A Gnostic perception of the Jewish nightmare , normative fossils and the vexing subject of the dominion of evil"Candidates for Survival"
Boston Review: What do you think the future looks like for literary criticism in America?
Harold Bloom: Oh, I have no idea. Who am I to prophesize? I do suspect very strongly that at this time American poetry is in better condition than the American criticism of poetry, . . .
http://bostonreview.net/BR11.1/bloom.html[/
BR: Why do you call yourself a Jewish Gnostic?
HB: (Laughs) Partly for polemical reasons, partly because I have a religious temperament and my culture is Jewish culture or American Jewish culture. And the more deeply I read Jewish literature, from the Bible to the present day, the more I become convinced that what we now regard as the normative Jewish literature is essentially a fossil going back to the second century of the common era. It is based upon a strong reading of the Hebrew Bible, but it is not the only possible strong reading of the Hebrew Bible. Clearly the tradition of Jewish gnosticism which goes from at least the second century of the common era to the present day and of which the late Gershem Scholem, who is the principal historian and scholarly expositor and modern theoretician, represents a very strong reading also of the Hebrew Bible in the Jewish tradition and it’s one which seems to me to account much better the whole nightmare of Jewish history than the normative Jewish religion possibly can do. The problems of theodicy, of how to bring together the Talmudical vision of God with the actual fate of the Jews in the twentieth century, seemed to me insoluble whereas a Gnostic perception of God and of religion more than adequately accounts for the dominion of evil. It’s a vexed subject.
