Jonathan Derbyshire

Fallen Angels

This review of Harold Bloom's Fallen Angels will appear in the next issue of New Humanist.

Harold Bloom
FALLEN ANGELS
Yale University Press £9.99

Harold Bloom’s literary personality contains multitudes: he is a biblical scholar, a Shakesperian and a critic of Romantic poetry. In his books, it’s often hard to separate these vocations, and Fallen Angels, a strange, hectic little essay that Yale University Press has deemed worthy of being placed between hard covers (with illustrations by the artist Mark Podwal), is no different. As the title suggests, it’s ostensibly about angels, but turns out to be about what Bloom’s books are usually about – that is, and in no particular order, the genius of Shakespeare, the Bible as literature and the saving, redemptive power of reading.

America, Bloom begins by arguing, is in the grip of a “post-millenial” obsession with angels. (Actually, Bloom doesn’t argue so much as smother the reader in great gusts of oracular chutzpah.) Angels, he says, are everywhere. A cursory Amazon search turns up, inter alia, Contacting Your Spirit Guide, Angels 101: An Introduction to Connecting, Working, and Healing with Angels and Angel Numbers, which latter is apparently a guide to the “angelic meanings” of numbers. And central to all these books is the idea of “angelic intervention” and communication with angels.

Reasonably enough, Bloom thinks that this obsession is a sentimental evasion of the simple fact of human finitude. Nevertheless –and this is the most arresting provocation of an irrepressibly provocative book– he also thinks these preoccupations are redeemable. Bloom takes the Emersonian view that American religion is not the opiate but rather the “poetry of the people”, and that it can therefore be saved from the sentimentalism of contemporary “angelicism”. The key to this is getting us to see that angels, specifically fallen angels, are in fact images of a distinctively human predicament – that of a dying animal with transcendental longings.

To this end, Bloom applies his gargantuan erudition to the representations of fallen angels and devils which first emerged in the Zoroastrian faith of ancient Persia, before being transmitted to Judaism and Christianity. Characteristically, he is entirely indifferent to questions of belief and unbelief; rather, Bloom prefers to treat the great Western religions as a series of “literary representations”. This means that Satan, the fallen angel par excellence, the “star figure” in this story, was a “literary character” long before Milton got his hands on him in Paradise Lost.

By appearing, as Blake put it, to be of the devil’s party, Milton brings us to the recognition that our relationship with Satan is an “intimate” one. Milton’s Satan fascinates and disturbs us precisely because we see ourselves in him. If, on Bloom’s account, Milton’s literary genius is outstripped by Shakespeare’s, it is because Shakespeare sees that there are more fallen angels than devils, that “we can be fallen angels without being demons or devils.”

For Bloom, therefore, “fallen angel” and “human being” are different names for the same condition. In his secular religion of literature, fallenness is stripped of its Pauline and Augustinian associations and becomes a synonym for what Philip Roth calls the “human stain” – the fact that, more often than not, we remain enigmatic to ourselves.

Of course, this invites the question why talk about “fallenness” at all, unless some of those theological associations in fact remain in play. Bloom’s answer, I suppose, would be that he talks like that because, for all his disdain for Saints Paul and Augustine, he still believes in redemption. Not redemption through Christ, needless to say, but redemption through literature.

Exit Ghost

This very brief notice of Philip Roth's new novel Exit Ghost will appear next week in Time Out London.

Philip Roth once described his novel Portnoy's Complaint as a kind of explosion – an act of self-sabotage in which he blew up 'a lot of old loyalties' in order to liberate himself as a writer. Though less dramatically incendiary than that intemperate masterpiece, Roth's new book Exit Ghost is no less significant, for it too marks the end of something.

The exit announced in the title is that of Roth's long-time authorial surrogate and fictional alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman. Exit Ghost closes with the words 'gone for good', as if to suggest that Zuckerman's departure from Roth's fiction is meant to be definitive. The novel, then, is both Zuckerman's reckoning with his own writing life and Roth's reckoning with Zuckerman. Consequently, it is haunted by Zuckerman's books and the other 'Zuckerman' books  – in particular The Ghost Writer, the first instalment of what Roth has called an 'imaginary biography'.

When Exit Ghost opens, Nathan Zuckerman is in New York for prostate surgery. While in hospital, he catches a glimpse of Amy Bellette, who he'd met 50 years before at the home of his literary hero E.I. Lonoff, an encounter recorded in The Ghost Writer. Amy, now decrepit and ravaged by a tumour, turns out to have in her possession half of a manuscript by Lonoff. The other half is in the hands of an incorrigibly ambitious would-be biographer named Richard Kliman.

Zuckerman tries to resist Kliman's prurience on Lonoff's, and Amy's, behalf. But he, and we, are haunted by the thought that Kliman might in fact be the ghost of his, Nathan's, younger self  – the young man who had confessed to Lonoff that when you admire a writer you become curious, you '˜look for his secret, the clue to his puzzle'. It's not clear from this splendid novel whether Roth is leaving us a clue or in fact warning us that there's no secret to discover.