Harold Bloom’s latest book—his forty-first, if you’re keeping track—is The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime. Those well acquainted with the monumental Bloomian corpus (God bless them) will recognize the topic at once: Gnosticism, upon which Professor Bloom has been fixated for going on four decades. Yet those not so acquainted need not feel disadvantaged. Bloom’s latest offering will leave everyone thoroughly flummoxed.
The Daemon Knows is about “the dozen creators of the American sublime”: Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Mark Twain, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Hart Crane. Together these writers “represent our incessant effort to transcend the human without forsaking humanism.” Bloom pairs the twelve off—sometimes appropriately, sometimes tendentiously—and attempts to show how each author’s work demonstrates “receptivity to daemonic influx.”
That’s ostensibly the aim, at least. In the early 1990s, Bloom famously told The Paris Review“I refuse to be edited,” and it shows. After an introduction and a “Daemonic Preludium” (both of which meander), Bloom handles each author in a style that might aptly be described as gnomic stream-of-consciousness. He is, of course, enormously read—perhaps incomparably, among living literary personae—and has insights to offer, but finding them here is like panning for gold: you’re likely to spend a long time in the water without success. What one finds, instead, are clumps of musings about several American authors, tied loosely together by an erratic application of the Freudian
