvard historian of religion, George Foot Moore, first named “normative Judaism”: the faith of Akiba and his colleagues in the second century C.E. But they lived perhaps twelve centuries after the Yahwist, greatest and most original of the biblical writers. Between his tales of Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, and Moses, and the rabbis’ extraordinary modes of interpretation, there had been many interventions, of which the most decisive was the influx of Greek culture after Alexander’s world conquests. The oral Torah, created by the rabbis as a defensive hedge around Scripture, is ultimately Platonic in its function, though not in its ideology. Nothing in the Hebrew Bible proclaims the holiness of study, or sees the Jewish people saving themselves, as a people, by Torah learning. Yet this vision of sanctification through instruction has become so Judaic, even so Jewish, that its Platonic origin now constitutes a shock for almost all Jews, however scholarly. The historical difference between the Yahwist and Akiba is Plato, and this influx of Athens into Jerusalem saved Judaism, and the Jews, from being scattered into oblivion among the nations, by giving the Jews a central formulation of their own culture, but in Greek, the universal language.

Differences between Hebrew and Greek ideas of history nevertheless abound, though whether those differences can aid us in separating out distinctive Jewish notions of time and of memory is problematical, and can be illuminated by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982). The Hebrew Bible commands the Jews to remember, because its God is primarily “the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,” known only through His historical self-revelations, rather than through the cycles of time, natural or mythic. Historical time as such does not matter to Israel; what matters are the times when God intervenes and Israel responds. Significant time, in this sense, is clearly not a Greek notion, for a surprising reason that has more to do with “Israel responds” than with “God intervenes.” What is peculiarly Judaic is the faith that God’s interventions are always primarily for the purpose of eliciting Israel’s response. In this sense also, the Freudian view of the human predicament remains biblical. Because the intervention is for our response, we can be tempted to believe we are everything; because the intervener is incommensurate with us, we can fear that we are nothing. The Psalms echo with this most terrible of affective self-contradictions, taking us in a few phrases from lying down among the potsherds to being as the wings of a dove. The Shakespearean view of man is the biblical and now the Freudian view, rather than the Roman stoicism of Seneca. Hamlet’s dramatic reveries transcend even the Yahwist and Freud in a dialectical awareness that everything, and yet nothing, is for Hamlet’s sake alone, a dialectic that exalts time rather than place, or an interior place only.

A certain curious sense of interiority marks Jewish thought, as a mode that negates all idolatry, all bondage to the bodily eye. The invisible God of the Jews makes only a handful of actual appearances in the Bible, and in only one of those—the Sinai Theophany, where the elders sit, eat, and gaze at Him—does He fail to speak. Appearances account for less in the Bible than in very nearly any other literature, and there must be some connection, however obscured by our estrangement from the Bible, between the devaluation of the eye and the extraordinary text of the Second Commandment:

You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. For I the Lord your God am an impassioned God, visiting the guilt of the fathers upon the children, upon the third and upon the fourth generations of those who reject Me, but showing kindness to the thousandth generation of those who love Me and keep My commandments.

This zealous or impassioned God molded Adam in His own zelem (image) and so presumably He is urging us not to presume to emulate Him, that being the Greek sin of Prometheus or the Romantic sin of Frankenstein. But the prohibition then continues until it becomes remarkably comprehensive, and the divine passion mounts to sublime hyperbole. That the intent of the Second Commandment is to compel us to an extreme interiority is palpable enough, but the very power of this rhetoric encouraged the rebellious Gnostic imagination to an unprecedented originality in the idolatry of fabulation. The preferred biblical way of representing an object is to explain how it was made. We are not told how the Ark of the Covenant, the Desert Sanctuary, the Temple, and Solomon’s Palace looked, because the stories of how they were built is what constitutes depiction. And though we are told that Joseph, David, and Absalom were outstandingly handsome, again we are given only an impression, with no sense of their actual appearance. Yet the beauty of Absalom is hardly an index to his interiority, except in ways so subtle as to suggest that the great writer who composed 2 Samuel had his own highly original doubt of appearances. The Second Commandment evidently was no inhibition for prose narrative, and perhaps we are wrong to find in it the ancestor of many of the later Jewish anxieties of representation.

Yet some of these do have profound if dialectical connections to the rabbinical tradition which, as Walter Benjamin remarked, chose not to see, a legacy he rightly found still alive in Kafka, and which seems to me equally lively in Freud’s theories. We are all of us sensitive to the place of the negative in Jewish thought, a sensitivity upon which I wish to expand. Do Freud and Kafka manifest a Jewish version of negation, one highly distinct from the Hegelian mode of negative thinking? Hegelian negation both culminates European rationalism and aggressively sets that rationalism against British empiricism, with its contempt for universals. Herbert Marcuse observed that Hegel’s intellectual optimism is based upon a destructive concept of the given, thus denying any empirical insistence upon the ultimate authority of the fact. Freudian Verneinung is anything but a Hegelian dialectical negation, alien to Freud both in its optimism and in its transcendence of mere fact. Rather, Freud’s negative is dualistic, mingling ambivalently a purely cognitive return of the repressed and a continuation of the repression of all affect, of the flight away from forbidden and yet desired images and memories. We can call Hegelian negation perhaps the most profound of all Gentile idealizations, after Plato, and then say of the Freudian (and Kafkan) mode of negation that always it reenacts the ambiguities of the Second Commandment.

The difference between Hegelian and Freudian Verneinung is evaded by French Freudians (Lacan, Deleuze, Laplanche, even Derrida). This evasion invalidates their readings of Freud, since ultimately they destroy his proud dualisms by rendering them into mere “psychical duplicities.” Hegelian negation allows the mind to attain the self-consciousness that will free nature, history, and society from the authority of empiricism and positivism. So Marcuse sums up Hegelian truth as “the result of a double process of negation, namely, (1) the negation of the ‘per se’ existence of the object, and (2) the negation of the individual I with the shifting of the truth to the universal.” But Freud, as Richard Wollheim writes, “traced . . . the capacity to assign truth or falsity to an assertion, to some very primitive movement of the mind, in which something like a thought is felt within one,” and then it is either projected or introjected. This is certainly not Hegelian, but is very close to what Yerushalmi calls “Jewish memory.”

Hegelianizing Freud, whether in the linguistic mode of Lacan or the subtler, more skeptical way of Derrida, ends by undoing his radical dualisms (primary process/secondary process; pleasure principle/reality principle), and by thus driving Freud into a kind of phantasmagoric monism, in which the primal ambivalence of an aggressive narcissism becomes our ruling passion. But if you undo Freud’s dualisms, then you confound him with his “renegades”—Jung, Adler, Reich, Rank, all of them what the poet Wallace Stevens called “fundamentalists of the First Idea.” True, Freud’s First Idea of civil war in the psyche still would be conflictive, but the conflict will tend to take place within a narcissistic, mostly unconscious ego, rather than between the ego and the superego, or the ego and the id. That is as large a revision of Freud as Adler was, and if my surmises are accurate, it also removes Freud from the problematical domain of Jewish memory.

We can locate Freud in that domain by first acknowledging the often contradictory and ambiguous relationship between Freud and Judaism, but then subtly associating the biblical and the Freudian ideas of personality and the possibilities of its sublimation. I would add that sublimation, in the Freudian sense, may well be a Jewish ideal, but the true center of Freud’s work is the concept of repression, which is profoundly Jewish, and even normatively so. Freudian memory is Jewish memory, and Freudian forgetting is yet more Jewish. Freud’s Verdrängung is now weakly translated by “repression,” whose current overtones are misleadingly ideological and even political. But Verdrängung, despite its etymology, is not the trope of pushing under or pushing down, but rather the trope of flight, of an estrangement from representations, under the influence of an inner drive.

I come full circle here by returning to the idea of a psychic cosmos, rabbinical and Freudian, in which there is sense in everything, because everything already is in the past, and nothing that matters can be utterly new. Rabbinical memory, as Yerushalmi expounds it, insists that all meanings are present already in the Bible, in its normative commentaries, and in the oral law represented in each generation by the interpreters who stand centrally in the tradition. If everything is there already, then everything in the Bible is absolutely meaningful. Mix together this passion for total intelligibility with a discarding of every mythology, of all idolatry, of the possibility of mere irrationalisms, and you are very close to Freud’s own stance regarding individual consciousness (memory). This must be why Freud had the audacity, in the special preface he wrote for the Hebrew version of Totem and Taboo, to affirm the inward Jewishness of his science, and to hint even that he might be forming a Judaism for the future. The Second Commandment, in our time, is called primal repression, which now takes place before there is anything to be repressed.

Freud implicitly knew this, and that knowledge underlies his weird late book The Man Moses, translated into English as Moses and Monotheism. In what Freud himself called “my novel,” the Yahwist is so revised as to vanish, and Moses is declared to be an Egyptian, Yahwism thus becoming an Egyptian invention. Freud’s motives were at least double: to revitalize the outrageous primal history scene of Totem and Taboo, and to remove a major rival for authority. It is worth remarking that Freud eagerly speculated, at just this time, that the Earl of Oxford had written Shakespeare, a curious devaluation of yet another true rival. Though dismissing this “cultural” Freud of totemism and of an Egyptian Moses might be a comfort, the dismissal would have to be uneasy, both because the figurative power of the primal history scene lingers, and because the taboo-and-totem complex is the concealed paradigm for the Freudian therapeutics of the transference.

Nothing could be less Jewish than the primal history scene, which reads like a parody of Blake’s Tiriel, and which centers upon a primal horde of rival brothers who combine to murder and devour their terrible father, who has taken all the women of the horde for his own. Once slain and digested, the father becomes a venerated ancestor god, Nietzsche’s “numinous shadow” of The Genealogy of Morals. Ambivalence having been resolved by this grotesquely literal introjection of the father, remorse for the crime against the father begins—a remorse upon which, Freud insists, all culture is founded. Religion, Judaism included, is thus the desire for the dead father, whose name in Judaism alternately might be Yahweh or Moses, or for some among us now, Sigmund Freud. The dead father, our father Sigmund Freud remarked, proved mightier than the living one had been. But Yahweh was the true name of the father: Baal and Moloch were not fathers, and Jesus Christ perpetually is a son and not a brother of Yahweh. Freud’s grandest heresy, from a Judaic perspective, is his transfer of the Hebraic trope of the fatherhood of Yahweh to the hideous totemic ancestor god of the primal horde. Yahweh’s elective love for Israel, the center of all Jewish memory, could not be more at variance with the Freudian account of our erotic attachment to authority: in Freud authority has no love for us.

Freedom, for Freud, had to be freedom from the past, but never from time, the Jewish (and Freudian) reality principle. Pragmatically, Jewish freedom is freedom of interpretation, though Jewish (and Freudian) memory results in all meaning being overdetermined. What is freedom where everything is overdetermined, where character is fate, and there are, after all, no accidents? Freud’s scientism, not his Jewishness, led to his proud embrace of the reductive, but his path out of his own reductionism proved to be hi...