.16.

95

ZHhrold "Bloom

KpMalah and Qitidsm #

#
#
MY #
Harold Bloom’s Yeats “deserves to rank as
a classic,” said the Times Literary Supple¬
ment; his Anxiety of Influence, according
to Commonweal, is already “one of the
classics of literary theory.” And the distin¬
guished critic, Paul de Man, summarized
the general consensus with his observa¬
tion that Harold Bloom may prove to
have been “ahead of everybody else all
along.”
While all students of Bloom’s work
have commented on its originality, its ex¬
ceptional range, and its clarity, less notice
has been taken of the even more remark¬
able unity that is displayed in his writings
from the earlier studies on Shelley, on
Blake, and on Romanticism, up to his
most recent A Map of Misreading. That
unity is now brilliantly highlighted in J
Kabbalah and Criticism which may be
justly regarded as the cardinal work in
Harold Bloom’s critical enterprise. This
book is the keystone in the arch; it clari¬
fies the development of his earlier books
and indicates the direction his future
work will take. A significant portion of
that work will be published in 1976 under
the title Figures of Capablez imaging
Imagination.

(continue
Ml flap)
p
 KABBALAH
AND CRITICISM
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2019 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/kabbalahcriticisOOOObloo
 HAROLD BLOOM X • \

-« <•> »-

KABBALAH
AND
CRITICISM

A CONTINUUM BOOK

The Seaburj Press : New York

The Seabury Press, Inc.
815 Second Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10017
Copyright © 1975 by Harold Bloom
All rights reserved. No part of this book may
be reproduced in any form, except for brief reviews,
without the written permission of the publisher.

Design by Victoria Gomez

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Bloom, Harold.
Kabbalah and criticism.
(A Continuum book)
1. Cabala—History and criticism. 2. Criticism. I. Title.
BM526.B55 296.T6 75-12820
ISBN 0-8164-9264-6
For Angus Fletcher

i£3846
 A song means filling a jug, and even more so breaking the
jug. Breaking it apart. In the language of the Kabbalah
we perhaps might call it: Broken Vessels.

H. L E I V I C K
 CONTENTS

PROLOGUE : 11
That, too, I must have known

KABBALAH : I5

KABBALAH AND CRITICISM : 51

THE NECESSITY OF MISREADING 95

EPILOGUE : 127
The Name Spoken Over the Water
 PROLOGUE
That, too, I must have known

W hen the Holy One entered the Garden, a herald

called out: “Disperse, O hosts, to the four
corners of the world!”

i. One climbs to one side.

2. One climbs down on that side.
3. One enters between these two.
4. Two crown themselves with a third.
5. Three enter into one.
6. One comes forth in many colors.
7. Six come down on one side and six on the other.
8. Six enter into twelve.
9. Twelve agitate themselves to form twenty-two.
10. Six are contained in ten.
11. Ten are fixed in one.

Call this the text (Zohar, Lech Lecha, 77a) and quest
after the interpretation. The hosts form a man, a tree,
an alphabet, and every figure among the hosts is in
every other figure, yet also acts upon every other
figure. When the hosts gather together again, they
 Prologue 12

form a chariot. All these things are known, and

nothing is still to be gained by using the ancient names
for all these, for they too are known. To seek after
what is not known of this host, these ten primal
numbers, and their fixation in one, as an eleventh, is to
seek a primordial scheme after which the revisionary
impulse seems to model itself. The first chapter of this
book offers an account of that primordial scheme. In
the second chapter, the scheme is related, in detail, to a
theory of reading poetry. A manifesto for antithetical
criticism, based on this theory, constitutes the third
and final chapter.
... as much as to say, Mystically or enigmatically
written; adding farther . . . they shall be only knowne to
our hearers or disciples, and this closenesse Pythagoras
also having learned of those his Masters, and taught it his
disciples, he was made the Master of Silence. And who,
as all the doctrines hee delivered were (after the manner
of the Hebrewes, AEgyptians, and most auncient Poets,)
layd downe in enigmaticall and figurative notions, so one
among other of his is this Give not readily thy right
—

hand to every one, by which Precept (sayes the profound

IamblicusJ that great Master advertiseth that wee ought
not to communicate to unworthy mindes, and not yet
practized in the understanding of occulte doctrines, those
misterious instructions that are only to bee opened (sayes
he) and taught to sacred and sublime wits, and such as
have been a long time exercised and versed in them.
Now, from this meanes that the first auncients used, of
delivering their knowledges thus among themselves by
word of mouth; and by successive reception from them
downe to after ages, That Art of mysticall writing by
Numbers, wherein they couched under a fabulous attire,
those their verbal! Instructions, was after, called Scientia
 Prologue 14

Cabalae, or the Science of reception: Cabala among the

Hebrewes signifying no other than the Latine receptio:
A learning by the auncients held in high estimation and
reverence and not without great reason . . .

henry Reynolds, Mythomystes (1632)

 KABBALAH

( ( abbalah” has been, since about the year 1200,

.IX. the popularly accepted word for Jewish esoteric
teachings concerning God and everything God cre¬
ated. The word “Kabbalah” means “tradition,” in the
particular sense of “reception,” and at first referred to
the whole of Oral Law. But there existed among the
Jews, both in their homeland and in Egypt, during the
time of ferment when Christianity began, a considera¬
ble body of theosophical and mystical lore. These
speculations and beliefs appear to have been in¬
fluenced by Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, and it
seems fair to characterize the history of subsequent
Kabbalah as being a struggle between Gnostic and
Neoplatonic tendencies, fought out on the quite alien
ground of Judaism, which in its central development
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM l6

was to reject both modes of speculation. But Kabbalah

went out and away from the main course of Jewish
religious thought, and uncannily it has survived both
Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, in that Kabbalah
today retains a popular and apparently perpetual
existence, while Gnosticism and Neoplatonism are the
concern of only a few specialists. As I write, the desk
in front of me has on it a series of paperback manuals,
purchased in drugstores and at newsstands, with titles
like Tree of Life, Kabbalah: An Introduction, Kabbalah
Today, and Understanding the Kabbalah. There are no
competing titles on Gnosticism today, nor on under¬
standing Neoplatonism, and it is important that the
continued popularity of Kabbalah be considered in
any estimate of the phenomenon of the current
survival and even revival of ancient esotericisms.
Popular handbooks of Kabbalah are not always
very exact in their learning, and tend to be danger¬
ously eager to mix Kabbalah up with nearly everything
else in current religious enthusiasms, from Sufism to
Hinduism. But this too by now is a Western tradition,
for Christian popularizations of Kabbalah starting
with the Renaissance compounded Kabbalah with a
variety of non-Jewish notions, ranging from Tarot
cards to the Trinity. A singular prestige has attended
Kabbalah throughout its history, and such prestige
again is worth contemporary consideration. Accom¬
panying this prestige, which is the prestige of suppos¬
edly ultimate origins, is an extraordinary eclecticism,
that contaminated Kabbalah with nearly every major
occult or theosophical strain in the Renaissance and
later in Enlightened Europe. A reader deeply versed in
 Kabbalah 17

the interpenetrations of Kabbalah with these strains

learns to be very tolerant of every popular version of
Kabbalah he encounters. The five I have read recently
were all terribly confused and confusing, but all were
palpably sincere and even authentically enthusiastic in
their obfuscations.
Yet educated readers need not rely upon such
manuals. The lifework of Professor Gershom Scholem
of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, was summed up
by him, magnificently, in the various articles on
Kabbalah in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, only a few
years ago. These entries, revised by Scholem, are now
available in one large volume of nearly five hundred
pages, published under the title Kabbalah by Quadran¬
gle/The New York Times Book Company. Most of
what follows in this essay is based upon either this
book or on Scholem’s other major studies of Kabba¬
lah, several of which are easily available in American
paperback reprints. Where I will depart from Scholem
cannot be on any factual matters in Kabbalistic
scholarship, but will concern only some suggestions on
the continued relevance of Kabbalah for contempo¬
rary modes of interpretation, and a few personal
speculations on how Kabbalah itself might be inter¬
preted from some contemporary perspectives.
Scholem’s massive achievement can be judged as
being unique in modern humanistic scholarship, for he
has made himself indispensable to all rational students
of his subject. I will suggest later in this essay that
Kabbalah is essentially a vision of belatedness, and I
would praise Scholem above all for having trans¬
formed his own belatedness, in regard to the necessary
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM l8

anteriority of his own ancient subject, into a surprising

earliness. Kabbalah is an extraordinary body of rheto¬
ric or figurative language, and indeed is a theory of
rhetoric, and Scholem’s formidable achievement is as
much rhetorical or figurative as it is historical. In this
deep sense, Scholem has written a truly Kabbalistic
account of Kabbalah, and more than any other
modern scholar, working on a comparable scale, he
has been wholly adequate to his great subject. He has
the same relation to the texts he has edited and written
commentaries upon, that a later poet like John Milton
had to the earlier poets he absorbed and, in some
ways, transcended. Scholem is a Miltonic figure in
modern scholarship, and deserves to be honored as
such.

Any brief account of Kabbalah, such as the one I am

attempting here, has to begin with descriptions, how¬
ever brief, of Gnosticism and of Neoplatonism, for
these opposed visions are the starting-points of the
more comprehensive vision of Kabbalah. To most
modern sensibilities, Gnosticism has a strong and even
dangerous appeal, frequently under other names, but
Neoplatonism scarcely moves anyone in our time.
William James reacted to the Neoplatonic Absolute or
God, the One and the Good, by saying that “the
stagnant felicity of the absolute’s own perfection
moves me as little as I move it.” No one is going to
argue with James now, but a thousand years and more
of European cultural tradition would not have agreed
 Kabbalah 19

with him. Neoplatonism was essentially the philosophy

of one man, the Hellenic Egyptian Plotinus (205-270
a.d.), whose seminars in Rome were subsequently
written out as the Enneads (“sets of nine”). Seeing
himself as the continuator of Plato, Plotinus sought
vindication for the three mystic and transcendent
realities that he called “hypostases”: the One or the
Good, Intelligence, the Soul. Beneath these hypostases
was the world of nature, including human bodies. To
bridge the abyss between the unified Good and a
universe of division and evil, Plotinus elaborated an
extraordinary trope or figure of speech, “emanation.”
The One’s plenitude was so great that its love, light,
glory brimmed over, and without the One itself in any
way decreasing, its glory descended, first into the
realm of Intelligence (the Platonic Ideas or Ideal
Forms), next into a region of Soul (including each of
our souls) and at last into the body and nature. On this
bottom level, evil exists, but only by virtue of its
distance from the Good, its division of an ultimate
Oneness into so many separate selves, so many ob¬
jects. The body and nature are not bad, in the vision of
Plotinus, but merely have gone too far away from their
beloved fatherland. By an intellectual discipline, Plo¬
tinus held, we can return to the One even in this life.
Plotinus had a strong dislike for the Gnostics,
against whom he wrote an eloquent treatise, calling
them “those who say that the Maker of the world and
the world are evil.” There is no great scholarly book of
our time on Neoplatonism (for many of the same
reasons that there are no drugstore manuals) but there
is a superb work, The Gnostic Religion, by Hans Jonas,
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 20

a worthy complement to Scholem’s Kabbalah. Jonas

usefully compares Gnosticism to Nihilism and Exis¬
tentialism, citing many analogues between Valentinus,
the greatest of the Gnostic speculators, and the
philosopher Heidegger. Gnosticism, according to
Jonas, is the extremist version of the syncretic, general
religion that dominated the eastern Mediterranean
world during the first two Christian centuries. Jonas
refers to this general religion of that period as a
“dualistic transcendent religion of salvation.” “Dualis-
tic” here means that reality is polarized into: God
against the creation, spirit against matter, good against
evil, soul against the body. “Transcendent” here
means that God and salvation are alike transmundane,
beyond our world. Gnosticism takes its name from
gnosis, a Greek word for “knowledge.” Though the
Church Fathers attacked Gnosticism as a Christian
heresy, it appears to have preceded Christianity, both
among the Jews and the Hellenes. Gnostic “knowl¬
edge” is supposed knowledge “of God,” and so is
radically different from all other knowledge, for the
gnosis is the only form that salvation can take,
according to its believers. This is therefore not rational
knowledge, for it involves God knowing the Gnostic
adept, even as the Gnostic knows Him.
Gnosticism was always anti-Jewish, even when it
rose among Jews or Jewish Christians, for its radical
dualism of an alien God set against an evil universe is
a total contradiction of the central Jewish tradition, in
which a transcendent God allows Himself to be known
by His people as an immediate Presence, when He
chooses, and in which his Creation is good except as it
 Kabbalah 21

has been marred or altered by man’s disobedience or

wickedness. Confronted by the Gnostic vision of a
world evilly made by hostile demons, the Talmudic
rabbis rejected this religion of the alien God with a
moral passion surpassing the parallel denunciations
made by Plotinus. We can contrast here the most
famous formula of Valentinian gnosis with an equally
famous rabbinic pronouncement of anathema upon
such speculations:

What makes us free is the knowledge who we

were, what we have become; where we were,
wherein we have been thrown; whereto we
speed, wherefrom we are redeemed; what is birth
and what rebirth.

Whosoever speculated on these four things, it

were better for him if he had not come into the
world—what is above? what is beneath? what
was beforetime? and what will be hereafter?

The rabbis believed such speculation to be morally

unhealthy, a judgment amply vindicated by the sexual
libertinism of many Gnostics. Since Kabbalah, in all
of its earlier phases, remained a wholly orthodox
Jewish phenomenon, in belief and in moral behavior,
it seems a puzzle that Kabbalah had so large a Gnostic
content. This puzzle can be clarified by even the
briefest account of the origins of the Kabbalah.
Kabbalah proper begins in twelfth-century Provence,
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 22

but Scholem and others have traced its direct descent

from the earliest Jewish esotericism, the apocalyptic
writings of which the Book of Enoch is the most
formidable. This earliest Jewish theosophy and mysti¬
cism centered about two Biblical texts, the first chapter
of the prophet Ezekiel and the first chapter of Genesis.
These gave impetus to two modes of visionary specula¬
tion, ma’aseh merkabah (“the work of the Chariot”)
and ma’aseh bereshit (“the work of creation”). These
esoteric meditations were orthodox parallels to Gnos¬
tic reveries on the pleroma, the unfallen divine realm,
and can be considered a kind of rabbinical quasi-
Gnosticism, but this was not yet Kabbalah.

Some eight centuries after the Gnostics subsided, a

short book, the Sefer Yezirah (“Book of Creation”),
became widely circulated among learned Jews. There
are at least half a dozen English translations of Sefer
Yezirah available, and the little book probably will
always be popular among esotericists. In itself, it is of
no literary or spiritual value, but historically it is the
true origin of Kabbalah. The date of its composition is
wholly uncertain, but it may go back to the third
century. Later Kabbalistic gossip attributed it to the
great Rabbi Akiba, whom the Romans had martyred,
which accounts for much of the book’s prestige. What
matters about Sefer Yezirah is that it introduced, in a
very rudimentary form, the central structural notion of
Kabbalah, the Sefirot, which in later works became the
divine emanations by which all reality is structured.
 Kabbalah 23

Since the next Kabbalistic text of importance, the

Sefer ha-Bahir, was not written until the thirteenth
century, and since that work presents the Sefirot in
fuller but not final development, all students of
Kabbalah necessarily confront the problematic of a
thousand years of oral tradition. All of Jewish mediev¬
alism becomes a vast labyrinth in which the distinctive
ideas of Kabbalah were invented, revised and trans¬
mitted in an area ranging from Babylonia to Poland.
In these vast reaches of space and time, even Scholem
becomes baffled, for the very essence of oral tradition
is that it should defeat all historical and critical
scholarship.
The “Book Bahir” (bahir means “bright”) has been
translated into German by Scholem, another service,
as this book is incoherent, and its mixture of learned
Hebrew and vernacular Aramaic makes it difficult
even for specialists. Though fragmentary, the Bahir is a
book of some real literary value, and truly begins the
Kabbalistic style of parable and figurative language.
Its major figuration is certainly the Sefirot, the attri¬
butes of God emanating out from an infinite center to
every possible finite circumference. Where the Sefirot,
in the Sefer Yezirah, were only the ten primary
numbers, a neo-Pythagorean notion, in the Bahir they
are divine principles and powers, and supernal lights,
aiding in the work of creation. But this was still only a
step towards the true emergence of Kabbalah, which
took place in thirteenth-century southern France, and
then spread across the border to find its home among
the Jews of Spain, a process culminating in the
masterpiece or Bible of Kabbalah, the Sefer ha-Zohar.
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 24

The Zohar (“splendor”) was written by Moses de Leon

between 1280 and 1286 in Guadalajara, and with its
circulation Kabbalah became a full-scale system of
speculation. After seven hundred years the Zohar, with
all its faults, remains the only indubitably great book
in all of Western esotericism. Most of the Zohar is
written in Aramaic, but as an artificial, highly literary
language, rather than as a vernacular. There is an
adequate five-volume English translation (by Sperling
and Simon) still in print, and well worth reading, but it
represents only a portion of the Zohar, which is
however a unique book in that it is impossible to say
what a complete version of it would be. The book (if it
is a book) varies from manuscript to manuscript, and
seems more a collection of books or a small library
than what ordinarily we would describe as a self-
contained work.
Rather than attempt a description of the Zohar here,
I shall pass on immediately to a summary account,
largely following Scholem, of the basic concepts and
images of Kabbalah, and then return to glance at the
Zohar before giving a sketch of the later Kabbalah,
which was created after the Jews were exiled from
Spain. For the Zohar is the central work of classical
Kabbalah, centering on the doctrine of the Sefirot, but
Kabbalah from the sixteenth century until today is a
second or modern Kabbalah, largely the creation of
Isaac Luria of Safed in Palestine (1534-1572), and
makes a rather different exposition.
Classical Kabbalah begins with a Neoplatonic vi¬
sion of God. God is the Ein-Sof (“without end”),
totally unknowable, and beyond representation, all
 Kabbalah 25

images of whom are merely hyperboles. As Ein-Sof has

no attributes, his first manifestation is necessarily as
ayin (“nothing”). Genesis had said that God created
the world out of nothing. Kabbalah took this over as a
literal statement, but interpreted it revisionistically as
meaning just the opposite of what it said. God, being
“ayin,” created the world out of “ayin,” and thus
created the world out of himself The distinction
between cause and effect was subverted by this initial
Kabbalistic formula, and indeed such rhetorical sub¬
version became a distinctive feature of Kabbalah:
“cause” and “effect” are always reversible, for the
Kabbalists regarded them as linguistic fictions, long
before Nietzsche did.
Kabbalah, which thus from the start was revisionary
in regard to Genesis (though asserting otherwise), was
also revisionary of its pagan source in Neoplatonism.
In Plotinus, emanation is a process out from God, but
in Kabbalah the process must take place within God
Himself. An even more crucial difference from Neo¬
platonism is that all Kabbalistic theories of emanation
are also theories of language. As Scholem says, “the
God who manifests Himself is the God who expresses
Himself,” which means that the Sefirot are primarily
language, attributes of God that need to be described
by the various names of God when he is at work in
creation. The Sefirot are complex figurations for God,
tropes or turns of language that substitute for God.
Indeed, one can say that the Sefirot are like poems, in
that they are names implying complex commentaries
that make them into texts. They are not allegorical
personifications, which is what all popular manuals of
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 26

Kabbalah reduce them to, and though they have

extraordinary potency, this is a power of signification
rather than what we customarily think of as magic.
Sefirah, the singular form, would seem to suggest the
Greek “sphere,” but its actual source was the Hebrew
sappir (for “sapphire”), and so the term referred
primarily to God’s radiance. Scholem gives a very
suggestive list of Kabbalistic synonyms for the Sefirot:
sayings, names, lights, powers, crowns, qualities,
stages, garments, mirrors, shoots, sources, primal days,
aspects, inner faces, and limbs of God. We can observe
that rhetorically these range over the entire realm of
the classical trope, including metaphor, metonymy,
synecdoche, and hyperbole, even as the designation
ayin for God was a simple irony (meaning one thing by
saying another), and again even as the merkabah or
chariot-throne was a metalepsis for God, that is, the
transumptive trope-of-a-trope. At first the Kabbalists
dared to identify the Sefirot with the actual substance
of God, and the Zohar goes so far as to say of God and
the Sefirot: “He is They, and They are He,” which
produces the rather dangerous formula that God and
language are one and the same. But other Kabbalists
warily regarded the Sefirot only as God’s tools, vessels
that are instruments for him, or as we might say,
language is only God’s tool or vessel. Moses Cordo-
vero, the teacher of Luria and the greatest systemizer
of Kabbalah, achieved the precarious balance of
seeing the Sefirot as being at once somehow both
God’s vessels and His essence, but the conceptual
difficulty remains right down to the present day, and
has its exact analogues in certain current debates
 Kabbalah 27

about the relationship between language and thought.

The Sefirot then are ten complex images for God in
His process of creation, with an interplay between
literal and figurative meaning going on within each
Sefirah. There is a fairly fixed and definite and by now
common ordering for the Sefirot:

1. Keter Ely on or Keter (the “supreme crown”)

2. Hokmah (“wisdom”)
3. Binah (“intelligence”)
4. Gedullah (“greatness”) or Hesed (“love”)
5. Gevurah (“power”) or Din (“judgment” or “rigor”)
6. Tiferet (“beauty”) or Rahamin (“mercy”)
7. Nezah (“victory” or “lasting endurance”)
8. Hod (“majesty”)
9. Yesod (“foundation”)
10. Malkhut (“kingdom”)

It is best to consider these allegorical images as

carefully as space allows, for the interplay of these
images in some sense is the classical or Zoharic
Kabbalah, though not the later Kabbalah of Luria, out
of which finally the Hasidic movement was to emerge.
It is not a negative criticism of Scholem to say that the
Sefirot have not interested him greatly. Scarcely a
dozen pages out of the five hundred in Kabbalah are
devoted to the details of Sefirot symbolism, just as only
ten pages of the four hundred and fifty of the earlier
Major Trends In Jewish Mysticism by Scholem were
concerned with expounding the Sefirot. Scholem is
impatient with them, and prefers to examine larger
mythological and historical aspects of Kabbalah. In
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 28

contrast, popular expositions of Kabbalah for many

centuries down to the drugstore present tend to talk
about nothing but the Sefirot. What is their fascination
for so many learned minds, as well as for the popular
imagination? Contemporary readers encounter the
Sefirot in curious places, such as Malcolm Lowry’s
Under the Volcano or Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s
Rainbow, where these fundamental images of Kabba¬
lah are used to suggest tragic patterns of over-determi¬
nation, by which our lives are somehow lived for us in
spite of ourselves. Like the Tarot cards and astrology,
with which popular tradition has compounded them,
the Sefirot fascinate because they suggest an immuta¬
ble knowledge of a final reality that stands behind our
world of appearances. In some sense the Sefirot have
become the staple of a popular Platonism or Hegelian¬
ism, a kind of magic Idealism. Popular Kabbalism has
understood, somehow, that the Sefirot are neither
things nor acts, but rather are relational events, and so
are persuasive representations of what ordinary people
encounter as the inner reality of their lives.
Keter, the “crown,” is the primal Will of the Creator,
and is scarcely distinguishable from the Ein-Sof,
except as being first effect to His first cause. But,
though an effect, Keter is no part of the Creation,
which reflects Keter but cannot absorb it. As it cannot
be compared to any other image, it must be called
ay in, a “nothingness,” an object of quest that is also
the subject of any search. As a Name of God, Keter is
the Ehyeh of the great declaration of God to Moses in
Exodus 3:14. God says Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, “I Am That
I Am,” but the Kabbalists refused to interpret this as
 Kabbalah 29

mere “being.” To them, Keter was at once Ehyeh and

ayin, being and nothingness, a cause of all causes and
no cause at all, beyond action. If Kabbalah can be
interpreted, as I think it can, as a theory of influence,
then Keter is the paradoxical idea of influence itself.
The irony of all influence, initially, is that the source is
emptied out into a state of absence, in order for the
receiver to accommodate the influx of apparent being.
This may be why we use the word “influence,”
originally an astral term referring to the occult effect of
the stars upon men.
Below Keter as crown, the Sefirot were generally
depicted as a “tree of emanation,” as in the simple
vision of influence. This tree grows downward, as any
map of influence must. As frequent a depiction of the
Sefirot is the “reversed tree,” in which the emanations
are arranged in the form of a man. In either image, the
right hand side begins with the first attribute proper,
Hokmah, generally translated as “wisdom,” but better
understood as something like God’s meditation or
contemplation of Himself, and frequently called the
“father of fathers” or the uncreated Tables of the Law.
Freud’s imago of the father is a close enough contem¬
porary translation.
The matching imago of the mother, on the left side,
is Binah, usually rendered as “intelligence,” but mean¬
ing something more like a passive understanding
(Kabbalah is nothing if not sexist). Binah is sometimes
imaged as a mirror (very much in a Gnostic tradition)
in which God enjoys contemplating Himself. We can
call Keter the Divine self-consciousness, Hokmah the
active principle of knowing, and Binah the known, or
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 30

reflection upon knowledge, or the veil through which

God’s “wisdom” shines. In another Kabbalistic image,
certainly derived from Neoplatonism, Binah as mirror
acts as a prism, breaking open Divine light into
apprehensible colors.
The seven lesser Sefirot are the more immediate
attributes of creation, moving out from Binah in its
role of supreme mother. Where the three upper Sefirot
together form Arikh anpin (Aramaic for “long face”),
the great or transcendental “face” of God, the seven
lower emanations form the “short face” or Zeir anpin,
the immanent countenance of God, and sometimes are
called the Sefirot of “construction.” Unlike the Great
Face, the constructive principles are conceived by
analogy, and so are nearly identical with the principles
of figurative or poetic language. The first, on the
father’s or right-hand side, most often called Hesed, is
love in the particular sense of God’s Covenant love,
caritas or “grace” in Christian interpretation. Its
matching component on the mother’s or left-hand side
is most often called Din, “severity” or “rigorous
judgment.” God’s Covenant love requires a limit or
outward boundary, which is provided by Din. This
makes Din the Kabbalistic equivalent of the Orphic
and Platonic Ananke or Necessity, the law of the
cosmos. Creation, for the Kabbalah, depends upon the
perpetual balance and oscillation of Hesed and Din as
antithetical principles.
It is an unintentional irony of the Sefirot that they
increase enormously in human and imaginative inter¬
est as they descend closer to our condition. Even the
most exalted of Kabbalist writers relax and are more
 Kabbalah 31

inventive when they reach the lower half of the

Sefirotic tree. With the sixth Sefirah, Tiferet, the
“mercy” or Heart of God, we are in the aesthetic realm
of God’s “beauty,” which for the Kabbalah is all the
beauty there is. Tiferet is the principle of mediation,
reconciling the “above” and the “below” on the Tree,
and also drawing together the right side and the left
side, masculine and feminine. All Kab'balistic refer¬
ences to centering are always to Tiferet, and Tiferet
sometimes stands by itself for the “small face” or
God’s immanence, and is frequently spoken of as the
dwelling-place of the Shekhinah or “Divine Presence”
(of which more later). In Kabbalistic dialectic, Tiferet
completes the second triad of Hesed-Din-Tiferet, and
governs the third triad of N ezah-Hod-Yesod.
Nezah or God’s “victory” emanates from Hesed, and
represents the power of nature to increase itself, in a
kind of apotheosis of male force. Hod, the female
counterpart emanating from Din, is a kind of equiva¬
lent to “mother nature” in the Western Romantic
sense (a Kabbalist would have called Wordsworth’s or
Emerson’s Nature by the name of Hod). Hod is
“majesty” of the merely natural sort, but for the
Kabbalah nothing of course is merely natural. Out of
the creative strife of Nezah and Hod comes Yesod,
“foundation,” which is at once human male sexuality,
and the ongoing balance of nature.
The tenth and last of the Sefirot is properly the most
fascinating, Malkhut or “kingdom,” where “kingdom”
refers to God’s immanence in nature. From Tiferet,
Malkhut inherits the Shekhinah, and manifests that
glory of God in His world. So Malkhut is called the
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 32

“descent,” meaning the descent of the Shekhinah.

Malkhut is also called the “lower mother” as against
the “higher mother” of Binah. As the closest of the
Sefirot to us, Malkhut sums them up, and makes the
world of emanation a pragmatic unity. The Kabbalist
encounters the Sefirot only through Malkhut, which
makes of Kabbalism necessarily a sexual mysticism or
erotic theosophy.

In their total structure, the Sefirot are identified with

the Merkabah or “celestial chariot” in which the
prophet Ezekiel saw the Divine manifest itself. This
identification led to a series of further symbolic
analogies or correspondences—cosmological, philo¬
sophical, psychological, indeed every area in which
over-determined meanings could be plotted out.
Popular Kabbalism concerns itself with these over¬
determinations, but they are not the prime spiritual
significance of the Sefirot. That significance comes in
the inter-relationships of the Sefirot, their reflections of
one another within themselves.
The great master of these reflections was Moses
Cordovero (1522-70), the best example of a systematic
thinker ever to appear among Kabbalists. But the
movement from the Zohar to Cordovero and on to
Cordovero’s pupil and surpasser, Luria, returns us
from doctrine to history, for the later Kabbalah is the
product of a second and intensified Exile, following
the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Perhaps
Scholem’s greatest achievement as a scholar has been
 Kabbalah 33

his analysis of Lurianic Kabbalah as a Myth of Exile.

The Sefirot, though they lend themselves to such a
myth, are too close to the unfallen worlds fully to
accommodate fresh onsets of historical suffering. I
touch here upon what I take to be the deepest meaning
of Kabbalah, and will digress upon it, before returning
to problems of theosophical meaning.
Louis Ginzberg, one of the greatest of modern
Talmudists, introduced the Palestinian Talmud by
remarking that post-Biblical Jewish literature was
“predominantly interpretative and commentative.”
This is true even of Kabbalah, which is curious for a
body of work professedly mystical and speculative,
even indeed mythopoeic. But this emphasis upon
interpretation is finally what distinguishes Kabbalah
from nearly every other variety of mysticism or
theosophy, East or West. The Kabbalists of medieval
Spain, and their Palestinian successors after the expul¬
sion from Spain, confronted a peculiar psychological
problem, one that demanded a revisionist solution.
How does one accommodate a fresh and vital new
religious impulse, in a precarious and even cata¬
strophic time of troubles, when one inherits a religious
tradition already so rich and coherent that it allows
very little room for fresh revelations or even specula¬
tions? The Kabbalists were in no position to formulate
or even re-formulate much of anything in their reli¬
gion. Given to them already was not only a massive
and completed Scripture, but an even more massive
and intellectually finished structure of every kind of
commentary and interpretation. Their stance in rela¬
tion to all this tradition became, I think, the classic
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 34

paradigm upon which Western revisionism in all areas

was to model itself ever since, usually in rather indirect
emulation. For the Kabbalists developed implicitly a
psychology of belatedness, and with it an explicit,
rhetorical series of techniques for opening Scripture
and even received commentary to their own historical
sufferings, and to their own, new theosophical insights.
Their achievement was not just to restore Gnosis and
mythology to a Judaism which had purged itself of
such elements, but more crucially to provide the
masses of suffering Jewry with a more immediate and
experiential personal faith than the strength of ortho¬
dox tradition might have allowed. Hasidism was the
ultimate descendant of Kabbalah, and can be re¬
garded as the more positive ultimate achievement of a
movement that led, in its darker aspects, to morasses
of magic and superstition, and to false Messiahs and
even apostates.
The Zohar, astonishingly beautiful as it frequently
is, is not in itself greatly representative of what
became, from the Spanish Exile on, the true voice of
Kabbalah. Though Cordovero and Luria derived fun¬
damentally from the Zohar, their systems and visions
actually have little in common with it. The Zohar is
organized as an apparent commentary upon Scripture,
just as much of the later Kabbalah is organized as an
apparent commentary upon the Zohar, but it is the
genius of revisionism to swerve so far from its canoni¬
cal texts as to make the ancestral voices into even their
own opposites. A contemporary reader encountering
the Zohar will have trouble finding in it a clear
statement about the structure and function of the
 Kabbalah 35

Sefirot, let alone any of the more complex refinements

of Kabbalah. Such a reader will find himself con¬
fronted by hundreds of homilies and little stories,
many of them haunting in their enigmas, but finally
compelling the reader to wish that the Zohar would
obey its own injunction about how to interpret Scrip¬
ture or the Torah:

As wine in ajar, if it is to keep, so is the Torah,

contained within its outer garment. Such a
garment is made up of many stories, but we, we
are required to pierce the garment.

To pierce the garment of the Zohar is almost

impossible, but in some sense that was the achieve¬
ment of Cordovero and of Luria, to whose doctrines I
now turn.

Scholem makes the point that after 1492 and the fresh
dispersal of the Jews, the Kabbalah ceased to be as
esoteric and became “public property.” From about
1530 on, Safed in Palestine became the center of the
new Kabbalah, and from Safed there emanated out to
the Diaspora what became a new popular religion,
which captured much of Judaism, and has left an
influence (now much diminished) on it ever since.
Isaac Luria was much the largest source of this new
religion, and will receive more analysis here, as he does
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 36

in Scholem, but Cordovero was a clearer and more

systematic theorist, and some account of his ideas
remains the best introduction to the intricacies of the
Lurianic Kabbalah.
As early as the thirteenth century, Kabbalists spoke
of the Sefirot reflecting themselves within themselves,
so that each “contained” all the others. Complex
systems of pathways of Sefirot within Sefirot were set
up, and meditation upon these pathways became the
characteristic Kabbalistic exercise, whether in vision,
prayer or intellectual speculation. This theosophical
path-breaking becomes in Cordovero what Ginzberg
and other scholars have described accurately as a
theory of influence. Cordovero invented a new cate¬
gory, behinot, to convey the multiform aspects within
each Sefirah, aspects that account for the links be¬
tween Sefirot. These are the six behinot or phases of the
ten Sefirot, as differentiated by Cordovero: i) Con¬
cealed before manifestation within the preceding
Sefirah; 2) Actual manifestation in the preceding
Sefirah; 3) Appearance as Sefirah in its own name; 4)
Aspect that gives power to the Sefirah above it, so as to
enable that Sefirah to be strong enough to emanate yet
further Sefirot; 5) Aspect that gives power to the
Sefirah itself to emanate out the other Sefirot still
concealed within it; 6) Aspect by which the following
Sefirah is in turn emanated out to its own place, after
which the cycle of the six behinot begins again.
This cycle may seem baffling at first, but is a
remarkable theory of influence, as causal yet reversed
relationships. To be understood today it needs transla-
 Kabbalah 37

tion into other terms, and these can be psychoanalytic,

rhetorical or imagistic, for the six behinot can be
interpreted as psychological mechanisms of defense,
rhetorical tropes, or areas of poetic imagery (as I will
indicate later in this essay). Whereas the Sefirot, as
attributes of God, are manifestly supernatural chan¬
nels of influence (or rhetorically speaking divine
poems, each a text in itself), the behinot work more like
human agencies, whether psychic or linguistic. Scho-
lem indicates that, in Cordovero, the Sefirot “actually
become the structural elements of all beings,” but they
do this only by their aspects or behinot. One might
indeed call Cordovero the first Structuralist, an unac¬
knowledged ancestor of many contemporary French
theorists of the “human sciences.”
In order to see precisely the great dialectical leap
that Isaac Luria took away from his teacher, Cordo¬
vero, it is necessary to expound the true, dark heart of
Kabbalah: its vision of the problem of evil. Scholem
rightly remarks that Jewish philosophy was not very
interested in the problem of evil, and it seems just to
observe that Talmudic tradition was also too healthy
to brood excessively on evil. But Kabbalah departed
both from normative Judaism and from Neoplatonism
in its obsessive concern with evil. For Neoplatonism,
evil has no metaphysical reality, but Gnosticism en¬
gaged evil as the reality of this world, which presuma¬
bly is why Gnosticism now lives, under a variety of
disguises, while Neoplatonism is the province of schol¬
ars. Probably, this is why the Lurianic Kabbalah came
to dominate popular Judaism for many centuries,
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 38

giving birth first to a series of false messiahs, and

finally to the lasting glory of the Baal Shem Tov and
his Hasidism.
The book Bahir speaks of the Sefirah Gevurah or Din
as the Left Hand of God, and so as a permitted evil.
Out of this came the Kabbalistic doctrine that located
evil in what Freud called the superego, or in Kabbalis¬
tic terms the separation of Din from Hesed, stern
judgment from love. The world of Din brought forth
the sitra ahra or “the other side,” the sinister qualities
that came out of a Name of God, but then fell away
from the Name.
The Zohar assigned to the sitra ahra ten Sefirot all its
own, ten sinister crowns representing the remnants of
worlds that God first made and then destroyed. In one
of the great poetic images of esoteric tradition, Moses
de Leon compared evil to the bark of the tree of the
Sefirot, the kelippah. The creatures of this bark—
Samael and his wife Lilith, or Satan and the chief of
witches (of whom more later)—became in the Zohar
almost worthy antagonists of God. Kelippot, conceived
first as bark, became regarded also as husks or shells or
broken vessels of evil. But even in the kelippot,
according to the Zohar, there abides a saving spark of
good. This notion, that there are sparks in the kelippot
that can be redeemed, and redeemed by the acts of
men alone and not of God, became the starting point
of Lurianic Kabbalah.

The problem of original genius in every intellectual

area, past a certain date (a date upon which no two
 Kabbalah 39

people can agree), is always located in the apparently

opposed principles of continuity and discontinuity.
Yet the very word Kabbalah means tradition, and
every master of Kabbalah has stressed his own conti¬
nuity rather than his discontinuity with previous
speculators. Luria is extraordinarily original, indeed he
may have been the only visionary in the entire history
of Kabbalah whose basic ideas were original, since the
entire tradition from the Sefer Yezirah through Cordo-
vero is finally only an amalgam, however strangely
shaped, of Neoplatonism and Gnosticism. But Luria
had the originality of certain great poets—Dante,
Milton, Blake—though since the important accounts
of his visions are not written by him, but by rival and
contrasting disciples, it is difficult to compare Luria’s
powers of invention to those of other creators.
Before Luria, all of Kabbalah saw creation as a
progressive process, moving in one direction always,
emanating out from God through the Sefirot to man, a
movement in which each stage joined itself closely to
the subsequent stage, without enormous leaps or
backwards recoilings. In Luria, creation is a startlingly
regressive process, one in which an abyss can separate
any one stage from another, and in which catastrophe
is always a central event. Reality for Luria is always a
triple rhythm of contraction, breaking apart, and
mending, a rhythm continuously present in time even
as it first punctuated eternity.
Luria named this triple process: zimzum, shevirah
ha-kelim, tikkun (contraction, the breaking-of-the-
vessels, restitution). Zimzum originally seems to have
meant a holding-in-of-the-breath, but Luria trans¬
formed the word into an idea of limitation, of God’s
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 40

hiding of Himself, or rather entering into Himself. In

this contraction, God clears a space for creation, a
not-God. This cleared point the Zohar had called
tehiru, or fundamental space. Luria saw the zimzum as
God’s concentration within himself of the Sefirah of
Din, rigor, but part of this power of stern judgment
remained behind in the cleared tehiru, where it mixed
together with the remnants of God’s self-withdrawn
light, called by Luria the reshimu. Into the mixture (out
of which our world is to be formed), God sends a
single letter, the yod, the first letter of his great name,
YHWH, the Tetragrammaton. This yod is the active
principle in creation, even as the reshimu is the passive
principle.
This creation, according to Luria, was of kelim,
“vessels,” of which the culminating vessel was Adam
Kadmon or primal Man. Two kinds of light had made
these vessels, the new or incoming light that had
accompanied the yod or Word of God, and the light
left behind in the tehiru after the zimzum. The collision
of lights is an enormously complex process, for which
this present essay lacks space, but the crucial element
in the complexity is that Adam Kadmon, man as he
should be, is a kind of perpetual war of light-against-
light. This war emanates out from his head in patterns
of writing, which become fresh vessels-of-creation,
newly manifested structures of Sefirot. But though the
three upper Sefirot held firm, and contained the
pugnacious light, the six Sefirot from Hesed to Yesod
broke apart. This shevirah, breaking or scattering of
the vessels, was caused by the force of the light hitting
all-at-once, in what can be interpreted as too strong a
 Kabbalah 41

force of writing, stronger than the “texts” of the lower

Sefirot could sustain. Paradoxically God’s Name was
too strong for his Words, and the breaking of the
vessels necessarily became a divine act of substitution,
in which an original pattern yielded to a more chaotic
one that nevertheless remained pattern, the guarantee
of which was that the vessel of the tenth and last
Sefirah, Malkhut or the female world, broke also but
less severely than the other vessels splintered.
Though some of the light in the shattered vessels
returned immediately to God, much of it fell down
with the vessels, so as to form the kelippot or evil forces
of the universe. But these kelippot still have pattern or
design, as well as sparks-of-light imprisoned within
them. Luria appears to have believed that all this
catastrophe came about because of an original excess
of Din, a plethora of rigor in God Himself, and it is in
the Sefirah of Din that the smashing-apart begins.
Scholem theorizes that Luria saw the whole function
of creation as being God’s catharsis of Himself, a vast
sublimation in which His terrible rigor might find
some peace. This is not unlike Freud’s extraordinary
explanation as to why people fall in love, which is to
avoid an over-filled inner self. As man must love, in
Freud’s view, in order to avoid becoming sick, so
Luria’s God had to create, for His own health. But He
could create only by catastrophe, in Luria’s judgment,
an opinion again very like that of Freud’s disciple,
Ferenczi, whose book Thalassa also ascribes every act
of creation to a necessary catastrophe.
Remarkable as these first two stages of Luria’s
vision are, both zimzum and shevirah are less important
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 42

in his doctrine than tikkun, the saving process of

restoration and restitution, for this is the work of the
human, taking place through a complex agency called
the parzufim or “faces,” the Lurianic equivalent of
Cordovero’s behinot. Scholem calls the parzufim “con¬
figurations” or gestalten, but like the behinot they seem
to be at once psychic and linguistic, defense mecha¬
nisms and rhetorical tropes. As patterns of images, the
parzufim organize the shattered world after the vessels
have broken apart, and as principles of organization
they substitute for or take the place of the Sefirot.
Keter or the Crown is substituted for by the parzuf of
Arikh Anpin, or God as the “long-faced one,” that is to
say, the God who is indulgent or forbearing even in
fallen history. Hokmah and Binah are replaced by
what Freud called the Imagos, Abba and Imma,
“father” and “mother,” who together create the fourth
and most important parzuf, called Ze’eir Anpin, the
“short-faced” or “impatient” or “unindulgent” God,
who stands in judgment upon history. Ze’eir Anpin
substitutes for the six lower Sefirot, from Din to Yesod,
the six that broke apart most dreadfully. Ze’eir Anpin
thus substitutes also quite directly for the behinot of
Luria’s teacher, Cordovero, and in some sense this
parzuf can be considered as Luria’s revisionist mispri¬
sion or creative misunderstanding of his direct precur¬
sor’s most original and important doctrine. Luria’s last
parzuf is called Nukba de-Ze’eir, the female of the
impatient God, and substitutes for Malkhut or the
Kingdom.
Together, the parzufim make up a new and second
Adam Kadmon, for the tikkun or restoration of creation
 Kabbalah 43

must be carried out by the religious acts of individual

men, of all Jews struggling in the Exile, and indeed of
all men and women struggling in the Exile that Luria
saw as the universal human existence. The nature of
such religious acts of tikkun is again too complex to
define in my limited space, but essentially these are
acts of meditation, acts that lift up and so liberate the
fallen sparks of God from their imprisonment in the
shards of the kelippot. Such acts of meditation are at
once psychic and linguistic, but for Luria they are
magical too, so that they enter the sphere of practical
Kabbalah, a puzzling world that this essay must
conclude by entering also, though again the entrance
must be brief and tentative.

As a psychology of belatedness, Kabbalah manifests

many prefigurations of Freudian doctrine. Yet most of
these stem from the psychological notions of Neopla¬
tonism, and are not original with Kabbalah. Thus, the
Kabbalistic division of the soul into three parts is
Neoplatonic, where the lowest soul is the nefesh or
vital being with which everyone is born. The ru’ah or
anima comes about later through a spiritual awak¬
ening, but only with the highest awakening is the true
soul born, the neshamah or spiritus. Lurianic Kabbalah
added further souls, so as to achieve a psychic
cartography again too complex to sketch in so limited
a space. But a more truly original notion, and one
more prophetic of Freud, is the zelem or divine image
in every man, first set forth in the Zohar and then
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 44

developed by Luria and his disciples. The zelem is a

modification of the later Neoplatonic idea of the
Astral Body, a kind of quasi-material entity that holds
together mind and physical body, and that survives the
death of the body proper. In Lurianic Kabbalah, the
Astral Body also serves the function of determining an
individual human personality, so that the difference
between one of us and another is not necessarily in
any part of the soul, but in the enigmatic joining of
soul and body, that is, in the relationship between our
consciousness and our body. What makes us individ¬
ual, our zelem, is the way our particular body feels
about our psyche, or the way that psyche feels about
the body to which it is linked. Scholem says that
“without the zelem the soul would burn the body up
with its fierce radiance,” and one can add conversely
that the body’s desires would consume the soul
without the zelem. It is as though Luria were saying, in
our terms, that the body is the unconscious as far as
the soul is concerned, or that the soul is the uncon¬
scious from the stance of the body.
It was only a step from the idea of the zelem to the
Lurianic version of the transmigration of souls, called
gilgul. Luria seems to have taught that there were
families of souls, united by the root of a common
spark. Each person can take up in himself the spark of
another soul, of one of the dead, provided that he and
the dead share the same root. This leads to the larger
idea of a kind of Eternal Recurrence, with the saving
difference that gilgul can be the final form of tikkun, in
which the fallen soul can have its flaws repaired. The
 Kabbalah 45

legend of the dybbuk is a negative version of the same

idea.
With the idea of gilgul, speculative Kabbalah passes
into practical Kabbalah, a world of “white” magic,
dependent however entirely upon the sacredness of a
divine language. It is very difficult to distinguish
practical Kabbalah from the whole body of Jewish
magic and superstition, the vast accumulation of
folklore that so long a tradition brings forth. Very late
or popular Kabbalah also became mixed with the
“occult sciences,” particularly astrology and alchemy,
but these have little to do with Kabbalah proper.
Two areas of practical Kabbalah seem most authen¬
tic: demonology and what was called Gematria, the
explanation of words according to their numerical
values or the equivalents, by set rules. Kabbalistic
demonology became absorbed by the wilder aspects of
Hasidism, and is now familiar to a wide group of
contemporary readers through the fiction of Singer.
Such demonology ultimately centers upon two figures,
Lilith and Samael. One can wonder why Lilith has not
become the patroness of some of the more extreme
manifestations of the Women’s Liberation Movement,
as her legendary career shows a strong counter-current
of guilt towards women (and fear of them) moving in
Kabbalah. Kabbalah enshrined the Shekhinah or Di¬
vine Presence in the shape of a woman, an image of
splendor-in-exile, and the Sefirot are relatively fairly
balanced between male and female sides. Yet Kabba¬
listic texts awaken into a peculiar vividness whenever
Lilith is invoked. Though she seems to have begun as a
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 46

Babylonian wind-demoness, she became very thor¬

oughly naturalized in Judaic contexts. A pre-Kabbalis-
tic legend held that she was Adam’s first wife, and that
she abandoned him on the issue of sexual equality,
with the immediate cause of separation being that of
positions in sexual intercourse, Adam favoring the
missionary posture, while she insisted on the ascend¬
ancy. In Kabbalah, Lilith dwindled from an heroic
self-asserter into a strangler of infants, and into the
Muse of masturbation, bearing endless imps to those
guilty of self-gratification. Kabbalah also married her
off to Samael, the principal later Jewish name for
Satan as the Angel of Death. The obsessive emphasis
upon Lilith’s lustfulness throughout Kabbalistic litera¬
ture is an obvious indication of the large element of
repression in all those Gnostic fantasies that inhabit
the entire history of Kabbalah.
If Lilith is a Gnostic reversal of the Shekhinah, a
demonic parody of the Kabbalistic pathos of attempt¬
ing to exalt aspects of Exile, then it seems fair to say
that the techniques of Gematria were a kind of parody
of the sometimes sublime Kabbalistic exaltation of
language, and of the arts of interpretation. For Gema¬
tria is interpretative freedom gone mad, in which any
text can be made to mean anything. But its prevalence
was itself a mark of the desperation that underlay
much of Kabbalah. To open an ancient text to the
experiential sufferings of contemporary men and
women was the not ignoble motive of much Kabba-
lism. Gematria, with its descents into occult numerolo-
gies, is finally best viewed as an index to how
tremendous the suffering was, for the pressure of the
 Kabbalah 47

sorrow came close to destroying one of the greatest

interpretative traditions in cultural history.
“Mysticism” is a word I have avoided in this essay,
for Kabbalah seems to me more of an interpretative
and mythical tradition than a mystical one. There were
Kabbalistic ecstatics, and sub-traditions of meditative
intensities, of prayer conducted in an esoteric manner.
But Kabbalah differs finally from Christian or Eastern
mysticism in being more a mode of intellectual specu¬
lation than a way of union with God. Like the
Gnostics, the Kabbalists sought knowledge, but unlike
the Gnostics they sought knowledge in the Book. By
centering upon the Bible, Kabbalah made of itself, at
its best, a critical tradition, though distinguished by
more invention than critical traditions generally dis¬
play. In its degeneracy, Kabbalah has sought vainly
for a magical power over nature, but in its glory it
sought, and found, a power of the mind over the
universe of death.
■
“To see the object as in itself it really is, ” has been justly
said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever; and in
aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one’s
object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it
really is, to discriminate it, to realize it distinctly. The
objects with which aesthetic criticism deals—music, po¬
etry, artistic and accomplished forms of human life—are
indeed receptacles of so many powers or forces; they
possess, like the products of nature, so many virtues or
qualities. What is this song or picture, this engaging
personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What
effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me
pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How
is my nature modified by its presence, and under its
influence? The answers to these questions are the original
facts with which the aesthetic critic has to do; and, as in
the study of light, of morals, of number, one must realize
such primary data for oneself, or not at all. And he who
experiences these impressions strongly, and drives directly
at the discrimination and analysis of them, has no need to
trouble himself with the abstract question what beauty is
in itself, or what its exact relation to truth or experience
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 50

—metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as metaphysi¬

cal questions elsewhere. He may pass them all by as
being, answerable or not, of no interest to him.

Walter pater, “Preface” to The Renaissance

(1873)
 KABBALAH
AND CRITICISM
. . . the highest grade of reality is only reached
by signs . . . —c. s. peirce

K abbalah proposes to give suffering a meaning, by

way of an interpretation of Scripture that de¬
pends overtly upon an audacious figuration, the
Sefirot. Nietzsche, in his Genealogy of Morals, using as
his starting point the perpetual human desire to give
suffering some meaning, eloquently insisted that the
only meaning yet found for suffering was “the ascetic
ideal.” The ascetic ideal had kept mankind from
nihilism, saving the will but at the expense of guilt, a
guilt involving hatred of common humanity (with all
natural pleasure). For the ascetic ideal is an interpreta¬
tion, one that in turn inspires a change in the process
of willing. This change signifies “a will to nothingness,
a revulsion from life,” yet still a purposefulness. Life
thus uses ascetism in a struggle against death.
Nietzsche, magnificently contrapuntal, attains a tri¬
umph in antithetical thought by declaring that to be
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 52

ascetic thus is to be life-affirming. The artist in

particular transforms the ascetic ideal by incarnating
“the wish to be different, to be elsewhere.”
Are not the Sefirot also, and all of Kabbalah, an
incarnation of the desire for difference, and for an end
to Exile? To be different, to be elsewhere, is a superb
definition of the motive for metaphor, for the life-
affirming deep motive of all poetry. Let us say
(following Vico) that all religion is apotropaic litany
against the dangers of nature, and so is all poetry an
apotropaic litany, warding off, defending against
death. From our perspective, religion is spilled poetry.
Kabbalah seems to me unique among religious sys¬
tems of interpretation in that it is, simply, already
poetry, scarcely needing translation into the realms of
the aesthetic. Beyond its direct portrayal of the
mind-in-creation, Kabbalah offers both a model for
the processes of poetic influence, and maps for the
problematic pathways of interpretation. More auda¬
ciously than any developments in recent French
criticism, Kabbalah is a theory of writing, but this is a
theory that denies the absolute distinction between
writing and inspired speech, even as it denies human
distinctions between presence and absence. Kabbalah
speaks of a writing before writing (Derrida’s “trace”),
but also of a speech before speech, a Primal Instruc¬
tion preceding all traces of speech. Derrida, in the
brilliance of his Grammatology, argues that writing is
at once external and internal to speech, because
writing is not an image of speech, while speech itself is
already writing, since the trace it follows “must be
conceived as coming before being.” Derrida says that
 Kabbalah and Criticism 53

“all Occidental methods of analysis, explication, read¬

ing or interpretation” were produced “without ever
posing the radical question of writing,” but this is not
true of Kabbalah, which is certainly an Occidental
method, though an esoteric one. Kabbalah too thinks
in ways not permitted by Western metaphysics, since
its God is at once Ein-Sof and ayin, total presence and
total absence, and all its interiors contain exteriors,
while all of its effects determine its causes. But
Kabbalah stops the movement of Derrida’s “trace,”
since it has a point of the primordial, where presence
and absence co-exist by continuous interplay. With
this point, we return to the crown of the Sefirotic tree,
and to the Sefirot as the working-model for a theory of
poetic influence.

The Talmudists took the Scriptures as true text, and

kept the line clear between text and commentary. This
line wavers and breaks in the Zohar, which is of
necessity a revisionist text. Revisionism is a reaction to
the double priority and authority of both text and
interpretation, Bible and the normative Judaism of
rabbinic tradition. Kabbalah therefore can be viewed
as a rebellion against the Jewish version of a Scene of
Instruction (in the sense of that scene that I sketched
in A Map of Misreading), which means that Kabbalah
is a collective, psychic defense of the most imaginative
medieval Jews against exile and persecution pressing
on them inwardly. So, some Kabbalists spoke of a
missing twenty-third letter of the Hebrew alphabet,
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 54

hidden in the white spaces between the letters. From

those openings the larger Torah was still to emerge, yet
it was there already. This revisionist notion hoped to
bring forth the invention of the Kabbalists themselves,
which may recall to us that aphorism (119) of
Nietzsche’s Dawn of Day, where we are told that “all
our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic
commentary upon an unknown text, one that is
perhaps unknowable but still felt.”
The instrument for Kabbalistic invention began as
the Sefirot, as we have seen. Let us return to the
description of the Sefirot, remembering that they are at
once modes-of-divination, and yet also over-deter¬
mined explanations. Though there are ten Sefirot, only
six are active in the world, and these six provide the
model for the six behinot of Cordovero, and return as
the six principles active in the fourth of the parzufim of
Luria. Keter, Hokmah, and Binah all have to do with
primordial creation, and manifest the latent potencies
of God, and so have no real analogues in human
creativity (a term that for the Kabbalists would have
been oxymoronic, anyway). The lower seven Sefirot,
called the Sefirot of “construction,” are at work in
creation as we know it, from the initial seven days
onwards. But the last Sefirah, Malkhut or the Shekhi-
nah, is wholly passive and receives the influence of the
six “directions,” the six active Sefirot: Hesed, Din,
Tiferet, Nezah, Hod, Yesod. Only these six could be
called poems of creation for each conceals and reveals
a difference in the creative power of God, a difference
that can be expressed in humanly apprehensible terms.
It must seem odd to speak of hypostases or emana-
 Kabbalah and Criticism 55

tive concepts as if they were poems, but the six

directional Sefirot are precisely like poems or imagina¬
tive texts in the way they function. The creative insight
that showed how the Sefirot function was provided by
Moses Cordovero, the ultimate source for my own
notion of “revisionary ratios,” or the behinot as
Cordovero called them. But to understand the behinot,
we need to brood first on the kind of ideas that poems
are, a brooding that for me commences with certain
speculations of the major American thinker, Peirce.
All ideas, according to Peirce, divide into the three
classes of Firstness, of Secondness, and of Thirdness:

Firstness is the mode of being of that which is

such as it is, positively and without reference to
anything else.
Secondness is the mode of being of that which
is such as it is, with respect to a second but
regardless of any third.
Thirdness is the mode of being of that which is
such as it is, in bringing a second and third into
relation to each other.

Peirce illustrates Firstness by the scarlet of royal

liveries, or the hardness of anything as a possibility the
realization of which will cause anything to be like flint.
His summary is that “the unanalyzed total impression
made by any manifold not thought of as actual fact,
but simply as a quality as simple positive possibility of
appearance is an idea of Firstness.” Since I am not
concerned with Peirce as philosophy, but as providing
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 56

another model for interpreting poems, this summary is

less useful for me than the last illustration of Firstness
that he gives: “The idea of the present instant, which,
whether it exists or not, is naturally thought as a point
of time in which no thought can take place or any
detail be separated, is an idea of Firstness.”
With any idea of Secondness, Peirce says, we have
the experience of effort, and the experience of resist¬
ance: “Effort only is effort by virtue of its being
opposed; and no third element enters.” Peirce defines
“experience,” in this context, as being consciousness of
the action of a new feeling in destroying an old feeling.
Ideas of the past are thus all ideas of Secondness, but
ideas of the future are not. Every idea of the past is a
dyad, a dialectic of effort and resistance, and Peirce
adds his opinion “that great errors of metaphysics are
due to looking at the future as something that will have
been past.”
When he comes to Thirdness, I confess that I do not
understand what Peirce is saying, in his own terms, but
find him supremely useful if I interpret him as talking
about poems (which are not in his mind at all). That is,
he helps me to see that poems are truly triads, ideas of
Thirdness, rather than monads, as the New Critics
regarded them, or dyads, as I called them in The
Anxiety of Influence. Here is Peirce on Thirdness:

In its genuine form, Thirdness is the triadic

relation existing between a sign, its object, and
the interpreting thought, itself a sign, considered
as constituting the mode of being of a sign. A
 Kabbalah and Criticism 57

sign mediates between the interpretant sign and

its object. . . . A Third is something which brings
a First into relation to a Second . . .

Let us, by misprision, translate Peirce into the realm

of poetry. A poem is an idea of Thirdness, or a triadic
relation, because the sign is the new poem, its object is
the precursor text (however composite, or imaginary),
and the interpreting thought is the reading of the
poem, but this reading is itself a sign. In the Peircean
view, a poem is a mediating process between itself and
a previous poem, but the mediation always belongs to
the act of interpreting, which I think Peirce would
have seen as being always an evolving act. A poem as
triad is a dialectic of effort, resistance, and evolution
into a future that never can become part of the past.
On this account of triadic relations, there must be
always an unbridgeable gap between poetry and the
history of poetry, between a triad and a dyad.
Lunatic as the juxtaposition may seem, I want to
contrast Peirce’s vision of triads with the Neoplatonic
triads of Proclus, in his Elements of Theology, Proposi¬
tions 35-39. E. R. Dodds summarizes the triads of
Proclus as: “the three moments of the Neoplatonic
world-process, immanence in the cause, procession
from the cause, and reversion to the cause—or iden¬
tity, difference, and the overcoming of difference by
identity.” Iamblichus had said the monad was the
cause of identity, the dyad the instigator of procession
and so of difference, and the triad the origin of
reversion. Dodds says of this reversion that it restored
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 58

to reality the value lost in procession, but without

annihilating the individuality that procession created.
How? is what we want Proclus to tell us, for such a
reconciliation of difference and repetition is the funda¬
mental paradox of all originality in poetry, and would
relieve the tension between poetry and the history of
poetry. What Proclus tells us, ultimately, is the answer
of Plotinus, that every effect at once remains in its
cause, proceeds from its cause, yet also reverts upon its
cause. Compared to the triad of Peirce, this seems to
take us even further away from the kind of idea that is
a poem. Translated into poetic terms, the Neoplatonic
formulation would help us close the gap between
poems and the history of poems, but would squeeze
poems themselves into reified monads.
But poems are not so much three-fold as they are
six-fold, and we will find a more adequate model if we
turn from Peirce and Proclus to Cordovero, to com¬
plete our own triad of esoteric theorists. But the
turning here involves a circuitous path, from Plotinus
as precursor of Proclus, on through the Valentinian
Gnosis that he attacked, until we reach a synthesis of
Neoplatonism and Gnosticism in the Kabbalism of
Cordovero, after which we will proceed to Luria again,
as a more Gnosticizing Kabbalist than Cordovero.

“We shall insist that there is a single Intelligence that

is immutable, does not swerve, and imitates its father
as much as it can.” Plotinus urges this insistence
against the Gnostics, because Plotinus recognizes only
 Kabbalah and Criticism 59

one necessity: “that all things always exist in hierarchi¬

cal dependence.” It is therefore consistent that Plo¬
tinus assigns to the Gnostics, as a prime motive, the
anxiety of influence:

“We hardly know what to say of the other new

things they have introduced into the universe,
such as their exiles, imprints, and repentances. If
they mean certain affections of the soul, when
she yields to repentance, or certain images of the
intelligible beings themselves, they are using
meaningless words invented merely for the sake of
having a sect of their own. They imagine such
fictions because they have failed to understand
the ancient wisdom of the Greeks. ... In
general, their [the Gnostics’] doctrines are partly
taken from Plato, while the remainder, which
were invented merely to form a new system of
their own, are contrary to truth. It is from Plato
that they borrowed their tribunals, the rivers of
Hades, and the transmigrations. They speak of
several intelligible principles, Being, Intelligence,
a second demiurge, and the soul. But all that
comes from Plato’s Timaeus . . .

Granted the bias of Plotinus, his thrust against the

Gnosis is shrewd, for no religion ever has been so
anxiety-ridden, and this anxiety was comprehensive
enough to include vast and resentful anxieties-of-
influence, in regard both to Plato and to the Bible.
Here is a cento of passages from the Valentinian
Gospel of Truth:
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 60

The All was searching for Him from whom it

had come forth. . . . The Ignorance concerning
the Father produced Anguish and Terror. And
the Anguish became dense like a fog so that no
one could see. Thus Error gained strength. It set
to work on its own matter in the void, not
knowing the Truth. It applied itself to the
fashioning of a formation exerting itself to pro¬
duce in beauty a substitute for Truth ... It was
a great marvel that they were in the Father
without knowing Him and that it was possible
for them to escape outside by their own will
because they could not understand and know
Him in whom they were . . . Since Deficiency
came into being because they did not know the
Father, therefore when they know the Father,
Deficiency, at that same instant, will cease to
exist. . . . Through knowledge he [the Gnostic
adept] shall purge himself of diversity towards
Unity, by consuming the matter within himself
like a flame, darkness by light, and death by life.

Hans Jonas remarks that the gospel of truth, for the

Valentinians, is contained in one formula, only partly
embedded here, of which the full version is given only
by Irenaeus, in his attack upon the Gnostics:

Perfect salvation is the cognition itself of the

ineffable greatness: for since through “Igno¬
rance” came about “Defect” and “Passion,” the
whole system springing from the Ignorance is
 Kabbalah and Criticism 61

dissolved by knowledge. Therefore knowledge is

salvation of the inner man; and it is not corpo¬
real, for the body is corruptible; nor is it
psychical, for even the soul is a product of the
defect and is as a lodging to the spirit: spiritual
therefore must also be the form of salvation.
Through knowledge, then, is saved the inner,
spiritual man; so that to us suffices the knowl¬
edge of universal being: this is the true salvation.

What is here called “Ignorance” is parallel to the

Lurianic Zimzum or “withdrawal”; what is here called
“knowledge” is akin to the Lurianic Tikkun or “restitu¬
tion.” Aesthetically considered, as I shall soon venture,
“ignorance” and “withdrawal” are modes of limita¬
tion, while “knowledge” and “restitution” are modes
of representation. The triadic process of limitation,
substitution, and representation, which I shall propose
as the governing dialectic of Post-Enlightenment or
Revisionist poetry, is what Hans Jonas calls a Gnostic
concept of happening as opposed to a more orthodox
or Platonic concept of being. Jonas applies it to the
most famous formula of the Valentinians, which I have
cited earlier:

What makes us free is the knowledge who we

were, what we have become; where we were,
wherein we have been thrown; whereto we
speed, wherefrom we are redeemed; what is birth
and what rebirth.
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 62

Jonas observes “that the terms throughout are

concepts not of being but of happening, of movement.
The knowledge is of history, in which it is itself a
critical event.” Let us apply the same distinction
between concepts to the central formula of the Valen-
tinian Gnosis, again already cited:

Since through “Ignorance” came about “De¬

ficiency” and “Passion,” therefore the whole
system springing from the Ignorance is dissolved
by Knowledge.

What this meant to the Gnostics is too complex for

my purposes here, but it is important to note that the
“whole system” means the cosmos. It is also crucial to
observe that whereas Neoplatonism was a rather
conventional theory of influence, Gnosticism was a
theory of misprision, and so is a necessary model for
any contemporary theory of influence as being a
creative misunderstanding. Kabbalah, as a blend of
Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, is as a theory of
influence both a model of benign influx and a map of
misprision. Zoharic Kabbalah tends towards the
former, Lurianic Kabbalah towards the latter, with the
Kabbalah of Cordovero a blend or balance of the two.
In terms of my own theory, Cordovero provides the
model for my six “revisionary ratios” with his six
behinot, or aspects of each Sefirah. But Luria provides
the model for my dialectic of revisionism, and the
Sefirot themselves, the six Sefirot of “direction,” pro-
 Kabbalah and Criticism 63

vide the model for my six-phased Scene of Instruction.

As I am pressing on in these essays towards a theory of
literary history as canon-formation, I want to sketch a
paradigm from the Valentinian Gnosis for my theory-
in-progress, before outlining the relation of my previ¬
ous formulations to Kabbalistic paradigms. I will leave
for last a defense of all this esotericism, this construct¬
ing of a practical criticism out of such recondite
abysses of speculation.
If we interpret the Valentinian formula cited above
as a concept of happening in literary history, then we
would get a statement something like this: when you
know both precursor and ephebe, you know poetic
history, but your knowing is as critical an event in that
history as was the ephebe’s knowing of the precursor.
The remedy for literary history then is to convert its
concepts from the category of being into the category
of happening. To see the history of poetry as an
endless, defensive civil war, indeed a family war, is to
see that every idea of history relevant to the history of
poetry must be a concept of happening. That is, when
you know the influence relation between two poets,
your knowing is a conceptualization, and your con¬
ceptualization (or misreading) is itself an event in the
literary history you are writing. Indeed your knowledge
of the later poet’s misprision of his precursor is exactly
as crucial a concept of happening or historical event as
the poetic misprision was. Your work as an event is no
more or less privileged than the later poet’s event of
misprision in regard to the earlier poet. Therefore the
relation of the earlier to the later poet is exactly
analogous to the relation of the later poet to yourself.
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 64

The ephebe’s misreading of the precursor is the

paradigm for your misreading of the ephebe. But this
is the relation of every text to every reader whatsoever.
The same figurations of belatedness govern revisionary
reading as govern revisionary writing. To interpret is
to revise is to defend against influence. We are back at
the Gnostic formulation that all reading, and all
writing, constitute a kind of defensive warfare, that
reading is mis-writing and writing is mis-reading. This
formulation is Gnostic because for the Gnostic the
unknown God is every precursor and the demiurge of
misprision is every ephebe. Yet every new poet tries to
see his precursor as the demiurge, and seeks to look
beyond him to the unknown God, while knowing
secretly that to be a strong poet is to be a demiurge.

I return to the behinot of Cordovero, after this long

Gnostic digression. In his anxiety to impute no divi¬
sion or change to God, Cordovero elaborated a
remarkable series of figurations, or “aspects” as he
called them, for each Sefirah. As a formal intellect,
rather than an intuitive one, Cordovero is unique
among the masters of Kabbalah, and in some respects
is almost more a theologian than a theosophist, and
almost more of a philosopher of rhetoric than a
theologian. Perhaps as a defense against his own
Neoplatonic inclinations, Cordovero was unusually
obsessed with the Sefirot, and particularly with their
structure. For him, the Sefirot were at once the
substance of God yet also vessels or implements quite
 Kabbalah and Criticism 65

distinct from God. To overcome this apparent contra¬

diction, Cordovero became a highly dialectical
thinker, and his ideas of emanation in particular
became obsessively dialectical. Since, for literary pur¬
poses, “emanation” means “influence,” we can say
that Cordovero became a dialectician of influence.
It is Cordovero who notes that the process of
influence begins in a dialectical alternation of images
of God’s presence and God’s absence, in a revealing
that causes concealing, and a concealing that causes
revealing. Again, it is Cordovero who first sees that the
Sefirot are concepts of happening rather than concepts
of being. Each Sefirah is governed, according to
Cordovero, by an interplay of six inner aspects or
behinot. This interplay is what allows each Sefirah to
emanate out from the next, but the interplay is itself
dialectical, light going downward, and reflected light
always glancing back.
I have suggested that, for literary purposes, each
Sefirah can be considered as a single poem or text,
meaning any poem or text. On this analogical identi¬
fication, the configurations or behinot are precisely
tropes, the figurative language that is nearly identical
with all poetry. If we vary the analogical identification,
and say that each Sefirah is a single mind or conscious¬
ness, then the behinot function as psychic defenses. But
trope and defense are held together in the verbal image
(however you want to define an image), and every
intra-textual image is necessarily what I have called a
“revisionary ratio,” measuring the relationship be¬
tween two or more texts. The sequence of Cordovero’s
revisionary ratios or behinot is one that I have found
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 66

crucially instructive, for in this sequence I believe that

Cordovero uncovered the normative structure of im¬
ages, of tropes and psychic defenses, in many central
revisionary texts, including many poems of the last
three centuries. This assertion on my part is so weird,
as I am aware, that I become a little anxious myself,
and must assert that I myself am no Kabbalist, and
hold no theosophical beliefs of any kind. I am merely a
skeptic, and want only to show the shape of Cordo-
vero’s configurations, and put off until later my own
surmises as to how these structural resemblances
between Kabbalism and Post-Enlightenment poetry
could have been produced, aside of course from the
doubtless pertinent consideration that whatever mis¬
prision of both Kabbalism and poetry is involved, in
this analogizing, is of course my own belated and
revisionist creation, my own misreading.
The first behinah in any Sefirah, according to
Cordovero, is its hidden aspect before it is manifested
in the preceding Sefirah. This is to say, in literary
terms, that the initial trope or image in any new poem
is closely related to the hidden presence of the new
poem in its precursor poem. I find this so suggestive
and important an insight, on Cordovero’s part, that I
want to brood on it at some length. We are speaking
here of the greatest apparent puzzle in poetic in¬
fluence, which is that the deepest or most vital
instances of influence are almost never phenomena of
the poetic surface. Only weak poems, or the weaker
elements in strong poems, immediately echo precursor
poems, or directly allude to them. The fundamental
phenomena of poetic influence have little to do with
 Kabbalah and Criticism 67

the borrowings of images or ideas, with sound-

patterns, or with other verbal reminders of one poem
by another. A poem is a deep misprision of a previous
poem when we recognize the later poem as being
absent rather than present on the surface of the earlier
poem, and yet still being in the earlier poem, implicit
or hidden in it, not yet manifest, and yet there. Rather
than use illustrations from Cordovero here, say of the
Sefirah Din or “stern judgment” hidden in the Sefirah
Hesed or Covenant Love, it is better for our purposes
to cite poems. Take the descendants of Shelley among
the major Victorian and modern poets: Browning,
Swinburne, Hardy and Yeats. There are a few passages
in their earlier work that sounded Shelleyan, but these
are irrelevant to what we are discussing. All four of
these strong poets have styles almost totally antitheti¬
cal to Shelley’s style, yet he is the crucial precursor for
all of them. When we read Browning’s Childe Roland
to the Dark Tower Came, we do not encounter in the
poem any significant verbal elements that take us back
to Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, yet it is an accurate,
meaningful critical observation that the initial aspect
of Browning’s poem is hidden in Shelley’s poem. The
critical usefulness of this insight comes when we
examine the opening images of Browning’s poem, for
these will be most meaningfully interpreted when we
see them as being closely related to their poem’s
hidden presence in Shelley’s poem. But there is also a
general principle to be extracted; so many strong
poems of the nineteenth and twentieth century open
with dialectical images of presence and absence, with
rhetorical ironies or defensive reaction-formations,
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 68

because of the hiddenness of their immediate origins.

The second behinah of Cordovero is the actual
manifestation of the particular Sefirah in its precursor,
that is, the poem hidden in the earlier poem comes out
from its concealment. But it is still in the earlier poem,
which means that we have moved from dialectical
images of presence and absence to synecdochal images
of part and whole. The literary phenomenon here is a
striking and frequent one, being the manifestation in a
poem of a part of that poem that seems prophetic of
a poem to come rather than of the poem it inhabits. A
large element of what we call the contemporaneity of
older poetry is involved here. Instances abound. When
I was younger, Donne seemed our contemporary,
because current poets kept writing verse that he had
prophesied. As no one writes like that now, Donne’s
synecdoches seem to have receded. When critics read
him now, they find him to be less of a poet whose
characteristic psychic defenses involve vicissitudes of
instinct, such as turning against the self, or reversal
into the opposite. When W. S. Merwin or Richard
Wilbur wrote in the Line of Wit, then Donne was
much wittier. Now that Whitman is our contemporary
again, and Donne a more archaic classic, poets like
Merwin and Wilbur have moved from images of part
and whole to images of fullness and emptiness. We are
again in an age of metonymy.
Cordovero’s third behinah is rather clearly a mode of
metonymy, since it involves the materialization or
reification of each Sefirah as a Sefirah in its own right.
In literary terms, this means the precarious element in
each poem that attempts the illusion of self-sufficiency
 Kabbalah and Criticism 69

and unity, or the poem as a round jar placed in

slovenly Tennessee. Nothing is more unstable than this
poetic element, or this aspect of a Sefirah. Psychically,
this kind of reification is at once an undoing and an
isolation, and in poems more often than not it is a
regression, generally evidenced by images of a prior
fullness emptying itself out. Again, Cordovero’s insight
exposes the Sefirotic emanation as a concept of
happening, more a tool or vessel of power than part of
the power itself.
Cordovero says that the fourth behinah of any
Sefirah is the aspect that enabled its precursor to be
strong enough to have emanated the later Sefirah
outwards. This extraordinary formulation ascribes a
power in the supposed cause to the supposed effect;
indeed it pragmatically all but reverses cause and
effect. The power of emanation, which is that of influx,
becomes wholly dialectical, in this account. As a trope,
Cordovero’s formulation is an hyperbole, one in which
higher and lower are seen as reversible categories.
Psychically, the later Sefirah is seen as repressing its
own force, in order to augment the force of its
precursor, or else repressing the precursor’s force, so as
to augment its own. Either way, the process is un¬
canny, and is related to the Kabbalistic image of
“channels,” for which I cite Gershom Scholem, lest I
be suspected of importing my own influence-obses¬
sions into the Kabbalah.

. . . specific Sefirot stand in particular relation¬

ships of radiation with other Sefirot (though not
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 70

necessarily with all of them). The face of one

Sefirah turns toward another and consequently
there develops between them a “channel” (zin-
nor) or influence which is not identical with
actual emanation. Such channels are paths of
reciprocal influence between different Sefirot.
This process is not a one-way influx from cause
to effect; it also operates from effect to cause,
dialectically turning the effect into a cause.

It is useful to juxtapose Scholem’s summary with

Nietzsche on causalism. The error we call a “cause,”
Nietzsche says, is merely “a capacity to produce events
that has been super-added to the events,” which means
that any interpretation by causality is a deception.
Cordovero and Nietzsche are both talking about
language, but what Nietzsche sees as a constraint put
upon us, by language, is for Cordovero a supernatural
gift rendered us through language.
By now it should be clear that the behinot are poetic
images that can be regarded as the master tropes, or as
the crucial mechanisms of defense. The fifth behinah is
the Sefirah's or poem’s own power to emanate the
Sefirot hidden within it outward, which means that as
a trope the fifth behinah is metaphor, a dualistic image
setting inside against outside. The later Sefirot are
inside the particular Sefirah, yet must be radiated to
outside, where they belong, by a psychic process of
sublimation.
The sixth and final behinah is a metaleptic reversal
of the fifth, for by this final aspect the following
 Kabbalah and Criticism 71

Sefirah, next in sequence, is emanated to its proper

place, after which the whole cycle begins again with
the first behinah of the following Sefirah. As a defense
this is a projection, while as an image it necessarily
involves an aspect of earliness succeeding one of
lateness. Cordovero’s theosophical cycle becomes a
wheel of images, or tropes, or defenses, by which one
text constantly conducts interchange with another.

I come now to the doctrines of Isaac Luria. Where

Cordovero provided the model for the six revisionary
ratios, Luria gives us the paradigm for what is even
more basic in the study of poetic misprision, which is
the dialectic of revisionism. The Kabbalists, like poets,
pragmatically exalted rhetorical substitution, the prin¬
ciple of the second chance, while like poets they
theoretically celebrated the first chance alone, God’s
creation being that first chance. Again, like poets, the
Kabbalists richly confused rhetorical substitution with
magic, relying upon the basic trope that God had
spoken in order to form the world. The Sefirot are after
all ten names of God, and together form the great,
unutterable Name of God, which itself is a perpetually
renewable act of creation. I myself find it curious that
no one, in the entire history of scholarship, ever has
speculated on the literary motives of the Kabbalists.
There has been much speculation upon what has been
called “a new religious impulse” (Scholem), upon
charlatanry (Graetz), and upon philosophical ambi¬
tions (Ginzberg), but very little upon the palpable
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 72

psychology of belatedness that Kabbalists invariably

expose. Confronting, as they did, not only a closed
Book, but a vast system of closed commentary, the
Kabbalists refused Neo-Aristotelian philosophical re¬
ductiveness, refused normative Rabbinicism with its
pious repetition, and took the Gnostic path of expan¬
sive inventiveness, though in an uneasy alliance with
Jewish Neoplatonic rather than Jewish Gnostic con¬
ceptions of the Godhead. Their human anxieties,
particularly after the Expulsion from Spain, were those
of the endless vicissitudes of the Jewish Galut, the
Diaspora, but their specifically literary anxieties cen¬
tered upon a genuinely overwhelming anxiety-of-
influence,
I think that this anxiety-of-influence intensified in
Kabbalah with the passage from the Zohar to Cordo-
vero, again from Cordovero to his pupil Luria, and
after Luria with invariable reference to Luria. There is
a nice juxtaposition between a remark attributed to
Luria and a remark made a hundred years later by the
false Messiah, Shabbetai Zevi, who had emerged from
the world of Lurianic Kabbalah. Here are the two
traditional remarks, which I have translated faithfully,
so that only the juxtaposition is my own:

Rabbi Isaac Luria used to say that Rabbi

Moses Cordovero dealt only with the world of
confusion [olam ha-tohu\ while he, Luria, dealt
with the world of restitution [olam ha-tikkun].
Yet the learned Shabbetai Zevi used to say
about Rabbi Isaac Luria that he built a fine
 Kabbalah and Criticism 73

chariot [merkabah] in his day but neglected to

say who was riding on it.

Like Plotinus on the Valentinians, the egregious

Zevi was imputing creative envy to Luria as that great
sage’s motive-for-metaphor. Luria’s genius for the
invention of new theosophical hypostases seems to me
beyond comparison with anyone else in esoteric tradi¬
tion. Even as Cordovero might be called the first
Structuralist, I am tempted to call Luria the archetype
of all Revisionists, for his dialectics-of-creation seem
to me the model for all other kinds of belated
creativity that came after him, from the Italian Renais¬
sance to the present. I will not resume here the account
of the Lurianic myth of creation that I gave in my
preceding essay on Kabbalah, but will proceed directly
to translating Luria into the terms of a revisionist
poetics. After thus translating Luria, I will return to
Cordovero, and to Luria’s misprision of Cordovero’s
behinot as his own parzufim or “countenances,” his
own breaking-up of the Sefirot into their component
tropes.
Kabbalah, if viewed as rhetoric, centers upon two
series of tropes: first—irony, metonymy, metaphor,
and then—synecdoche, hyperbole, metalepsis. I am
speaking of the Lurianic or regressive Kabbalah, but a
full treatment of rhetoric in the Zohar would uncover
these same apotropaic litanies. Luria and his writing
disciples, in their accounts of origins, rely upon two
great composite tropes, zimzum and tikkun, and upon
a connecting concept between these, shevirat ha-kelim,
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 74

which rhetorically considered is not a trope but a

violent dramatization of the process by which one
verbal figure is substituted for another. Zimzum is
initially a rhetorical irony for the act of creation, in
that it means the opposite of what it appears to “say.”
It says “withdrawal” and means “concentration.” God
withdraws from a point only to concentrate Himself
upon it. The image of His absence becomes one of the
greatest images ever found for His presence, a pres¬
ence which is intensified by the original metaphor of
mezamzem, His holding in of His breath. If we move
out of theosophy into poetry, what is the equivalent of
this creative contraction? What does it mean to
transform the Lurianic zimzum into a trope-of-limita-
tion? What does “limitation” mean in the context of
poetry?
To begin with, it means a loss-in-meaning, even an
achieved dearth-of-meaning, a sense that representa¬
tion cannot be achieved fully, or that representation
cannot fill the void out of which the desire-for-poetry
rises. Walter Pater was one of the great theorists of
that void, or rather a great applier of theory to
practice, the theory being for him an Hegelian modi¬
fication of Plato. Hegel prophesied the death of art, the
death of poetry, after our culture had run through
three phases: Symbolic Art, Classical Art, Romantic
Art. In the first, Form is inferior to Content; Form is
under-determined, for the Idea is undeveloped or
unspecified, and so imagistic representation is not
wholly appropriate, for such representation must be
specific. In Classical Art, Form and Content are
perfectly fitted, and a determinate idea is represented
 Kabbalah and Criticism 75

by a determinate image. In Romantic Art, the relation

between Form and Content breaks down, almost
completely, because the Idea is no longer anterior to
representation, but has so undergone internalization
that its spirituality can no longer be conveyed by
appropriate images.
Richard Wollheim points out that Pater’s achieve¬
ment was to psychologize Hegel’s theory into a
paradoxical vision of the role of subject-matter in art.
Wollheim accurately summarizes this as the insight
that “representation can exceed what it represents:
and do so through representing it.” I would add to
Wollheim’s observation only a note on Pater’s sense of
the experiential void, where philosophy abandons us,
and art has to take over, lest we perish of the truth, a
sense that Pater shared with his contemporary,
Nietzsche. For the Epicurean Pater is pragmatically
not far away from the theosophical Luria, when he too
sees creation as rising out of the artist’s withdrawal
from himself, his concentration into a single point of
apprehension, as here in the magnificent “Conclusion”
to The Renaissance:

To such a tremulous wisp constantly re¬

forming itself on the stream, to a single sharp
impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less
fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in
our life fines itself down. . . .

The “real” of Walter Pater is the achieved realism of

 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 76

an ultimate solipsist, and circuitously that is our

passage back to Luria’s God, for more even than
Blake’s parodistic Urizen, Luria’s God is the ultimate
solipsist, truly and uniquely the great I Am. As a
philosophical skeptic, Pater did not have the advan¬
tage of a magical theory of language, a theory that
most strong poets have shared, secretly, with all
Kabbalists. Pater, as Wollheim says, believed that
representation could exceed what it represented and
do this through the act of representing. Pater had to
believe something like that, because in his own uneasy
sense of belatedness he feared that Hegel might be
correct in prophesying the death of art, and partly
because his sense of experience so emptied experience
out that art had to commence in that void, or
limitation, if life itself were to go on. But though the
Kabbalist poetics I am espousing is heavily influenced
by Pater, who is for me (as he was for Yeats) a Sacred
Book, I want to get back to Kabbalah from this
particular digression.
Zimzum is a mode of limitation that rhetorically
works through the series of tropes of irony, metonymy
and metaphor, which means, as Kenneth Burke would
say, through the processes of dialectic, reduction, and
perspectivism. In psychic terms, I would add that this
means we are confronting a process of imagistic
limitation that arouses a series of defenses-of-limita-
tion: reaction-formation, undoing, isolation, and re¬
gression, culminating in sublimation. Zimzum finally
then is God’s great sublimation of His own Presence,
of His declaration ehyeh asher ehyeh, “I Will Be
Present Wherever and Whenever I Will to Be Present.”
 Kabbalah and Criticism 77

Sublimation thus culminates a series of dualistic de¬

fenses, and I think we can call limitation, in our sense,
a dualizing phenomenon, for God’s withdrawal neces¬
sarily creates a dualistic universe. Limitation, whether
of tropes or defenses, constitutes a demand-for-
language, an excessive demand, to use one of Geoffrey
Hartman’s formulations. In this sense, limitation rec¬
ognizes a lack or defect in language that mirrors (or is
mirrored by) a lack or defect in the self.
I turn then to the image of catastrophe-creation in
Luria, the Shattering-of-the-Vessels that produced the
world as we know it. Why translate this into poetic
terms as substitution, the replacing of one image by
another? The imagery of limitation centers upon
absence, emptiness, and outsideness, though any poem
would prefer to revel in presence, fullness, and inner¬
ness. Substitution is the actual process by which poems
work, as images of wholeness, height and earliness
work to represent desire, and restitute all inaugural
limitations. The idea of substitution is faithful to the
spirit of Luria because the essence of Kabbalah is to
open God to the sufferings of His own creatures, and
of His own creation. The vessels break so as to break,
not the Godhead, but everything that is not God and
yet contains His light. It is suggestive that one of the
Kabbalist synonyms for the making/breaking of the'
vessels is “blinding,” a blinding that is another inevita¬
ble emblem for the substituting patterns of figurative
language in poetry.
The movement to the universe of restitution, of
tikkun, scarcely needs translating into the poetic
concept of representation. It is only a short step to go
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 78

to reinforcing a potentiality for response, from the

general vision of tikkun as redemptive restitution. The
lifting up and gathering in of the sparks, the basic
image of tikkun, can remind us that the Latin rep-
raesentare, from which our word “representation”
came to us by way of Old French, meant to bring
something absent into presence. As a triple trope,
tikkun poetically involves three transitions or substitu¬
tions: from irony to synecdoche, in which the absent is
made present, and so is re-presented; from metonymy
to hyperbole, where something emptied out is height¬
ened again to a fullness; from metaphor to metalepsis,
where something outside is placed within inner time, a
time-yet-to-be.
Luria needed instruments for tikkun, and the Sejirot
as composite tropes or Divine texts were too compre¬
hensive for his purposes. Cordovero had taught him
the behinot, which would have given him the range of
defensive tropes or tropes of defense that could have
yielded the requisite images of restitution. But Luria
was too strong a poet to incur so large a guilt of
indebtedness. His sixfold, as demonstrated in the
previous essay, were the six Sejirot of “directions” as
modified by their containment in the fourth Parzuf,
Ze’eir Anpin, the “impatient” or “short-faced” counte¬
nance of God. Three dialectical alternations—between
Hesed and Din (love and rigor), Tiferet and Nezah
(beauty and endurance-unto-victory), Hod and Yesod
(natural majesty and male force)—took the place of
the dialectical alternations of Cordovero’s behinot.
Though I necessarily simplify these complicated theo-
sophical models, the complications are in the first
 Kabbalah and Criticism 79

place those of a conceptual rhetoric, and need little

manipulation to become models for Post-Enlighten¬
ment poems. Why this should be possible, and what is
the use of this analogizing, will be my subject in the
remainder of this essay.

Marcuse defines what the Frankfurt School of Hork-

heimer and Adorno had called “negative thinking” as
the final form of Hegelian dialectic: “The absent must
be made present because the greater part of the truth is
in that which is absent.” In defense of his own
enterprise, his own quest for a return of the repressed,
Marcuse speaks of “the effort to contradict a reality in
which all logic and all speech are false to the extent
that they are part of a mutilated whole.” Against
Marcuse, one can urge the wisdom of Kabbalah,
which is the same as the insight of all belated poetry:
to recover tabooed meanings does not bring about a
return of the repressed. Rather, it intensifies the
repression by re-activating the defensive origins of all
repression.
Gnosis and Kabbalah, as I think we can now begin
to see, were the first Modernisms, in our still current
sense of “Modernism.” A modern poem begins with a
clinamen that depends upon the renunciation of an
earlier poem. But this renunciation must be dialectical.
The earlier poem (or poet) is concentrated (which
means also contracted) and made to vacate part of
himself. Since the precursor has been internalized, a
crucial mental space in the ephebe is being voided.
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 80

Creation begins therefore with an element in the self

contracting to a primordial point. But this concentra¬
tion sets up defensive reactions in the self, making the
subsequent creation a catastrophe, and rendering
tikkun or representation a hopeless quest, since there
can come no reparation for an overly-defended self,
and least of all from that self.
This creation through contraction of an internalized
precursor text, which is the Kabbalistic mode, is
precisely the dialectical mode of belated or Post-
Enlightenment poetry. As a theory of meaning, Kab¬
balah tells us that meaning is the hurt that meaning
itself is hurtful. For Kabbalah tries to restore the
primal meaning that God intended when He gave
Torah to Moses. But Kabbalah treats Torah as alpha¬
bet, as language itself. God gave writing, which was
almost primal, except that writing was what we now
would call a compulsive sublimation of a more primal
Instruction. The primal act is that God taught; the
primal teaching is writing. Zimzum is therefore in the
first place Instruction. Ein-Sof instructs Himself by
concentration, and what he teaches is then apparent in
the tehiru (vacated space) as the letter yod. God
teaches Himself His own Name, and so begins crea¬
tion. Without ever saying so, the Kabbalists, like the
Gnostics, have started with a belated God. And so
must begin any subsequent belated creator, for every
new strong poet starts with a fresh limitation that
teaches him his own name, as poet, by renouncing and
voiding an unbearable presence, the idea of the
precursor. A turn that does not turn from anything, as
 Kabbalah and Criticism 81

posited by Derrida, is only possible for Ein-Sof for

only His writing is in any sense primal.
One advantage of a Kabbalistic model for a dialec¬
tic of poetic revisionism is to help us see the primacy of
what I have called a Scene of Instruction in any
account of poetic origins that we can offer ourselves. A
maxim of sociology, at least since Erving Goffman, is
the element of staging in any presentation of self in
everyday life. Here is Goffman’s summary of his own
insight:

. . . the performed self was seen as some kind

of image, usually creditable, which the individual
on stage and in character effectively attempts to
induce others to hold in regard to him. While this
image is entertained concerning the individual, so
that a self is imputed to him, this self itself does
not derive from its possessor, but from the whole
scene of his action, being generated by that
attribute of local events which renders them
interpretable by witnesses. A correctly staged
and performed scene leads the audience to
impute a self to a performed character, but this
imputation—this self—is a product of a scene
that comes off, and is not a cause of it. The self,
then, as a performed character, is not an organic
thing that has a specific location, whose funda¬
mental fate is to be born, to mature, and to die;
it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a
scene that is presented, and the characteristic,
the crucial concern, is whether it will be credited
or discredited.
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 82

If we substitute the strong poetic self for the social

self here, Goffman’s insight comes even more sharply
into focus, indeed experiences a version of zimzum or
creative contraction. There is no anxiety of representa¬
tion for a strong poet, as there necessarily is for
Goffman’s social everyman, because that anxiety was
met and overcome already for the strong ephebe by
the precursor (and for the Kabbalist by God). This is
the particular strength that the precursor hands on,
and this is why poets can be strong, not because they
overcome the burdens of mimesis, but because they
transcend mimesis. They confront, not the universe,
but the precursors, and even if they cannot overcome
the precursors, they can wrestle them to a truce.
The great lesson that Kabbalah can teach contem¬
porary interpretation is that meaning in belated texts is
always wandering meaning, even as the belated Jews
were a wandering people. Meaning wanders, like
human tribulation, or like error, from text to text, and
within a text, from figure to figure. What governs this
wandering, this errancy, is defense, the beautiful
necessity of defense. For not just interpretation is
defense, but meaning itself is defense, and so meaning
wanders to protect itself. In its etymology, “defense”
refers to “things forbidden” and to “prohibition,” and
we can speculate that poetic defense rises in close
alliance with the notions of trespass and transgression,
crucial for the self-presentation of any new strong
poet.
In Hebraic tradition, all literary representation par¬
took of transgression, unless it were canonical. But
Exile is a profound stimulus to the human anxiety for
 Kabbalah and Criticism 83

literary representation. Kabbalah is a doctrine of

Exile, a theory of influence made to explain Exile.
Exile, in a purely literary context, wanders from the
category of space to that of time, and so Exile becomes
Belatedness. After the Exile from Spain, Kabbalah
intensified its vision of belatedness, an intensification
that culminated in the Lurianic myth in which the
Creation itself became an Exile.
We can say then that Zimzum, as a composite trope
of limitation, became the ultimate trope of Exile, or
the ultimate psychic defense of exiled Jewry. Through
Zimzum, God defended Himself from responsibility
for unmerited evil, and for the sufferings of His people.
Solomon Schecter said that the Kabbalists confronted:
“an awful alternative—the dread of confusing the
creature with his Creator, and the dread not less
keenly felt of the horror vacui, or a Godless
world . . .” Zimzum, as a radical metaphor, inter¬
vened between these alternatives, but at the price of
deconstructing an over-determined tradition. This de-
construction, unlike certain contemporary ventures in
that mode, was accompanied by considerable anxiety.
Indeed, I am about to go against Kabbalistic tradition,
by suggesting that Zimzum was God’s anxiety. God
had breathing trouble, and this trouble created the
world.
I turn to Freud’s lecture on “Anxiety,” no. xxv in
the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis:

. . . We believe that in the case of the affect of

anxiety we know what the early impression is
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 84

which it repeats. We believe that it is in the act of

birth that there comes about the combination of
unpleasurable feelings, impulses of discharge
and bodily sensations which has become the
prototype of the effects of a mortal danger and
has ever since been repeated by us as the state of
anxiety. The immense increase of stimulation
owing to the interruption of the renovation of the
blood (internal respiration) was at the time the
cause of the experience of anxiety; the first
anxiety was thus a toxic one. The name ‘Angst’—
‘angustiae, ’ ‘Enge’ [German and Latin words for
‘narrow place,’ ‘straits,’ from same root as ‘Angst’
and ‘anxiety’]—emphasizes the characteristic of
restriction in breathing which was then present
as a consequence of the real situation and is now
almost invariably reinstated in the affect. . . .

Freud says that primal anxiety was toxic, and that

the primal limitation was of inspiration. If the anxiety
of influence be imaged as a lack of breathing space,
then the voluntary limitation that allows a new poem
to begin, amounts to a holding-in of the breath, until
some space is cleared for it. Zimzum, as I’ve said
already, derives from the verb mezamzem, “to draw in
the breath.” The Kabbalistic model here illuminates
the fundamental human problem at the heart of all
influence-anxiety, which is the deep, hidden identity
between all psychic defense and the fear of dying.
There, for now, I must abandon the rich but
troubling conceptual rhetoric of the process of Zim¬
zum. The next process in the Lurianic dialectic,
 Kabbalah and Criticism 85

Shevirath ha-kelim, can be thought of, even in Kabba¬

lah, as being as much a separating out and re-forming
by and through differences, as a breaking-apart. It is
therefore a making as well as a breaking, and has been
compared by one modern scholar, Tishby, to the
Aristotelian process of catharsis. In that sense, the
Shevirat is a kind of cleansing, a birth of purified
vessels. I have compared Shevirat to the process of
rhetorical substitution, in which tropes of limitation
and of representation alternate in replacing one an¬
other. In deconstructive terms, Shevirat accounts for
the self-negating factor in every poem, the quest for
origins that goes against the poem’s own intentions.
Shevirat accounts for the rhetoricity of poetic texts, the
word-consciousness that grows more intense with
time’s passage.
If representation is the aesthetic translation for the
Kabbalistic tikkun, as I have suggested, then represen¬
tation is being viewed as a kind of mending process.
What is being mended cannot be meaning, or pres¬
ence, or form, or unity. Poems don’t have any of these,
and cannot be transformed into what poems have
never been. You cannot, in a poem, get into the
present, but poems, in repeating one another, can
attain to a finer tone of repetition. But that is only an
ironic vision of poetry. Poems cannot restitute, and yet
they can make the gestures of restitution. They cannot
reverse time, and yet they can lie against time. The
Kabbalistic tikkun has supernatural ambitions. As
Scholem says: “the tikkun is not so much a restoration
of Creation—which though planned was never fully
carried out—as its first complete fulfillment.” We are
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 86

not theosophists or mystics, and I do not urge another

idealizing view of poetry upon us. Pragmatically,
representation in belated poetry works to remind us of
what we may never have known, yet need to believe
we have known. Such reminding may be only a lesser
kind of restitution, but it does strengthen the mind,
almost literally it re-minds. Here too Kabbalah can be
a powerful model for the illusory but always persua¬
sive assertion by the mind of its own powers over all
that is not mind, including language.

I conclude with a brief coda or apologia for the use of

so esoteric and extravagant a model, in the map-mak¬
ing that is the interpretation of poetry. Thomas Kuhn,
in his admirable book on the structure of scientific
revolutions, asserts the priority of paradigms in the
puzzle-solving that is normal science. According to
Kuhn, anomaly leads to the emergence of new scien¬
tific theories, and Kuhn’s formula for scientific prog¬
ress is: from anomaly to crisis. Paradigms are prior to
shared rules and assumptions, and it is when anomaly
emerges, with proof that a paradigm is contra naturam,
that discovery commences. Kuhn says that even when
confronted by severe and prolonged anomalies, scien¬
tists tend not to renounce the paradigm that has led
them into crisis, because no paradigm can be rejected
without accepting another paradigm substituted for it.
I think this is the difference between the scientist and
the poet, for the precursor, however composite, cannot
ever be rejected, successfully, in favor of another
 Kabbalah and Criticism 87

precursor. Further, I think that this is because a

paradigm is shared by all members of a scientific
community, but a precursor speaks to a single one, as
Kierkegaard said, even if that precursor is as universal
as John Milton was, for the two hundred years after
his death. Poets have been governed, in their develop¬
ment, by other poets, from Homer and then Pindar to
the present, and this governance always has been
personal, eccentric, and even perverse.
But critics, meaning all readers, must have para¬
digms, and not just precursors. Western literary criti¬
cism has followed the paradigms provided by Aristotle
and Plato, with the later modifications of Christian
Aristotelianism and Christian Platonism, down to the
recent models provided by theories as diverse as those
of W. K. Wimsatt and Northrop Frye. Out of an
amalgam of Nietzsche, Marx, Heidegger, Freud, and
the linguists, another paradigm is now coming from
France, moving upon us like that apocalyptic crimson
man of Edom that Blake both celebrated and feared.
In urging a Kabbalistic model, which means ultimately
a Gnostic model, I am in danger of appearing to be
like those Valentinian mystagogues whom Plotinus so
eloquently condemned. My motives, though, are pure
enough, and it may be worth remarking that I did not
set out upon this enterprise with a Kabbalistic model
consciously in view. But it was there nevertheless, as I
groped to explain to myself why I had become
obsessed with revisionary ratios, and then with tropes
and defenses of limitation and of substitution. The
language of Post-Enlightenment poetry, in English,
betrays the patterns that were first systematized by
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 88

Moses de Leon in his Sefirot, Moses Cordovero in his

Behinot, and Isaac Luria in his Parzufim. As William
Wordsworth surely never in his life had heard of
Moses Cordovero, I am simply out of it, by the canons
of the carrion-eaters, Old Style, of my own belated
(and benighted) profession. How can the Intimations of
Immortality Ode show a patterning of images, tropes,
defenses, and ratios of revision worked out nearly
three centuries before Wordsworth, by thaumaturgical
rabbis of whom he had never heard? I shall venture an
extravagant answer to this sensible question.
The center of my theory is that there are crucial
patterns of interplay between literal and figurative
meanings, in post-Miltonic poems, and these patterns,
though very varied, are to a surprising degree quite
definite and even over-determined. What determines
them is the anxiety of influence, because it is the war
against belatedness that results in certain patterns of
analogous images, tropes, psychic defenses, and re¬
visionary ratios. I do not say that these patterns
produce meaning, because I do not believe that
meaning is produced in and by poems, but only
between poems. But the interaction of these patterns,
between poems, suggests or opens up all possibilities of
poetic meaning. The hidden roads that go from poem
to poem are: limitation, substitution, representation;
or the dialectic of revisionism. Even as the language of
modern or post-Miltonic poetry becomes more over¬
determined, in a movement down to the present, so
signification tends to wander, which means that a loss
in meaning accompanies a tradition’s temporal pas¬
sage. Tropism of meaning compels tropes themselves
 Kabbalah and Criticism 89

to be meaning. Increasingly, a poem must be an error

about poetry, and every poem begins by misreading
itself. Every poetic trope is an exile from literal
meaning, but the only homecoming would be the
death of figuration and so the death of poetry, or the
triumph of literal meaning, whatever that is. Nor is a
trope a free fall, for a defensive fall is not free. The
belated poet cannot substitute wholly at will, since his
tropes defend against prior tropes.
Meaning, whether in modern poetry or in Kabba¬
lah, wanders wherever anteriority threatens to take
over the whole map of misreading, or the verbal
universe, if that phrase be preferred. Meaning swerves,
enlarges oppositely, vacates, drives down so as to rise
up again, goes outside in the wan hope of getting itself
more on the inside, and at last attempts to reverse
anteriority by forsaking the evasions of mental space
for those of mental time. A poem’s images or Kabba-
listic hypostases are thus types of ambivalence (not of
ambiguity) that cope with the burden of anteriority.
Kabbalah and modern poetry share the paradox that
Kojeve explored in his commentary upon Hegel’s
Phenomenology:

. . . for Hegel it is precisely in this annihilation

of Being that consists the Negativity which is
Man, that Action of Fighting and Work by
which Man preserves himself in spatial Being
while destroying it—that is, while transforming it
by the creation of hitherto unknown new things into
a genuine Past—a nonexistent and consequently
nonspatial Past. . . . [my italics]
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 90

The struggle of belated poetry and of Kabbalah

against anteriority could be summarized no more
accurately or pungently, which may explain why
Hegel, like the poets, was impressed by what he knew
of Kabbalah. Time, history, freedom, and the authen¬
tic self are necessarily part of error or the swerve from
origins, rather than part of the stasis of origins. For
Hegel, spirit (according to Kojeve) is not origin or
beginning but end or result. This realization is more
ambivalent in Kabbalah or in the poets, but like Hegel
they know creation only as a breaking of the vessels,
and they know the past only as their own creation.
Hegel says that History ended in October, 1806, with
Napoleon’s victory at the Battle of Jena. Let us say
that Poetry ended just about then also, with the
Wordsworthian crisis-poem setting a pattern that sub¬
sequent strong poems seem doomed to repeat, what¬
ever the variations of rhetorical substitution. From
Wordsworth through our contemporaries, the trope
defends against literal meaning in the same way that
psychic defenses trope against death. Literal meaning,
where belatedness is so acute in poetic consciousness,
is synonymous with repetition-compulsion, and so
literal meaning is thus seen as a kind of death, even as
death itself seems the most literal kind of meaning.
The Talmud warns against reading Scripture by so
inclined a light that the text reveals chiefly the shape of
your own countenance. Kabbalah, like the poetry of
the last two centuries, reads Scripture only in so
inclined or figurative a defensive mode. Poets from the
Renaissance through today have sought occult author-
 Kabbalah and Criticism 91

ity in Kabbalah, but I suspect that this seeking

concealed and conceals a more professional and
technical concern. However “unconsciously,” poets
seem to have known that the revisionary patterns of
their work followed the Kabbalistic model. Not their
content nor their form derived from Kabbalistic
example, but rather the more crucial matter of their
stance, their stance towards tradition and towards their
precursors.
It is upon poetic stance that I come to rest here, and
also upon the stance of the critic. I turn back to the
Kabbalah, seeking an interpretative paradigm, for
reasons akin to those that led Emerson back to
Orphism and Neoplatonism. Emerson accepted the
necessity of misreading, or the active figuration of the
strong reader, and he accepted it with joy and
confidence, as befitted the prophet of Self-Reliance.
He read for the “lustres,” he insisted, and he saw those
lustres as emanating from His own Reason. We need
to read more strenuously and more audaciously, the
more we realize that we cannot escape the predica¬
ment of misreading. The Kabbalists read and inter¬
preted with excessive audacity and extravagance; they
knew that the true poem is the critic’s mind, or as
Emerson says, the true ship is the shipbuilder. Emer¬
son also says: “It is remarkable that involuntarily we
always read as superior beings.” The Kabbalists
doubtless were fearfully mistaken in their pride as
interpreters, and it is true that most of their interpreta¬
tions have vanished utterly. But then it is true that all
but a handful of poets are fearfully mistaken in their
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 92

pride also, at any time. The revisionist commits many

errors in searching for an individual relation to truth,
but some of those errors become the true history of
strong poetry.
No word comes easier or oftener to the critic's pen than
the word influence, and no vaguer notion can be found
among all the vague notions that compose the phantom
armory of aesthetics. Yet there is nothing in the critical
field that should be of greater philosophical interest or
prove more rewarding to analysis than the progressive
modification of one mind by the work of another.
It often happens that the work acquires a singular
value in the other mind, leading to active consequences
that are impossible to foresee and in many cases will
never be possible to ascertain. What we do know is that
this derived activity is essential to intellectual production
of all types. Whether in science or the arts, if we look for
the source of an achievement we can observe that what a
man does either repeats or refutes what someone else
has done—repeats it in other tones, refines or amplifies
or simplifies it, loads or overloads it with meaning; or else
rebuts, overturns, destroys and denies it, but thereby
assumes it and has invisibly used it. Opposites are born
from opposites.
We say that an author is original when we cannot
trace the hidden transformations that others underwent in
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 94

his mind; we mean to say that the dependence of what he

does on what others have done is excessively complex
and irregular. There are works in the likeness of others,
and works that are the reverse of others, but there are
also works of which the relation with earlier productions
is so intricate that we become confused and attribute
them to the direct intervention of the gods.
(To go deeper into the subject, we should also have to
discuss the influence of a mind on itself and of a work on
its author. But this is not the place.)

paul valery, Letter about Mallarme (1927)

(translated by Malcolm Cowley)
 THE NECESSITY OF
MISREADING

M ost of us live our lives in an uneasy alternation of

two opposing superstitions: either everything
that happens to us is arbitrary and haphazard or
everything that happens to us is determined or even
over-determined by fate, by heritage, by societal
pressures, by economic factors, by systemic operations
of one sort or another, or simply by our own charac¬
ters and personalities. Most of us, when we read
seriously, read as we live, in the same uneasy alterna¬
tion between the notion that we choose what we read
and the notion that it is chosen for us, by others or by
tradition. We read seriously, then, pretty much as we
dress or as we talk, following a range of conventions.
Sometimes we may wonder at the shape of our
reading, and try to decide who is setting the shape and
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 96

why. That wonder is my starting point in this essay, a

wonder at the shapes of literary convention, and at the
phenomena of literary tradition. Who or what is the
shaper of the shape? How are the phenomena of
tradition formed? What is the governing dialectic, if
any, that holds together the arbitrary and the over¬
determined in these areas?
As an academic critic, one of whose concerns is
contemporary poetry, I sometimes am asked, by
friends or students: “Which living, contemporary poet
ought one to read?” Increasingly I’ve tended to answer
with the names of four or five poets: Robert Penn
Warren, Elizabeth Bishop, A. R. Ammons and John
Ashbery in this country, Geoffrey Hill in England.
However diffidently I give the answer, I am engaged in
canon-formation, in trying to help decide a question
that is ultimately of a sad importance: “Which poet
shall live?” “They became what they beheld” is a
somber formula in Blake’s Jerusalem, akin to the
popular formula: “You are what you eat.” Yet we can
oppose to Blake’s formula a maxim of Emerson’s:
“What we are, that only can we see,” and I suppose
there could be a popular formula: “That which you
are, that only can you eat,” though literally of course
that might seem to verge on the great taboo of
cannibalism. On these models, let us compare two
formulae: “You are or become what you read” and
“That which you are, that only can you read.” The
first formula gives priority to every text over every
reader; the second makes of each reader his own text.
In the interplay of these two formulae, the intricacies
 The Necessity of Misreading 97

of canon-formation work themselves out, for both

formulae are true enough. Every act of reading is an
exercise in belatedness, yet every such act is also
defensive, and as defense it makes of interpretation a
necessary misprision.
The reader is to the poem what the poet is to his
precursor—every reader is therefore an ephebe, every
poem a forerunner, and every reading an act of
“influencing,” that is, of being influenced by the poem
and of influencing any other reader to whom your
reading is communicated.
Reading is therefore misprision—or misreading—-
just as writing is falsification, in Oscar Wilde’s sense of
“lying” [The Decay of Lying], A strong reading can be
defined as one that itself produces other readings—as
Paul de Man says, to be productive it must insist upon
its own exclusiveness and completeness, and it must
deny its partialness and its necessary falsification.
“Error about life is necessary for life”; error about a
poem is necessary if there is to be yet another strong
poem.
If tradition is, as Freud surmised, the equivalent in
culture of repressed material in the mind of the
individual, then rhetorically considered tradition is
always an hyperbole, and the images used to describe
tradition will tend to be those of height and depth.
There is then something uncanny (unheimlich) about
tradition, and tradition, used by Eliot, say, as a hedge
against the daemonic, is itself, however orthodox or
societal, deeply contaminated by the daemonic. The
largest characteristic of tradition, on this view, is that
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 98

tradition becomes an image of the heights by being

driven down to the depths, or of the depths by being
raised to the heights. Tradition is itself then without a
referential aspect, like the Romantic Imagination or
like God. Tradition is a daemonic term.
What the Ein-Sof or the Infinite Godhead was to the
Kabbalists, or the Imagination was to the Romantic
poets, tradition is now for us, the one literary sign that
is not a sign, because there is no other sign to which it
can refer. We cannot define tradition, therefore, and I
suggest that we stop trying. But though we cannot
describe what tradition is, we can describe how it
works. In particular we can attempt to describe how
tradition makes its choices, how it determines which
poet shall live, and how and when the chosen poet is to
become a classic. Rather more important, we can try
to describe how the choosing and classicizing of a text
itself results in the most powerful kinds of misreading.
The first principle that revisionism or historical
belatedness insists upon is best stated by a double
rhetorical question of Novalis: “Who has declared the
Bible completed? Should the Bible not be still in the
process of growth?” It is impossible not to be moved
by the noble pathos of Novalis, but of course we all
know, as he did, that the authority of institutional and
historical Judaism and Christianity declared the Bible
completed. Unlike the canon of secular literature, the
Scriptures of the West are not still in the process of
growth. It is instructive to consider how the Rabbis
thought the Bible ended, with these words of the
latecomer prophet, Malachi:
 The Necessity of Misreading 99

Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet

before the coming of the great and dreadful day
of the LORD:
And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to
the children, and the heart of the children to
their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with
a curse.

The Old Testament ends with this admonishing

prophecy, that the Oedipal anxieties are to be over¬
come, and that this will be performed by the greatest
of idealized precursors, Elijah, whose ephebe will be
the Messiah. The New Testament ends with a parallel
prophecy, but only after a fiercely defensive insistence
that the canon is indeed now closed, with these closing
verses of Revelation:

For I testify unto every man that heareth the

words of the prophecy of this book, If any man
shall add unto these things, God shall add unto
him the plagues that are written in this book:
And if any man shall take away from the
words of the book of this prophecy, God shall
take away his part out of the book of life, and
out of the holy city, and from the things which
are written in this book.
He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I
come quickly: Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with
you all. Amen.
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 100

St. John the Divine declares the Bible closed, with a

palpable anxiety as to how this declaration is to be
enforced. The issue is authority, as it always is in all
questions of canon-formation, and it is worth noting
that both Malachi and St. John base their authority on
the supposedly immediate future, on a First or a
Second Coming of a reality that they seek to introject.
Proleptic representation is the inevitable rhetorical
resource of all canonizing discourse, which means that
all canonizing must be done at the expense of the
presence of the present moment. When you declare a
contemporary work a permanent, classic achievement,
you make it suffer an astonishing, apparent, immediate
loss in meaning. Of its lateness, you have made an
earliness, but only by breaking the illusion of moder¬
nity, which is the illusion that literature can be made
free of literature. All canonizing of literary texts is a
self-contradictory process, for by canonizing a text you
are troping upon it, which means that you are misread¬
ing it. Canonization is the most extreme version of
what Nietzsche called Interpretation, or the exercise of
the Will-to-Power over texts. I am stating the thesis
that canonization is the final or transumptive form of
literary revisionism, and so I am compelled to re-capit-
ulate part of what I have said about revisionary
processes in my two studies of misprision, The Anxiety
of Influence and A Map of Misreading, but I hope that
this re-capitulation will rise above mere repetition into
a finer tone.
“Influence” is an ambivalent word to use in any
discourse about literature, for “Influence” is as com¬
plex a trope as language affords. “Influence” is the
 The Necessity of Misreading IOI

great I Am of literary discourse, and increasingly I find

its aptest analogue in what the Kabbalah called the
first Sefirah, the first attribute or name or emanative
principle of God, Keter or the Supreme Crown. For
Keter, like the Infinite God, is at once ayin or
“nothingness” and ehyeh or I AM, absolute absence
and absolute presence. The first Kabbalistic emana¬
tion is thus a dialectical entity, and rhetorically begins
as a simple irony. “Influence” begins as a simple irony
also, as the origins of the word indicate. “Influence” in
the occult and astral sense was believed to be an
invisible yet highly palpable fluid pouring onto men
from the star-world, a world obviously of potencies
and not of mere signs. “Influence” began then meta¬
physically as a wholly materialistic though occult
concept, and this materialism seems to me always
essential in any fresh theorizing about influence.
We all of us take it for granted that all criticism
necessarily begins with an act of reading, but we are
less ready to see that all poetry necessarily begins with
an act of reading also. It would move us greatly if we
could believe that what we call the Imagination is
self-begotten. But, as even Emerson had to admit, “the
originals are not original,” or as Yeats’s Hermit says in
Supernatural Songs: “all must copy copies.” Every
idealized account of Classicism defines it as mimesis of
essential nature, so as to fulfill and complete nature.
Romanticism being antithetical or contra naturam had
to acknowledge that nature retained priority, that
nature was the primary. The antithetical or High
Romantic thus had to achieve a super-mimesis of
essential nature, it had to over-complete and over-
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 102

fulfill nature, which meant that mimetic representation

was not sufficient. Nature, to Romanticism, is a vast
trope, and is by synecdoche a part that the so-called
Imagination must complete. Over-representation de¬
manded hyperbole and transumption, and hyperboli¬
cal and transumptive thinking moves us into areas
beyond the traditional Western balancing of micro¬
cosm and macrocosm. A de-idealized vision of
Classicism reveals not that nature and Homer are
everywhere the same, but that mimesis of essential
nature generally turns out to be the simpler act of
directly imitating Homer. A de-idealized vision of
Romanticism reveals that the super-mimesis of nature
generally turns out to be the simpler act of imitating
Milton. No one ever said that nature and Milton were
everywhere the same, but also no one ever said, after
Milton, that the Sublime and Milton were not every¬
where the same. To write poetry, in the past, was to
read Homer or Milton or Goethe or Tennyson or
Pound, and to write poetry these days in the United
States is to read Wallace Stevens. I take it that I am
stating obvious truths. Why do we resist such truths?
By “we” I mean readers, and not just readers who
have turned into professional poets. There is an
element in each of us that wants poetry always to be
more original than it possibly can be, and I think this
element is worth some speculation.
One way to understand what I mean by “influence”
is to see it as a trope substituting for “tradition,” a
substitution that makes for a sense of loss, since
“influence,” unlike “tradition,” is not a daemonic or a
numinous term. “Tradition” invokes the Sublime, and
 The Necessity of Misreading roj

the Grotesque; “Influence” invokes at best the pictur¬

esque, at worst the pathetic or even the bathetic. No
one is ever happy about being influenced; poets can’t
stand it, critics are nervous about it, and all of us as
students necessarily feel that we are getting or have
gotten rather too much of it. To be influenced is to be
taught, and while we all, at whatever age, need to go
on learning, we resent more and more being taught, as
we become older and crankier. Yet no one genuinely
resents discovering he or she has grand precursors, at a
certain saving distance. Nietzsche, increasingly wary
about Schopenhauer, was delighted to discover fresh
ancestors wherever he could, even in as unlikely a
figure as Spinoza. “Influence,” substituting for “tradi¬
tion,” shows us that we are nurtured by distortion, and
not by apostolic succession. “Influence” exposes and
de-idealizes “tradition,” not by appearing as a cunning
distortion of “tradition,” but by showing us that all
“tradition” is indistinguishable from making mistakes
about anteriority. The more “tradition” is exalted, the
more egregious the mistakes become. I will venture the
formula that only minor or weak poets, who threaten
nobody, can be read accurately. Strong poets must be
mis-read; there are no generous errors to be made in
apprehending them, any more than their own errors of
reading are ever generous. Every strong poet carica¬
tures tradition and every strong poet is then necessar¬
ily mis-read by the tradition that he fosters. The
strongest of poets are so severely mis-read that the
generally accepted, broad interpretations of their work
actually tend to be the exact opposites of what the
poems truly are.
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM IO4

Milton, who declined every dualism, is thus read

wholly dualistically by the dominant modern tradition
of interpretation, of which C. S. Lewis was a leading
representative. Wordsworth, a wholly antithetical poet,
has been read as a primary healer, a nature-thau-
maturgist. Stevens, a qualified but still incessant Tran-
scendentalist, is being read as an ironist and as an
exposer of poetry’s pretensions. “Influence” clearly is a
very troublesome trope, and one that we substitute
with continually, whether we want to or not, because
“Influence” appears also to be another term for
another apparent opposite, “Defense.”
“Defense” is an odd notion, particularly in psychoa¬
nalysis, where it always tends to mean a rather active
and aggressive process. In psychic life, as in interna¬
tional affairs, “defense” is frequently murderous. In
the realms of the inter-poetic, defense is rather mur¬
derous also, because there defense is always against
influence. But the inter-poetic, as I keep saying, is only
a trope for the reading-process, and so I propose the
unhappy formula that reading is always a defensive
process, a process that I believe becomes severely
quickened when we read poems. Reading is defensive
warfare, however generously or joyously we read, and
with whatever degree of love, for in such love or such
pleasure there is more-than-usual acute ambivalence.
Before brooding on the defensive nature of reading,
I want to defend my constant insistence on acknowl¬
edging tropes as being the actuality of critical dis¬
course, even as critical argument seems to me the
actual staple of poetic discourse. When current French
critics talk about what they call “language,” they are
 The Necessity of Misreading /05

using “language” as a trope. Their scientism is irrele¬

vant, and is not the issue here, but the terms of that
scientism are necessarily the issue, since their value-
words, including “language” and “structure,” are al¬
most wholly figurative. All of their invocations of
semiology or the archeology of discourse conceal a few
simple defensive tropes, and they are at least as guilty
of reifying their own metaphors as any American
bourgeois formalist has been. To say that the thinking
subject is a fiction, and that the manipulation of
language by that subject merely extends a fiction, is no
more enlightening in itself than it would be to say
“language” is the thinking subject, and the human
psyche the object of discourse. Language is hardly in
itself a privileged kind of explanation, and linguistic
models are useful only for linguistic problems. The
obsession with “language” is one of the clearest
instances of a defensive trope in modern literary
discourse, from Nietzsche to the present moment. It is
a latecomer’s defense, since it seeks to make of
“language” a perpetual earliness, or a freshness, rather
than a medium always aged by the shadows of
anteriority. Shelley thought that language was the
remnant of abandoned fragmented cyclic poems, and
Emerson saw language as fossil poetry. Is this less
persuasive than currently modish views that literature
is merely a special form of language?
Shelley and Emerson, for all their visionary ideal¬
ism, were not wholly out of the basic Anglo-American
philosophical tradition, in which Locke is always the
central figure. Even Blake, who made fun of Locke, is
not from the Continental point of view a dialectical
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM I06

thinker, and I would suggest that the real difference

between Blake and Nietzsche is the empirical strain
that surprisingly persists in Blake. Dialectical thinking,
whether of the various Marxist or Structuralist kinds,
adapts neatly to the so-called linguistic model, just as
Anglo-American empirical thinking does not, or at
least not often so readily. An empirical thinker,
confronted by a text, seeks a meaning. Something in
him says: “If this is a complete and independent text,
then it has a meaning.” It saddens me to say that this
apparently commonsensical assumption is not true.
Texts don’t have meanings, except in their relations to
other texts, so that there is something uneasily dialecti¬
cal about literary meaning. A single text has only part
of a meaning; it is itself a synecdoche for a larger
whole including other texts. A text is a relational
event, and not a substance to be analyzed. But of
course, so are we relational events or dialectical
entities, rather than free-standing units. The issue is
how either texts or people are to be dialectically
apprehended and studied, and here Anglo-American
empiricism and Continental modes can do very little
to enlighten one another. Though I acknowledge from
the start that poems are dialectical events, I still take
up a relatively empiricist stance in regard to poems,
though with a peculiar epistemological twist in my
empiricism. Emerson denied that there was any his¬
tory; there was only biography, he said. I adapt this to
saying that there is no literary history, but that while
there is biography, and only biography, a truly literary
biography is largely a history of the defensive mis¬
readings of one poet by another poet. A biography
 The Necessity of Misreading ioy

becomes literary biography only when literary mean¬

ing is produced, and literary meaning can only result
from the interpretation of literature. Poetry begins,
always, when someone who is going to become a poet
reads a poem. But I immediately add—when he begins
to read a poem, for to see how fully he reads that poem
we will have to see the poem that he himself will write
as his reading. If we are talking about two strong poets,
with a genuine difference between them, then the
reading we are talking about is necessarily a mis-read-
ing or, as I like to call it, a poetic misprision. And here
I must pause to explain yet again why I insist upon
mis-reading or misinterpretation as being the com-
monal or normal mode of poetic history.
Emerson, who disliked history enough to assert that
it didn’t exist, said that this human mind had invented
history and so this human mind could understand and
dismiss history. The Sphinx could solve its own
enigma, for the Sphinx had created that enigma.
Emerson, perhaps by way of Michelet or Cousin,
was following Vico, with his superb principle that we
could only understand what we ourselves had made. A
reader understanding a poem is indeed understanding
his own reading of that poem. If the reading is wholly
a received one, then it will not produce other readings.
An entire academy can convene to declare that
reading the right one, but of course it will be wrong. It
will also be weak. There are weak mis-readings and
strong mis-readings, just as there are weak poems and
strong poems, but there are no right readings, because
reading a text is necessarily the reading of a whole
system of texts, and meaning is always wandering
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM I08

around between texts. The meaning of a poem by

Stevens, say The Snow Man or The Course of a
Particular, just isn’t in the text of The Snow Man or The
Course of a Particular. Nor is it in Ruskin on the
Pathetic Fallacy, Shelley on the leaves and the West
Wind, Emerson on the paradoxical nothingness and
universalism of the Transcendent Observer, Coleridge
on Dejection, Whitman on diffusing the self in air. The
meaning of The Snow Man or The Course of a
Particular problematically plays back and forth be¬
tween its language and the language of those texts. It
was in this connection that I recall venturing the
apothegm that the meaning of a poem could only be
another poem. Not, I point out, the meaning of another
poem, but the other poem itself, indeed the otherness of
the other poem.
I find it curious how many modern theorists actually
talk about poems when they assert that they are
talking about people. Lacan defines the Unconscious
as the discourse of the Other. That is a fine trope,
though probably it is gorgeous nonsense. Freud’s
Unconscious is itself a powerful trope, and as a
representation is painfully effective. Had Lacan said
that poetry was the discourse of the Other, he scarcely
would have been troping. If I can invoke a somewhat
greater and more central man, then I question also the
grand formula that Poetry is a man speaking to men.
Poetry is poems speaking to a poem, and is also that
poem answering back with its own defensive discourse.
With the burden of defense, I have returned to a
central problem of my own stance, with its self-contra¬
dictory mixture of empirical and dialectical presuppo-
 The Necessity of Misreading 109

sitions. There are two defenses for self-contradiction in

criticism. One would be the Emersonian-Whitmanian
flamboyance of chanting that consistency is the
hobgoblin of little minds, and that a large conscious¬
ness contradicts itself because it contains multitudes.
Unfortunately, we have all of us arrived too late in the
day to take on such flamboyance. The more appropri¬
ate defense is to look at the language of the poets, and
not at any theory of language, including the poet’s
own, and to observe in the language of the poems a
perpetual self-contradiction between empirical and
dialectical assumptions. I knowingly urge critical
theory to stop treating itself as a branch of philosophi¬
cal discourse, and to adopt instead the pragmatic
dualism of the poets themselves, as I can see not the
least relationship of what we have called poetics to the
actual problematics of reading poetry. A theory of
poetry must belong to poetry, must be poetry, before it
can be of any use in interpreting poems. For several
hundred years now, at least, poems have located
themselves smack in the midst of what Stevens called
the dumbfoundering abyss between ourselves and the
object, or between ourselves and other selves. The
strong poets simultaneously and self-refutingly define
themselves by an outrageous mixture of two incompati¬
ble assumptions, the first being that the poem they seek
to write will stand by itself, as a unified idea of the
poem, Stevens’ Anecdote of the Jar being a defiantly
parodistic example:

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill,
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM I 10

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it.

And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.

The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

But since this is a strong poem, it contradicts itself,

and it also asserts, with every one of its rhetorically
defensive gestures, that it is only part of a mutilated
whole, which is the fundamental gesture of the irony of
all dialectic. Stevens’ opening joke is purely dialecti¬
cal: I placed ajar, not on a hill in Tennessee, but just
in Tennessee, as though the whole state had reified into
a single separate entity or substance. Tennessee is now
a single hill and a slovenly wilderness, but because of
the self-insistence of a single poetical jar Tennessee
gets organized, firmed up, and so the wilderness rises
up, still sprawling, but tamed.
The jar remains firmly antithetical, and everything
else in Tennessee abides in the state of nature, and the
whole poem starts to look like a trope of pathos, a
synecdoche for desire. If we compare this little poem
to our map of misreading or misprision, we will find
that it follows rather faithfully the great Wordswor¬
thian crisis-poem model, though it takes a pretty
cheerful attitude towards what it insouciantly regards
 The Necessity of Misreading Ill

as a merely technical crisis, that is to say, somebody

else’s crisis all right, but not mine. The poem becomes
rather like someone whistling a chorus of “The bells of
hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling/ For you but not for me,” but
the poem remains dialectical enough to break off
without going on to: “O death where is thy sting-a-
ling-a-ling,/ O grave thy victory?” Stevens’ anecdote
isn’t a triumph, it is just an anecdote, and its metalep-
tic conclusion introjects an antithetical future only by
reminding us that all in the past is projected, and by
forcing us to see that there is no present tense in the
poem at all, and indeed no presence, no fullness of
meaning whatsoever. The poet is a fellow who went
about placing jars. If you placed the jar properly, you
achieved a certain perspective. Your placing, however
well you did it, was necessarily a failed metaphor,
because all a metaphor does is to change a perspective,
so that the phrase “a failed metaphor” becomes a
tautology. A jar may be a unity, and you can do with
Tennessee what you will, but as soon as you troped
your jar you mutilated it, and it took dominion only by
self-reduction from fullness to emptiness.
I suggest the following formula: poems are apotro-
paic litanies, systems of defensive tropes and troping
defenses, and what they seek to ward off is essentially
the abyss in their own assumptions about themselves,
at once empirically reifying and dialectically ironizing.
A theory of poetic influence becomes a theory of
misreading because only misreading allows a poem to
keep going in its own philosophical contradictions.
Schizophrenia is disaster in life, and success in poetry.
A strong poem starts out strong by knowing and
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM I 12

showing that it must be mis-read, that it must force the

reader to take up a stance that he knows to be untrue.
The poem is a lie about itself, but it only gets to itself,
by lying against time, and its only way of lying against
time is to lie about previous poems, and it can lie
about them only by mis-reading them, which com¬
pletes our bewilderingly perverse revision of a her¬
meneutic circle, and returns us to the problematic
question of the reader.
It is a curiosity, as I’ve remarked already, of much
nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourse about
both the nature of the human, and about ideas, that
the discourse is remarkably clarified if we substitute
“poem” for “person,” or “poem” for “idea.” The
moral psychologist, philosopher or psychoanalyst is
discovered to be talking about poems, and not about
psyches or concepts or beliefs. Nietzsche and Freud
seem to me to be major instances of this surprising
displacement, but examples abound in other major
speculators.
Throughout his notebook aphorisms, posthumously
edited as The Will to Power, Nietzsche speaks of ideas
as if they were poems. In the following excerpt, I have
changed only one word, substituting “poem” for
“ideal”:

A poem that wants to prevail or assert itself

seeks to support itself (a) by a spurious origin, (b)
by a pretended relationship with powerful poems
already existing, (C) by the thrill of mystery, as if
a power that cannot be questioned spoke
 The Necessity of Misreading i ij

through it, (d) by defamation of poems that

oppose it, (e) by a mendacious doctrine of the
advantages it brings with it, e.g., happiness,
repose of soul, peace or the assistance of a
powerful God . . .
If one discovers all the defensive and protec¬
tive measures by which a poem maintains itself,
is it then refuted? It has employed the means by
which all living things live and grow—they are
one and all “immoral.”

If we move from Nietzsche on an “ideal” to

Nietzsche on a “thing,” we still have revealing defini¬
tions of poetry, when we substitute “poem” for
“thing”:

A poem is the sum of its effects, synthetically

united by a concept, an image.

Nietzsche is attacking the High German metaphysi¬

cal notion of the “thing-in-itself,” a notion that I
suspect still lingers in the Coleridgean exaltation of
poetry that we have inherited. In the following excerpt,
I have substituted “poem” for “thing” again:

The properties of a poem are effects on other

poems:
If one removes other poems, then a poem has
no properties, i.e., there is no poem without other
poems, i.e., there is no poem-in-itself.
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM I 14

I wish now to turn the Nietzschean polemic against

myself, and against the residue of metaphysics in my
own ideas-of-influence, by citing another excerpt, and
again substituting “poems” for “things,” and “poet”
for “subject.” One can deny the primacy of “language”
over desire, yet still acknowledge that the idea of a
thinking subject, an author, writing a poem, his poem,
still partakes of a fiction:

When one has grasped that the poet is not

someone that creates effects, but only a fiction,
much follows.
It is only after the model of the poet that we
have invented the reality of poems and projected
them into the medley of sensations. If we no
longer believe in the effective poet, then belief
also disappears in effective poems, in reciproca¬
tion, cause and effect between those phenomena
that we call poems.

Influence, as I employ it, is not a doctrine of

causation. It does not mean that an earlier poem
causes a later one, that Paradise Lost causes The
Prelude or The Four Zoas. Necessarily, therefore,
influence as a composite trope for poetic tradition,
indeed for poetry itself, does away not only with the
idea that there are poems-in-themselves, but also with
the more stubborn idea that there are poets-in-them-
selves. If there are no texts, then there are no
authors—to be a poet is to be an inter-poet, as it were.
But we must go farther yet—there are no poems, and
 The Necessity of Misreading 115

no poets, but there is also no reader, except insofar as

he or she is an interpreter. “Reading” is impossible
because the received text is already a received interpre¬
tation, is already a value interpreted into a poem.
I have been citing Nietzsche, largely because he
does not cease to upset me, but I have come to the
point where I abandon him for Emerson, though the
point is one he seems to share with Emerson. But this is
a seeming only, and the difference between Nietzsche
and Emerson here is a true difference, though it turns
only upon a change in stance or attitude in regard to
an agreed-upon vision. I cite another notebook pas¬
sage from Nietzsche, this time with no words substi¬
tuted for his:

“Interpretation,” the introduction of meaning

—not “explanation” (in most cases a new inter¬
pretation over an old interpretation that has
become incomprehensible, that is now itself only
a sign). There are no facts, everything is in flux,
incomprehensible, elusive; what is relatively
most enduring is our opinions.

In another of his notebook jottings, Nietzsche

brooded upon self-divination or poetic God-making,
speaking of himself in terms that elsewhere he applied
specifically to Emerson:

So many strange things have passed before me

in those timeless moments that fall into one’s life
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM I l6

as if from the moon, when one no longer has any

idea how old one is or how young one will yet be.

Of Emerson, Nietzsche cunningly remarked: “He

does not know how old he is already, or how young he
is still going to be.” Nietzsche’s point about both
Emerson and himself is that they both rejected belat¬
edness, or forgot their way into a perpetual earliness.
The most beautiful passage of this sort that I know of
in Nietzsche is an aphorism from Human All Too
Human, an aphorism on art as afterglow, indeed a
remarkable metaleptic reversal or transumption of the
Zarathustran image of the solar trajectory:

the afterglow of art. Just as in old age we

remember our youth and celebrate festivals of
memory, so in a short time mankind will stand
toward art: its relation will be that of a touching
memory of the joys of youth. Never, perhaps, in
former ages was art dealt with so seriously and
thoughtfully as now when it appears to be
surrounded by the magic influence of death. We
call to mind that Greek city in southern Italy,
which once a year still celebrates its Greek feasts,
amidst tears and mourning, that foreign barba¬
rism triumphs ever more and more over the
customs its people brought with them into the
land; and nowhere has Hellenism been so much
appreciated, nowhere has this golden nectar been
drunk with so much delight, as amongst these
fast-disappearing Hellenes. The artist will soon
 The Necessity of Misreading iij
come to be regarded as a splendid relic, and to
him, as to a wonderful stranger on whose power
and beauty depended the happiness of former
ages, there will be paid such honor as is not often
enjoyed by one of our race. The best in us is
perhaps inherited from the sentiments of former
times, to which it is hardly possible for us now to
return by direct ways; the sun has already
disappeared, but the heavens of our life are still
glowing and illumined by it, although we can
behold it no longer.

How does Emerson differ from this transumptive

stance? Only, I think, in his insistence upon re-cen¬
tering the interpretative sign, though Emerson knows
also that every interpretation is doomed to dwindle
down and away into incomprehensibility, indeed into
another layer in a palimpsest. How then can Emerson
present himself so insouciantly as a central interpreter,
with a suave self-confidence that Nietzsche always
envied, yet could never emulate? I verge here on the
truly problematic confrontation of my own belated¬
ness, my conscious adoption of a Kabbalistic model
for interpretation. Kabbalistic models, like Emerson’s
Orphism or Nietzschean or Heideggerian deconstruc¬
tions, exile any reader still farther away from any text.
I too want to increase the distance between text and
reader, to raise the rhetoricity of the reader’s stance, to
make the reader more self-consciously belated. How
can such a reader make his misreadings more central
and so stronger than any other misreader? How can
there be a central misreading?
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM I 18

In plain terms, I am asking: What is the difference

between two closely related interpretative stances, one
that asks, with Nietzsche: Who is the Interpreter, and
what kind of power does he seek to gain over the text?
While the other says, with Emerson, that only the truth
as old as oneself reaches one, that “It is God in you
that responds to God without, or affirms his own
words trembling on the lips of another”? How, for
interpreters, do the Will to Power and Self-Reliance
differ? Of course, neither interpretative stance can be
rigidly defined, anyway. On the one side, there is
Nietzsche’s parodistic rhetoric and his bewildering
perspectivism. On the other, there is Emerson’s subtle
antinomianism of rhetoric, and the outrageousness of
his general advice: “Leave your theory, as Joseph his
coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.” Still, the
difference can be defined, and it is this: for Nietzsche,
the trope is an error, albeit necessary and valuable; for
Emerson, the trope is a defense, a life-enhancing
defense. Forty years or so before Nietzsche set down
his Will to Power thoughts upon interpretation, Emer¬
son in 1841 filled his journal with acute insights as to
why we and nature alike were tropes, and why it was
the use of life to learn metonymy. Here is an Emerson
cento, circa 1841:

I have seen enough of the obedient sea wave

forever lashing the obedient shore. I find no
emblems here that speak any other language
than the sleep and abandonment of my woods
and blueberry pastures at home . . .
 The Necessity of Misreading ng

The metamorphosis of Nature shows itself in

nothing more than this, that there is no word in
our language that cannot become typical to us of
Nature by giving it emphasis. The world is a
Dancer; it is a Rosary; it is a Torrent; it is a
Boat; a Mist; a Spider’s Snare; it is what you
will; and the metaphor will hold, and it will give
the imagination keen pleasure. Swifter than light
the world converts itself into that thing you
name, and all things find their right place under
this new and capricious classification. There is
nothing small or mean to the soul. It derives as
grand a joy from symbolizing the Godhead or his
universe under the form of a moth or a gnat as of
a Lord of Hosts. Must I call the heaven and the
earth a maypole and country fair with booths, or
an anthill, or an old coat, in order to give you the
shock of pleasure which the imagination loves
and the sense of spiritual greatness? Call it a
blossom, a rod, a wreath of parsley, a tamarisk-
crown, a cock, a sparrow, the ear instantly hears
and the spirit leaps to the trope . . .
... I like gardens and nurseries. Give me
initiative, spermatic, prophesying, man-making
words.

The underlying insight here, that the trope is a

defense, is summed up in the strong essay, Nominalist
and Realist, where both trope and defense are sub¬
sumed in the fine New England category that Emerson
calls a “trick,” which is a synonym that I gladly would
accept for my more cumbersome “revisionary ratio.”
For Emerson, tropes are defensive tricks:
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 120

For Nature, who abhors mannerism, has set

her heart on breaking up all styles and tricks,
and it is so much easier to do what one has done
before than to do a new thing, that there is a
perpetual tendency to a set mode. In every
conversation, even the highest, there is a certain
trick, which may be soon learned by an acute
person, and then that particular style continued
indefinitely. Each man too is a tyrant in tend¬
ency, because he would impose his idea on
others; and their trick is their natural defence.
. . . If John was perfect, why are you and I
alive?

In his old age, Emerson was to re-define metonymy

as “seeing the same sense in things so diverse,” and we
can observe that the Emersonian reduction or kenosis
which resulted in metonymy was usually the defense of
isolation, or solipsism carried to an ultimate and magic
realism. An isolating substitution brings about a
re-centering, however unstably, whereas Nietzsche’s
sublimating substitution or perspectivizing metaphor
necessarily de-centers. For Nietzsche, every trope is a
change in perspective, in which outside becomes
inside. For Emerson, every trope burns away context,
and when enough context has been dissolved, a
pragmatic fresh center appears. Again, for Emerson,
societal and historical contexts burned away into the
flux as readily as literary contexts did, and so ulti¬
mately his vision of self-reliance is one that cheerfully
concedes the final reliance of the self upon the self, its
condition of perfect sphericity, in which it knows and
 The Necessity of Misreading 121

glories in its ultimate defense or trick, which is that it

must be misinterpreted by every other self whatsoever.
No one would survive socially if he or she went
around assuming or saying that he or she had to be
misinterpreted, by everyone whosoever, but fortu¬
nately poems don’t have to survive either in civil
society or in a state of nature. Poems fight for survival
in a state of poems, which by definition has been, is
now, and is always going to be badly overpopulated.
Any poem’s initial problem is to make room for
itself—it must force the previous poems to move over
and so clear some space for it. A new poem is not
unlike a small child placed with a lot of other small
children in a small playroom, with a limited number of
toys, and no adult supervision whatever.
I turn to that limited number of toys, whose uses are
all but infinite, the tropes or turns of poetic language,
for only these allow for the paradox that one poem’s
clearing away of another, through misprision, is mani¬
fested more by difference than by similarity. What is
the difference between a reading that is criticism and a
reading that is a new poem? All of us have read many
critical readings, and at times we reflect or should
reflect on the oddity that the criticism frequently has a
stronger apparent presence than the poem upon which
it comments. Indeed the criticism can seem to have
more unity, more form, more meaning. Is it just that
the critic has become more than adequate to the poem,
or is it perhaps that the critic’s illusions about the
nature of poetry are governing the nature of his
commentary? I will list the four largest illusions that
we tend to have about the nature of a poem:
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 122

1. There is the religious illusion, that a poem pos¬

sesses or creates a real presence.
2. There is the organic illusion, that a poem pos¬
sesses or creates a kind of unity.
3. There is the rhetorical illusion, that a poem
possesses or creates a definite form.
4. There is the metaphysical illusion, that a poem
possesses or creates meaning.

The sad truth is that poems don’t have presence,

unity, form, or meaning. Presence is a faith, unity is a
mistake or even a lie, form is a metaphor, and meaning
is an arbitrary and now repetitious metaphysics. What
then does a poem possess or create? Alas, a poem has
nothing, and creates nothing. Its presence is a promise,
part of the substance of things hoped for, the evidence
of things not seen. Its unity is in the good will of its
reader. Its form is another version of the inside/
outside metaphor of the dualizing Post-Cartesian
West, which means that form in poetry is always
merely a change in perspective. Finally, its meaning is
just that there is, or rather was, another poem. A poem
is a substitution for a lost first chance, which pragmati¬
cally means for another poem. Substitution, whatever
it becomes in life, is in poetry primarily a rhetorical
process, which returns us to the primacy of the trope.
I don’t wish to repeat here anything of what I’ve
said already about the defensive nature of tropes,
particularly in Chapter 5 of A Map of Misreading,
where I expound the map itself. My concern now is
with the history of interpretation, which means neces¬
sarily with the history of revisionism and of canon-

OB-10725—062475—04:01—RFV-OO—0112
 The Necessity of Misreading 123

formation in purely secular literary tradition. My

suggestion is that the history of poetry is also governed
by the primacy of the trope, and by the defensive
nature of the trope. There is of course nothing
particularly original about such a suggestion. Hayden
White in his recent Metahistory has examined the
governing tropes of many of the major nineteenth-
century historians, and also, in an essay on Foucault,
White usefully has decoded Foucault, showing Fou¬
cault’s hidden reliance upon tropes in his deconstruc¬
tions of the history of ideas. Similarly, Derrida and de
Man have perfected the Nietzschean-Heideggerian
mode of deconstruction, in which the illusion of
presence in texts is cleared away, in favor of what
Derrida calls the “supplementary difference,” a rather
baroque, ornamental name for the trope-as-misread¬
ing, which Jarry called by the Lucretian name of
clinamen, a ’Pataphysical naming that I myself have
followed. De Man has re-vivified the Nietzschean
critique of history, applying it to literary modernism in
particular, and subtly extending Nietzschean perspec-
tivism so that it becomes a deconstruction of all
inside/outside dichotomies that have obscured the
study of Romanticism. Rather less interestingly, there
have been many abortive attempts to displace literary
history into the reductive categories of linguistics, or
the scientism of semiotics. But literary history is itself
always misprision, and so is literature always mispri¬
sion, and so is criticism, as a part of literature. Like
poetry, the history of poetry is necessarily apotropaic.
Its prime characteristic is that it is always warding
something off, always defending against real or illu-
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 124

sory enemies, or against itself. Error is too wide a

category to aid much in achieving an authentic literary
history. Within the too-large vista of truth/falsehood
distinctions we can locate and map the narrower and
more poetic area of love/hate relationships, for psy¬
chic ambivalence is the natural context in which the
reading of poetry takes place. All tropes falsify, and
some falsify more than others. But it would be a
hopeless quest for criticism to follow philosophy in its
benighted meanderings after truth. How can it be the
function of criticism to decide the truth/falsehood
value of texts, when every reading of a text is itself a
falsification, and when every text itself falsifies an¬
other? But, at something like this stage I always hear
the protest: “What has happened to the notion of good
interpretation or of accurate criticism?”
Oscar Wilde wrote many profound and beautiful
essays, but his masterpiece is the critical dialogue
called The Decay of Lying. Wilde, as a good disciple of
Walter Pater, was a superb antithetical critic. As his
spokesman, Vivian, says in this dialogue, what is fatal
to the imagination is to fall into “careless habits of
accuracy.” Art, fortunately, is not accurate, for it “has
never once told us the truth.” In a remarkable vision,
Wilde’s Vivian shows us Romance returning to us, by
all the tropes of poetry coming to life, by all the
“beautiful untrue things” crowding upon us. In the
almost equally audacious dialogue, The Critic as Artist,
Wilde denies the supposed distinction between poetry
and criticism. Criticism, as the record of the critic’s
soul, is called by Wilde “the only civilized form of
autobiography.” Against Arnold, Wilde insisted that
 The Necessity of Misreading 125

“the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in

itself it really is not.” Wilde’s superb denial that
interpretation is a mimesis, is a good starting-point for
ridding our judgments of the notion that good criti¬
cism establishes itself through sound descriptiveness.
We do not speak of poems as being more or less useful,
or as being right or wrong. A poem is either weak and
forgettable, or else strong and so memorable. Strength
here means the strength of imposition. A poet is strong
because poets after him must work to evade him. A
critic is strong if his readings similarly provoke other
readings. What allies the strong poet and the strong
critic is that there is a necessary element in their
respective misreadings.
But again, I hear the question: “Why do you insist
upon misreading?' My answer is that a reading, to be
strong, must be a misreading, for no strong reading
can fail to insist upon itself. A strong reading does not
say: “This might mean that, or again that might mean
this.” There is no “this” or “that” for the strong
reading. According to the strong reading, it and the
text are one. But since the strong text is itself a strong
misreading, we actually confront a doubling, in which
one act of misprision displaces an earlier act of
misprision. As Wilde said: “Creation is always behind
the age. It is Criticism that leads us. The Critical Spirit
and the World-Spirit are one.”
Some of the consequences of what I am saying
dismay even me. Thus, it cheers me up to say that the
misreading of Milton’s Satan by Blake and Shelley is a
lot stronger than the misreading of Satan by C. S.
Lewis or Charles Williams, let alone than the pitifully
 KABBALAH AND CRITICISM 126

weak misreading of Satan by T. S. Eliot. But I am

rather downcast when I reflect that the misreading of
Blake and Shelley by Yeats is a lot stronger than the
misreading of Blake and Shelley by Bloom. Still, I cast
my vote for Oscar Wilde’s insight: a strong poem lies
against time, and against the strong poems before it,
and a strong criticism must do the same. Nothing is
gained by continuing to idealize reading, as though
reading were not an art of defensive warfare. Poetic
language makes of the strong reader what it will, and it
chooses to make him into a liar. Interpretation is
revisionism, and the strongest readers so revise as to
make every text belated, and themselves as readers
into children of the dawn, earlier and fresher than any
completed text ever could hope to be. Every poem
already written is in the evening-land. It may blaze
there as the evening star, but the strong reader lurking
in every one of us knows finally what Stevens knew,
that no star can suffice if it remains external to us:

Likewise to say of the evening star.

The most ancient light in the most ancient sky,

That it is wholly an inner light, that it shines

From the sleepy bosom of the real, re-creates,
Searches a possible for its possibleness.
 EPILOGUE
The Name Spoken Over the Water

At midnight he went down to the lake, to hear the

l\. name spoken over the water, but found no one
there to meet him.
So he became two, one to speak the name and one
to receive it.
He forgot which one was which.
Both spoke the name, and neither received it.
Then both stood to hear it, but it was not spoken.
Rabbi Isaac Luria used to say that Rabbi Moses
Cordovero dealt only with the world of confusion
[olam ha-tohu] while he, Luria, dealt with the world of
restitution [olam ha-tikkunj.
Yet the learned Shabbetai Zevi used to say about
Rabbi Isaac Luria that he built a fine chariot [merka-
bah] in his day but neglected to say who was riding on
it.
1Z3846 Z9<o

fMoonn
KcLbbalfltK and eribiciStri

r> r TE rv r

J
(continued from front flap)

Kabbalah and Criticism underlines

the fact that Harold Bloom’s close read¬
ing of texts derives not primarily from the
New Criticism, that his rich psychological
insights go beyond the classics of Freudi-
anism, that his elaborate interpretive
schemata are far from derivative syntheses
of a Nietzsche or an Emerson—Kabbalah
and Criticism underlines the fact that
Bloom’s entire critical oeuvre either di¬
rectly or indirectly has been inspired by
the hermeneutical principles and meth¬
ods of the major kabbalistic interpreters.
Kabbalah and Criticism provides a
study of the Kabbalah itself, of its great
commentators and the “revisionary ra¬
tios” they employed, and of its signifi¬
cance as a model for contemporary criti¬
cism. It is thus an indispensable book for
all students of literature as well as for all
those who are fascinated by this singularly
rich body of mystical writings whose in¬
fluence is possibly greater now than at any
other time in history.
Harold Bloom is DeVane Professor
of the Humanities at Yale University.

Jacket design by Spencer Drate

A Continuum Book (
THE SEABURY PRESS
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ISBN: 0-8164-9264-6
HHarold 'Bloom
A CONTINUUM BOOK
THE SEABURY PRESS • NEW YORK