Harold Bloom: Anti-Inkling? | Hacker News Reader

Harold Bloom: Anti-Inkling?

jewishreviewofbooks.com

55 pointslermontov15 comments

It's worth providing the context in which CS Lewis praised 'A Voyage to Arcturus:' it's in a list of what he considered the best mythopoeic fiction. The quote below is from Lewis' essay 'On Science Fiction,' available e.g. in his collection 'Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories'

> Specimens of this kind [of fiction], at its best, will never be common. I would include parts of the Odyssey, the Hymn to Aphrodite, Much of the Kalevala and The Fairie Queene, some of Malory (but none of Malory's best work) and more of Huon, parts of Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen, The Ancient Mariner and Christabel, Beckford's Vathek, Morris's Jason and the Prologue (little else) of the Earthly Paradise, MacDonald's Phantastes, Lilith, and The Golden Key, Eddison's Worm Ouroboros, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and that shattering, intolerable, and irresistible work, David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus. Also Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan.

Lindsay's "A Voyage to Arcturus" is available at Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1329.

Lindsay coins terms for two new colors, jale and ulfire but you'll need to be on Arcturus to see them. An amazing and far-reaching fantasy.

Currently reading it. Quite an experience. I am discussing it with a friend as I am reading it. Don't quite catch all the gnostic references, possible causes of the weird names etc. but still intriguing.

>Tolkien, Lewis and Williams actually flatter the reader’s Narcissism, while morally softening the reader’s Promethianism. Lindsay strenuously assaults the reader’s Narcissism, while both hardening the reader’s Promethianism and yet reminding the reader that Narcissism and Promethianism verge upon an identity. Inkling fantasy is soft stuff, because it pretends that it benefits from a benign transmission both of romance tradition and of Christian doctrine.

Bloom is a good critic and possibly the most well-read person ever, but he's not a particularly good writer. What does this sentence mean? Does Bloom even know? I'm skeptical

>Given these swerves, gaps, and evasions, it starts to look as if it was actually the Inklings, and especially Lewis, who got under Bloom’s skin.

A freudian twist

Plainly not true. Bloom just particularly despised them for their neo-Christianity, which makes sense as he was a jew, most of whose family was massacred in the holocaust.

He also seemed to despise Jews, at least according to the article. Perhaps he just didn't like theists.

I don't think it's as plain as you do. That he despised their religious views doesn't mean they didn't influence him and his work, even against his will and preference — in fact, in a way that accords with (my understanding of) Bloom's own views on how influence operates.

I'm also not sure how his family's death in the Holocaust is related to Bloom's view of the Inklings' Christianity; Christianity was at most peripherally involved in that particular instance of persecution, as I understand it.

I think it's unfair to even say "at most peripherally involved". There should have been greater opposition to hitlers rise to power (such as the Catholic Church treaty with hitlers Germany), but that's about it.

If Bloom had religious objections it was probably more to religion in general.

Maybe, at a stretch, he didn't like that Lewis' wife converted to Christianity before she married him. Lewis' stepsons were (are) Jewish. Lewis kept a Kosher house for at least some period of time for his stepsons. His Jewish stepsons inherited his estate after his brother passed away.

"At most peripherally involved" was mostly to avoid having a conversation about minor religious considerations like exactly these.

“We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity [...] in fact our movement is Christian.”

-- Adolf Hitler

@dang, please can you consider doing something about this thread. It seems to have dissolved into trolling.

Lee claims on his website to be waging a war on religious privilege, whatever that is. I assume that means trolling anyone he believes to be a thiest.

Hitlers version of Christianity did not even require the belief in Christ. It was twisted evil propoganda designed to combat the Christian Church which he deemed "negative Christiananity".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_Christianity

I don't agree that Lee is trolling. I think he is mistaken in putting any trust in Hitler's religious propaganda — it was certainly to his benefit to curry favor with Christians — but there's no trolling in quoting the man himself.

If you look at the changes Adolf Hitler made in the churches of Germany, it becomes clear that his idea of good religion, or at least useful religion, was far removed from any previously-practiced Christianity, his opinion notwithstanding.

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I assumed that steve19 probably doesn't understand what "trolling" means, but didn't think it would be useful to debate it.

I think we need to make a distinction between Hitler's personal religion, which although he was raised a Christian, was some crazy amalgam that he mixed up himself, and the faith of essentially every SS member and ordinary German citizen who closed their eyes to the brutality visited upon the Jewish minority: they were all Christians. Hitler may not have remained, personally, a Christian, but the Holocaust was only possible because of the way that Christians were trained to think about Jews. In my own lifetime, in the United States, I've heard Christians seethe with hatred against the "Christ killers"; imagine 1930s Germany. Martin Luther, the founder of German protestantism, wrote obsessively about how vile and filthy the Jews were, that their synagogues should be burned, their property seized, and even that they should be slaughtered. The Holocaust was a systematic, literal prosecution of Luther's program for the Jews. Hitler and the top Nazi officials frequently quoted Luther, and Hitler admired him in his autobiography. If the Nazi movement and the Holocaust were not Christian, why were the Jews, then, in particular, the targets?

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