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Time to introduce a new dimension to the Band. Now that the historical nature of West is coming into focus, we can look at positive creations that have been ignored or vilified by the inverted modern institutions that masquerade as knowledge. This post was going to focus on Tolkien's
Silmarillion after some set-up, but the set-up took on a life of its own and plans shifted. Instead it summarizes the relevant points and considers what passes for "Literature" in academic discourse and why Postmodernism was the logical consequence of an inverted system. This led to Harold Bloom, a gnostic luciferian with a familiar smell who somehow became heralded as a champion of the Western tradition, like a more erudite pre-internet Lobster Pope. Then we go through Tolkien's
On Fairy Stories - an essay that offers a very different vision of the Literature of the West. One based in the same foundations connected by Logos that defines the tradition. It is long, but it moves. We hope you stick around.
Ted Nasmith, At Lake Cuivienen
The first awakening of the Elves in The Silmarillion. The book is staggering in scope and difficult to classify - the creation, myth, and legendarium of an ancient world that could have been ours.
Tolkien's sense of natural beauty can be haunting, and the melancholy feeling of lost wonder runs through his work. It is a quintessentially Western tale - one of heroic failure and miraculous deliverance in a fallen world.
First, the set-up, or how we jump to the corruption of literature
when the last post was looking at the dawn on the European nations in the early Middle Ages. We've been looking at deep patterns to see how Western culture was inverted and to find what we can about the history beneath the deceptions. But now that we have the outlines of our three pillars, we can take side trips into particular examples. This helps the discernment and ties back into the present-day Postmodern maze that surrounds us. Having just considered Anglo-Saxons and Celts, the greatest modern inheritor of that English creative heritage is a logical choice.
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Education of the Children of Clovis, 1861, oil on canvas, private collection
We'll get back to the formation of the nations. An occult post is next, then the Franks, empire, and the historical identity of continental Europe. For now, we'll briefly recap the pertinent ideas from past posts with links if you want more depth, then take a trip through the fall and rise of Western literature courtesy of The Silmarillion - and a few other writings too.
The Band started as a way to lay out the idiocy beneath the confusing spray of gibberish that gave Postmodernism the semblance of intellectual credibility. But it became clear that Postmodernism was itself just a metastasis of basic false assumptions that modern institutions - Modernism in general - were built on. Huge patterns of collective self-delusion like secular transcendence,
Progress!, satanic inversion, and the spray of symbols turn up again and again in every aspect of the modern West. The sheer scope of the vanity, venality, magical thinking, and superficial, externally-driven morality forced us to strip things down to the bare bones - what can we know and how can we know it. And that brought us to the roots of Western culture.
Heinrich Weishaupt, Apotheosis of George Washington, 1830–50, hand-colored lithograph after Samuel Moore, Metropolitan Museum of Art
The central pattern is secular transcendence - the logical absurdity that absolutes are knowable to limited finite minds. It's near-universal acceptance comes from its appeal to vanity. Keep the glory of religious transcendence but pretend it's a human thing. This collapses ontological distinction into what the Band calls Flatland - an incoherent place where abstractions somehow coexist with entropic and unclear material reality.
Vanity because secular transcendence promises we can be masters of reality through some sort of pure knowledge. It is empirically and logically impossible but intoxicating and as old as history. The primordial satanic inversion that we can be arbiters of what is true. Be your own god, do what thou wilt, divine watchmakers, new ages and enlightenments - the the take-home message is always the same. Things that are observably and conceptually outside our scope are lying around like new species, just waiting for some plucky opportunist to discover them and change humanity forever. When you look back over the last few centuries, the procession of fake certainties is dizzying.
This diagram is a good summary of the how the wandering journey through the history and ontology of the West shakes out. A vertical hierarchy between material and ultimate reality through abstract concepts. The connective axis is Logos - the Christian Incarnation conceptualized in terms of Classical metaphysics. This also aligns with epistemology or how we know. Empirical knowledge on the material level, logic on the abstract, and faith on the ultimate. Logos manifests in the appropriate way in all three.
This is why the Flatland thinking of secular transcendence goes so awry - it claims clear knowledge of domains that are categorically impossible to know clearly. And it is an epistemological category error. Modern materialism is very good at producing practical knowledge of the material world.
N700 series train on the Tōkaidō Shinkansen before Mount Fuji
The history of modern engineering has been continual progress. Figuring out how things work materially is something our material senses are good for. But Flatland has to pretend material methods are equally applicable to things that aren't material - morality and ontology - because it has to pretend materialism is all there is.
The results have been about what you'd expect.
The deceptive nature of secular transcendence is obvious in the distance between what is said and what we can observe actually happens. The real Scientific Method produces reliable knowledge because it systematized how we learn in the first place - moving cumulatively and empirically into the unknown, growing a knowledge base through experience and pattern recognition. But there are limits to how far we can get this way.
M. Vuillemin, Astronomical and Cosmographical chart, plate 1 in Maison Basset’s Atlas Illustre, 1852
This goes off the rails into secular transcendence - the scientific method becomes
Science! - when materialists try and claim empirical-type certainty about abstract principles or ultimate reality. This is the inversion - the success of bottom-up reasoning in its domain becomes the rationalization for top-down claims about other ones. And like any inversion, the distance between the fake claims and reality becomes more visible over time.
Look at the history of universalizing, "scientific" claims and you see a carnival of errors in every field, certainty after certainty tossed out without second thought. But as our limits - discernment, Progress! - become more obvious, the fake universalisms get more retarded and easier to see. The mathematical elegance of a clockwork universe replaced with things like "intersectionality" and dark energy. Facts are supposed to be reliable.
Primordial soup is a fine example of a nonsensical idea about the origins of life that was pushed until it wasn't. Any "explanations" with as many problems as life's origins is an insult to the actual scientific method, but top-down ideologues will cling to any absurdity to preserve their fake faith in random material generation. If you can't address the problems, your "theory" is garbage.
Or "climate science". Dishonest fear mongering is nothing new, especially when it comes to "the environment". And no, this wasn't some isolated story as ironically-named "fact-checkers" like to misrepresent.
The only question is whether the average IQ has dipped to the point where the scripted ravings of a teenage fetal alcohol syndrome victim carry more weight than what in now an obviously a well-orchestrated deception.
The point isn't that modern
Science! is both unscientific in the scientific method sense and repeatedly wrong. It is that despite being continually wrong, the underlying assumptions of secular transcendence are never questioned. Once the soup isn't viable and the icecaps not melting, you aren't in the realm of theory anymore - there are facts to be accounted for. And at this point, there are only two scientifically-legitimate paths - you either rethink the initial premise or you are a conscious liar.
USDA's original food pyramid from 1992 and MyPyramid, the 2005 update.
Food Science! is an endless source of simple-minded pieties, lobbying, and outright nonsense. Consider a proportional "food pyramid" that is replaced by a completely different set of ratios a little over a decade later. This isn't cosmic time. The responsible thing to do would be to explain where the errors came from and to present the empirical evidence behind the changes. What actually happens is that the old content goes down the memory hole while the notion that Food Pyramid is scientific authority parties on. The presumption - USDA presents empirical facts - is independent of the actual reality. To be this wrong should destroy credibility, but the protoplasm quivers along to whatever new nonsense gets piped out by the official organs.
What sort of empirical facts collapse completely in 13 years? Fake ones. And who keeps buying the same snake oil from the same frauds? Stupid people.
Literally. My Pyramid only lasted lasted half as long - too "abstract and confusing", it was replaced by MyPlate in 2011. Suddenly milk is optional. But consider the remarks by Michelle Obama on the new format: "Parents don't have the time to measure out exactly three ounces of chicken or to look up how much rice or broccoli is in a serving. ... But we do have time to take a look at our kids' plates. ... ". Now consider how cognitively limited one must be to find that reassuring.
Who keeps buying the same snake oil?
Most people think of science as cumulative - building knowledge through progressive experimentation and observation while ruling out dead ends. That's pretty much a summary of the Scientific Method. But consider modern
Science! - one radical new claim after another that changes everything until the until the deviation from reality becomes too self-evident. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Gustave Doré, Dante and Virgil among the Sodomites in the 7th Circle of Hell, where they meet Dante's former teacher Brunetto Latini, Dante's Inferno, canto 15 verses 28-29, 1861
The problem isn't the hollow bleating of any one pre-forgotten shade...
...it's the insistence on abstract certainty in an entropic and uncertain world.
Secular transcendence - modernism, Marxism, luciferianism, rationalism, Postmodernism, emotionalism, all of it - is an act of faith, only faith in something empirically and logically false. It keeps changing because there is nothing there
Recognizing the range of what and how we can know avoids making impossible truth claims with the wrong form of knowledge. The Band has taken to a pair of Biblical quotations that perfectly capture this uncertain world of limited empirical tools and endless deceptions that we find ourselves in:
These are both possible because Christian ontology is vertical - Old Testament theology and Classical metaphysics recognized this. Truth can both exist and be impossible to access fully in itself at the same time.
Pablo Picasso, Weeping Woman, oil on canvas, 60.8 x 50 cm, Tate London
The fake authority of secular transcendence inverts everything it touches - science where conclusions drive the production of facts is just one example.
Authorized modern culture organs also tell us that this is among the most important artists of the 20th century.
Opening to Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, first printed by the Hogarth Press, London, 1925
That this is among the most important writers of the 20th century.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson pose by a model of the Seagram Building, New York, photo by Irving Penn
That this is among the most important buildings of the 20th century
Fritz Lang, Metropolis, 1927
That this is one of the greatest movies of the 20th century.
You get the picture...
The cultural toxicity of Modernist culture is is a byproduct of the centralized structures of Modern society - institutional cultures set up in the place of organic cultural formation. Instead of commenting on how the society it inhabits expresses itself, Modern institutions dictate that expression. With no regard for the cultural reality beyond atavism. And that's their ideal, not the Band's conclusion - if there is one common thread in all the Modernisms and Postmodernisms beyond secular transcendence, it's mindless opposition and destruction. When you control the centralized institutions of culture, you can recast atavism as a virtue.
Progress! Consider how many "critical" stands, deconstructions, problematizations, liberations, etc. that have stained modern times. And the pattern is all the same.
Globalist money creates "cultural" structures that have nothing to do with the nations they purport to speak for
Money and social status raises the structures to prominence without need for conventionally popularity
The structures are stocked with self-idolizing sociopaths and degenerates who hate the nations they purport to speak for.
The independence and wealth of the structures makes the sociopaths and degenerates “geniuses” and the centralization prevents counter arguments.
The sociopaths produce gibberish "discourse" that the structures declare "profound"
Gibberish and money create fake prestige that intimidates and repels the actual populace, who are dismissed as philistines for disliking sociopathy, atavism, and degeneracy
Beauty and truth are expelled from the venues of cultural expression
And, no, they couldn't care less about the NPCs that lick their fingers.
The Armory Show - coming in the portentous year of 1913 - is a perfect illustration of how an anti-human, globalist money-driven garbage culture was consciously imposed on America. With an emphasis on the globalist money. In an earlier post, we looked at the Rockefeller involvement in the establishment of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This hive of obscene wealth, avant-garde Manhattan chic, and mockery of any meaningful aesthetics is the symbolic heart in this perverse inverted culture. These institutions survive on their unaccountable independent wealth and socio-cultural monopoly - how long would the MOMA last if it had to survive on its gate? What's a Stanford degree worth strictly on the skills and knowledge conferred?
The illusion is that the prestige is qualitative.
The reality is that it is discursive.
So whoever controls the discourse determines what is to be valued in society.
Some earlier posts looked at notion of aristocracy as a Western phenomenon that leads to what are essentially two different nations in the same polity. Or at least two different national cultures. The aristocrats grew more and more consistent across international lines - more alike each other and different from their domestic populations. When financial titans replace the aristocratic ones at the forefront of elite society, the globalism and disdain for their nations remains. In fact, the pressure to return to a monstrous, one-world primordial soup only accelerates.
The Rockefeller family residence, 10 West 54th Street, now demolished.
Here's where David Rockefeller grew up - a Manhattan mansion based on a Renaissance palace. The Gilded Age elites were obsessed with European aristocratic culture. The Band has posted on their Old World posturing and Beaux-Arts architecture.
What historians don't talk about art the social consequences of growing up in a culture apart in every way, where money is basically meaningless, all contact is with peers, servants, and clever grifters, inherent superiority is assumed, and national cultures viewed with contempt. Actually think of it. With limitless resources, your aesthetic goal is to impose centuries-old palazzi on the New York streetscape. These are the arbiters of culture.
Exterior of new MoMA building, 1939
When you recognize that elite has always been a separate globalist culture, it is much easier to understand this. Elite culture was already fake - pastiched discourse of post-Enlightenment Europe. When the worldview is limited to "my culture crude, Europe sophisticated", whatever jackassery coming out of the continent is instantly cutting-edge style. But they have no culture of their own. It's all posturing based on whatever they're told is "in".
When the European discourse was jacked by anti-human Marxist globalists, their equally cultureless American financiers just danced along to that tune. That the destruction of "kitch" American culture was good for global business was just a bonus.
There are earlier posts on this - they're what led to the turn into the roots of the West in the first place. If you're interested, they're in the archive on the right. This platform isn't the most flexible and it can be irritating to try and find things. The easiest way is the actually the search window. The point here is that elite hostility to nations is necessary consequence of their existence as a separate culture. It is systematic.
Las Vegas suburb in 2012
The very structure of Modern life is designed to produce atomized consumers. There are no axes around which community can form. And without community, there is no organic culture. Only what centralized media tells you to want.
Enough recap. Time for something new.
Exposing the inversions and deceptions behind Postmodern culture has made the importance of positive alternatives obvious. With the last posts bringing our final historical root of the West - the nations of Europe - into focus, we can use this working understanding of the limits of discernment to think about literature. What it is, and more importantly, what it does. Or another way - why the great works of the past were also universally popular, while the Modern "greats" are largely unreadable.
Opening to a 2019 piece on Modernist saint Virginia Woolf with the typical reverence. But you can see how greatness is conceived in the official discourse - participation in the avant-garde and cultural subversion. This is taken for granted in the system.
Try reading Woolf and see if it matches the reputation.
It's something of a truism that evil can't create - understanding the vertical nature of Logos explains why. If material reality is a fallen projection of ultimate reality and Logos the ontological link between God and man, "Creation" itself is an act of Logos. This makes it an expression of Truth and therefore the Good. Since Evil is the inversion and rejection of Logos/ultimate reality/Good, creation is inherently impossible for it. Were creation possible, it wouldn't be evil. What it can do is distort, pastiche, and invert. It can spin de-moralized rhetoric to ramp up allure, but de-moralization is itself an inversion of something natural or organic. Spectacle for narrative. Fusion for cuisine. Porn for love.
Science! for science. And so on.
The simple conclusion is that the art of the West faces the truth. But this is impossibly vague. Thinking in terms of vertical ontology makes it clearer. Art has a sincere relationship with the truth - logos - on one or more of our ontological levels. Conversely, it does not deceive or subvert empirical or metaphysical realities as we can understand them.
Claude Monet, six of the Houses of Parliament series, painted in London, 1899-1901
Monet and the Impressionists are lumped in with early Modernism, but their art has an appeal that comes from a commitment to reality. His abstrations were efforts to capture the effects of light and air and better understand how we see. His worlds are blurry and fragmented, but so is ours. He was "subversive" towards the Academic art establishment, but that was just a fake post-Enlightenment secular transcendence. He is does not invert on the logical or metaphysical level. He is a materialist painter looking with insightful eyes at the material world and responding imaginatively to what he sees.
He is creating.
Which brings us around to J. R. R. Tolkien (
click for Tolkien Society bio), the Band's choice for author of the 20th century - whatever that means - and someone largely outside of the official canon of Great Writers.
Tolkien as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers in 1916, aged 24
The reason for our high regard and the exclusion is the same - Tolkien wrote with a sincerity and a commitment to nation and beauty utterly opposed to the Modernist discourse we've been talking about. One could argue that he achieved his goal of producing a national mythology for England, or at least a national epic - a web of tales in different forms spanning the ages and anchored by the magnificent Lord of the Rings. Exactly the things that Modernism was dismissing as kitch, sentiment, lowbrow, and retardaire.
It's one thing to have Mallory and Beowulf on some Western Civ. reading list, another to consider national myth in an age of relentless globalist ugliness.
A career academic and philologist, Tolkien produced relatively little critical writing, though it is often noted that his few articles were impactful. He devoted his life to teaching - the praise of his classroom performance is endless - and what can only be called world-building in the truest sense. That term is mostly associated with authors and creators that make a point of constructing a detailed and internally-coherent setting for their stories, but for Tolkien, the world was the point. His entire adult life, from the trenches of World War I to his death in the 70's was spent expanding, refining, and developing an entire "legendarium". An integrated web of stories, histories, verse, chronicles, and other forms mapping out the history and culture of an imaginary world.
Folio editions of Tolkien's Middle Earth books
Tolkien was something of a reluctant author, publishing relatively few complete works. Even The Silmarillion was edited and published posthumously. It seems that commiting the mythology to a published canon displeased him, since it cut off continued evolution of the stories.
Our knowledge of his thought is greatly enhanced by the work of his son Christopher who edited and published his father's copious notes in his 12-volume
History of Middle Earth.
In the process, Christopher also prepared several novels set in the First Age, expanding the world of
The Silmarillion and returning his father to the bestseller lists decades after his passing.
For the bibliophiles - folio editions of the Middle Earth novels published by Christopher. There were other works as well, including a translation of Beowulf.
The lack of participation in Modern discourse and vast body of extra-university fiction indicates that we assess Tolkien as a thinker as well as a writer from this literary output. But there are other obstacles to his assessment among
Literature! types - he was popular and wrote "fantasy".
The Modern notion of the avant-garde changed art by transforming it into perpetual revolution against what came before. Hence the approval of Woolf's subversion in the review posted above and the appeal of Marxism as a philosophy. Ditto the Cabal, Secret Society, New World Order types - it's in the name. Where art once valued beauty as an ethical and aesthetic imperative, the Modern inversion rejects or perverts it. Because of this, Modern art tends towards ugliness and general unpopularity.
John Gilbert, The Plays of William Shakespeare, 1849, oil on canvas, Dahesh Museum of Art, New York
When you consider the Great Books you'll notice that the older authors were also generally popular. The Greek playwrights, Dante, Shakespeare were all well-liked and able to support themselves through their work. No one reads Joyce outside of universities. The same holds for visual artists.
By redefining sentiment as kitsch and rejecting beauty and eventually representation itself, the Modern arts pretend to be an extension of the traditional Western timeline, but invert the values that defined the Western tradition. Artists have always been influenced by predecessors - love of reading inspires new writers. But Modernism was unique for making the reaction to the past destructive.
T. S. Eliot, opening to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", Poetry, June 1915
Eliot is another Modernist poster child for his rambling, indeterminate, internal monologue style and wealth of seemingly random references to past works. In other words - discourse. All allusion and subjectivity but no meaning. And ultimately no point in reading other than to admire to ability to chain empty citations and the occasional turn of phrase.
None of the story or meaning that his references would have expected from great literature. Just discursive masturbation for its own sake. A useful commentary on "the Modern condition", but the modern condition is the problem.
But when this is "literature", where does logos go?
You're likely familiar with that inversion where shit like Eliot is pedestalized as "one of the most important X of the 20th century", and things of meaning and value ignored. This is how the discourse works - and this is really important:
Things don't mean the same thing
in discourse and real life.
Both you and the Modernist may look at an older work on the Great Books reading list and agree that it is a great book. Take the
Divine Commedy - the Band has mentioned it before and it's on all the lists. You might note the complexity and structure before moving on to the plot - the archetypal journey, the fantastic setting, and the Empyrean resolution, and the sense of hope and faith that run through the whole masterpiece. For the Modernist, all that matters is the structure and self-contained reference.
Miki de Goodaboom, James Joyce, oil on canvas
Modern literary criticism was fixated on formalism and the subjective meaninglessness of de-moralized existence.
Artists are often surprisingly insightful. Like Joyce as the idol or emergent ideal in his books. Reading him leads nowhere but him. Modern literature is be your own God, but limited to a tiny, arbitrary, hermetic frame of reference.
Eliot cites Dante, but for reasons that aren't apparent to people outside the discourse. The cosmic scope, the metaphysical insights, the fantastic settings, the linguistic beauty, the notion of personal change through meaningful experience, and the affirmation of a logos-driven life in the face of despair are irrelevant to a Modernist.
Gustave Doré, Souls of Warriors of the Faith form a Cross, 1868, engraving from The Vision of Purgatory and Paradise by Dante Alighieri, London and New York: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin
Dante's Divine Commedy is staggering in the immensity of its vision. It's memorable images range from biting political insights to the enormity of creation. To the fully-realized reader, the way his poetic talents rise to this challenge is one measure of his greatness.
Alberto Zardo, Illustration for Dante’s Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto XXXIV
His vision of evil as endless, frozen, self-consumption is profound regardless of religious belief.
Domenico di Michelino, Dante and His Poem, 1465, fresco, Florence Cathedral
The universal scope is captured in this famous painting. Dante as creator is a gateway - he is obviously the source, but his goal is to use his insights and talents to communicate something more profound. What Modernists would call sentimental distractions that violate the formal autonomy of Literature.
Dante's Modern appeal is discursive, starting with his historical status as something of a founding father of the autonomous discipline. Modernists like Eliot actually studied Dante closely. They just did so within an intellectually constipated and epistemological nonsensical frame of reference.
You can see the difference.
Unexpectedly insightful.
For Eliot, Dante is important for his status in the discipline - the discourse - and not what a fully-realized human being would consider his quality. As a canonical figure, Dante is storehouse of motifs and references, so Eliot can use him as an entry into the autonomous world of literature. Only as a Modernist, his references are subversive because they deliberately de-moralize. They strip Dante of his profundity and beauty and reduce him to an exercise in formal composition. In fact, the Modernists see themselves as surpassing Dante, because they've evolved past his need for story, drama, moral purpose - all the elements of the writer's craft - into a world of meaningless Flatland wordplay.
Gustave Doré, Dante in the Gloomy Wood, 1861, engraving depicting the opening of Dante's Inferno.
Then there is the subjectivity - the internal or psychological aspect of Dante's experiences prefigures the Modernist obsession with the subjective impressions.
Mrs Dalloway, 1997, directed by Marleen Gorris
But Modernist subjective life is the same as Modernist formalism. Here too, the old-fashioned "distractions" that used to be called writing are replaced with nothing more than the banal impressions of truly uninteresting people.
Modern life outside of the individual impression is therefore unquestioned. It is presented as the inevitable, pre-reflexive, condition of Modern reality. From this perspective, the best literature can do is endlessly navel-gaze at the circular driftings of meaningless flotsam. De-moralized materialism as ultimate reality is secular transcendence.
Autonomous discursive forms and the subjective meaninglessness of reality are two huge Modern contributions to Postmodern "thought". To Existentialism too, though this hiccup was eclipsed by deconstruction and Postmodern well before the end of the 20th century. The point is that "greatness" in the discourse is different from the common understanding of literary greatness. The Great Books of the modern era are great because the propel narrow, fake, secular transcendent ideals and not because they're great books.
Frank Budgen, James Joyce, charcoal on wove paper, 1919, framed with note 1970, The Rosenbach, Philadelphia
The result is modern "Literature" - a self-referential collection of boring and often-unreadable darlings that represent whatever dyscivic vision the globalists were pushing at the moment.
The problems for fantasy are twofold.
First - entertaining or metaphysically profound stories of any type have no place in this world. Consider the canonical authors who directly precede Modernism - historically-great writers like Dostoevsky, the Victorians, Hugo and the other 19th century names. Where they shine is in capturing the spirit of contemporary life and insights into the modern "human condition". Valuable, but limited, and opening a question relevant to fantasy: what does it mean for "the human condition" - implicitly defined in atheistic demoralized Enlightenment terms - to be the highest measure of artistic greatness?
No further comment necessary on that.
Second - fantasy was popular and much of it pulpy, or without the self-conscious discursive trappings of Literature. It was ok for a historical classic like the
Odyssey to have fantasy elements because it was from the pre-Modern world where credulous primitives believed in the supernatural.
John William Waterhouse, Ulysses and the Sirens, 1891, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Victoria
In this context, the "literary" aspects - subjectivity, formal structure - have to ride along with meaning. But in Modern times, literature has "evolved" to the point where de-moralized trivialities is the
telos of greatness. Things that appeal to the popular imagination violate this aesthetic purity, even if they are a big part of the enduring appeal of the
Odyssey.
J.M.W. Turner, Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus, 1829, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London
A genre based on imaginative realism and grand vision - the parts of of the Odyssey that make it popular - like fantasy was doomed from the start.
LadyElleth, Silmarillion Taniquetil
Tolkien's Silmarillion is vast in ambition, an unfinished and perhaps unfinishable meditation on reality, history, knowledge, and morality. It is a collection of five "narratives", each written in a different style appropriate to the type. Together, they paint a history that seems organic - Biblical epic in the creation, mythology with the Valar, chronicle narrative in the Quenta Silmarillion, expository prose in the essay on the Third Age and so forth. The layered depth and high styles create an epic grandeur that seems monumentally remote and tragically real. The Lord of the Rings is a better novel and read, but the Silmarillion is Tolkien's masterpiece.
It is impossible to sum up in a paragraph and the inspiration to write this post.
Things don't mean the same thing in discourse and real life. Most people that aren't PM probably have own terms of judging quality. Not necessarily a "system", but at least some things that they look for. Some combination of style, creativity, originality, emotional effects, scale of vision, dialogue, intricacy of plotting, etc. That is, more than formal subversion and insights into the human condition.
And this brings us to a common misunderstanding about our authorized cultural institutions. Many have asked why the Postmodernists weren't drummed out before the cancer took hold? Why did the schools and so forth fold so quickly?
Jacques Derrida, Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, Deconstruction and Criticism, edited by Harold Bloom, 1979, Continuum
The closest thing to a Yale School manifesto and the symbolic launch of deconstructive criticism in the US. Look at the date. It is remarkable how quickly this metastasized and spread throughout the culture institutions.
Click for a link to the text.
The answer is that the Modernists who build the discourse didn't care any more about truth, reason, or reality than the Postmodernists who replaced them. The Band repeatedly points out that Modern discourse was epistemologically nonsensical because it is a secular transcendence. We just recapped again above. So the disciplines that Postmodernism "took over" were
already a sub-set of the larger Enlightenment inversion of logic and observation that claimed limited human minds could produce ontological absolutes. The whole Modern discursive system was merely "rules" and influencers claiming objective truth-value that they could not possibly possess. Which brings us to a big misunderstanding:
Things don't mean the same thing in discourse and real life. The institutional definition of "real" is
reality within the discourse. It's a matrix, a delusion bubble - collective subjectivity collectively mediated by collective language/philosophy/ideology spun up in the official channels and trickling down to the credulous masses. So when PM declines "reality" it does so in these terms and within these channels. It isn't "exposure", it's acknowledgment - recognizing that the nonsensical Modern rules were nonsensical. It's the Emperor's new clothes, but with a new nudist.
Jules Hardouin Mansart, the glittering Hall of Mirrors, built for King Louis XIV, begun 1678, Versailles
And it all takes place in the same hall of mirrors - notice the universities didn't vanish.
Institutions built on globalist money, Marxist subversion, and fake discourse were not "susceptible" to Postmodern subversion, they were accommodating. The rapid spread of the new atavism was driven by the thrill of the radicalism in an elitist safe space of fake rules and pious bromides. It's really the highbrow version of the way 60's pop culture replaced empty plastic formalism with infantile self-indulgence. Students dug the edgy profs. because it seemed like a mystery cult with a lot less reading than a traditional course. Administrators typically know little about academic subjects but hires in the next big area make a department look good in the rankings. Faculty worry about departments being out of date. Publishers and granting bodies favor the new hotness. All at a time where universities were eliminating traditional standards for students and faculty in the name of identity politics and debt-fueled expansion.
Every aspect of the modern university has been degraded to the point of inverting its original purpose. An intellectual foundation in the solipsistic nihilism of Postmodernism is the logical outcome of marrying secular transcendence and the myth of Progress!. It wasn't a corruption of the system but the final stage of a system that was intrinsically corrupt.
Now, consider where "resistance" to Postmodernism was going to come from. "Back to the Great Books!", or in other words, a return to the fake Modernist discourse that was exposed by Postmodern criticism? Postmodernism was when the chimerical nature of the whole discourse was dragged into the open by the weight of its own idiocy. This created the illusion that people who expected great literature to be great were on the same side as those advocating a return to the Modernist status quo.
Roland Barthes' grave, Urt graveyard, France
Take the "death of the author" - the Postmodern notion popularized by Roland Barthes that came up in an earlier post. This held that since "texts" were ultimately outside individual control - the world is text, so no one person can master it - there really is no such thing as an author.
The fully-realized person sees this as a sign that institutional culture is past broken and needs a complete rethinking. Any education this detatched from what we can know about reality is less than useless because it leaves you with a distorted world view that either has to be unlearned or else it leads to other misunderstandings.
But opposition from within the discourse came in discursive terms that don't mean the same thing as words in the real world. Their rejoinder was the same Modernist notion of "greatness" that gave us the formalist solipsism as the summa cum summa that Postmodernism required in the first place. From a reality-facing perspective, they were't on our side either. Put it another way:
De-moralized, post-Enlightenment Modernist secular transcendence isn't the answer to inverted, post-Enlightenment Postmodernist secular transcendence.
It's its precursor.
This put the "traditionalistists" in a bad spot - they wanted to defend the "integrity" of Literature, but from within their discursive house of mirrors - with Modernist terms that were arbitrary and externally meaningless. Once you realize Postmodernism is an artifact of the system and not its corruption, you see that there was no possibility of meaningful resistance from within. The only epistemologically coherent counter is to do what the Band it trying to do and move outside the delusion bubbles of secular transcendence altogether. But the institutions can't do that - epistemological sincerity is self-erasure. So the system produces faux reformers and traditionalists that come to prominence by opposing some especially retarded aspect of Postmodern leftism while actually working to protect the system from change.
Consider Harold Bloom, an eminent literary critic and professor who has popped up in earlier posts. Or as the ironically-named Independent called him: "The immortal Harold Bloom, the greatest literary critic on the planet".
Bloom was part of
the Yale School - four hugely influential English professors in Yale's English who more or less introduced deconstruction to American literary theory and criticism - before turning against Derrida and Postmodernism in general. He continues to write and teach and had become a leading "traditionalist" figure within the academy. That he has had virtually no impact on the subsequent direction of American literary studies is indicative that the degeneracy is systemic. And readers will be unsurprised to find that his own example offers somewhat ironic proof of the solipsistic hollowness of the whole charade.
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, Riverhead Books, 1994
Bloom's reputation as a champion of literary tradition against Postmodern nihilism was launched by The Western Canon - a purported defense of the fundamental importance of great books. Look at the title. But it delivers a series of ideosyncratic readings of an odd selection of authors that is weirdly assertive and limited at the same time, followed by a vast reading list presented without further explanation.
We've entered that space where the claims and the reality don't match, which is always a sign to look closer.
It is noteworthy that Bloom himself could see emptiness of his institutional environment. Consider this quote from his
foreword to Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays:
Literary criticism, to survive, must abandon the universities, where “cultural criticism” is a triumphant beast not to be expelled. The anatomies issuing from the academies concern themselves with the intricate secrets of Victorian women’s underwear and the narrative histories of the female bosom. Critical reading, the discipline of how to read and why, will survive in those solitary scholars, out in society, whose single candles Emerson prophesied and Wallace Stevens celebrated’.
Sounds like the sort of thing any reality-facing person that cares about literature and learning could agree with. Yet there he was, clinging to that Yale Professorship and teaching by Skype until his death earlier this month. It is an odd notion of solitary scholarship.
There's no ontological consideration at all in Bloom's criticism, or even coherent standards of critical judgment - just the pure subjectivity of one man's opinion, elevated to spokesman for the ages. Vanity Fair of all placed captured the de-moralized messianism of this position in an insightful rendering of him as a secular Moses preaching the litarary commandments of a New World Order. The article captures the sort of gnomic mumblings that pass for the great leader's thought. This means the lessons taught in his school aren't the ones that the conservatives who wave the book around as a defense of "tradition" think they are.
Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation, 1992
Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg, The Book of J, 1990
Like an "American Religion" where Joseph Smith is upheld as representing the belief that we can all become gods. Or an Old Testament where God is a literary character produced by a woman in King Solomon's court because of literary analysis through a translator. With no argument beyond Bloom's say so.
Harold Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, Riverhead Books, 2005
Not here. A morass of luciferian self-divination and Black Athena-level historical fantasy are not the stuff of the Western tradition in any historically or ontologically-meaningful way.
The lesson, as always, is read the books. That and not trusting self-deifying charlatans.
Bloom's fatal weakness is his Flatland ontology - he can conceive of things outside of everyday experience, but has to root them in material causes. Influence and undefinable notions of genius become the criteria he sets against PM nihilism and resentment, but they aren't founded on anything outside of his own authority. There can be some value in listening to a erudite reader reflect on books. But ultimately his take on the value of literature is personal - his appreciation, and evaluation by his standards. Just de-moralized, post-Enlightenment solipsism really, but a good window into the difference between opposing PM from within institutional discourse and starting over from the outside. It's worth looking closer, because he is a perfect example of the intrinsic limitations within institutional culture that made PM and leftist subversion inevitable.
To understand nature of Bloom as a public intellectual and luciferian solipsist, it is necessary to look at the book that put him there. Despite the grandiose title,
The Western Canon is a personal defense of Bloom's brand of reading after his own split with deconstruction. Now, think what a canon is...
The definition shown here is the second - the first deals with ecclesiastic usage and is only indirectly relevant. What the three sub-divisions all show is a notion of authoritative certainty. A law or standard by which something can be asserted or judged. So what makes his particular list canonical? Authors like Shakespeare and Dante have a genius and the historical impact that is self-evident. But how do you claim to
define a "canon" with hundreds of books? A reading list perhaps, but "canon" implies authority - that is, the canonicity. The only authority Bloom offers is subjective - his own canon for his own assertions. The result is a weird hybrid - the Modernist notion of canonical objectivity on a foundation of Postmodernist subjectivity.
So where does the list come from?
William Blake, title page to the Book of Urizen, 1794
This is an important question.
Bloom was fascinated by Blake, an ideosyncratic gnostic visionary who produced "prophetic" works like this parody of Genesis. The appeal seems to be the pure self-willed creative freedom while remaining within the establishment literary canon. See, Bloom's subjectivity wasn't the Postmodern everything is meaningless, so do what thou wilt. It's the luciferian man is his own god so do what thou wilt. The end result is the same, but the differences are important for institutional traditionalist and their "conservative" dupes.
Peruse the list and you'll see that it just excerpts the same stale academic tradition that the discourse had declared "literature". This is not necessarily a statement on the quality of the authors on his exhaustive list - with hundreds of names, all the historical heavyweights are there. But why is this the Western, or any other, canon? Neither adjective nor noun is really defined or even argued for. The literature is in the canon because it is self-evidently canonical - a sufficient springboard for critical musings, but hardly the school of the ages. The criteria is tautological. So what makes a work canonical?
William Blake, The Book of Urizen, plate 7, "As the stars are apart from the earth"
It is notable that Bloom's critique of Postmodernism refers to it as the "politiciziation of literature" - not the same thing. He opposed what is called cultural Marxism - the destruction of intellectual and artistic standards for grievance culture and identity politics. But "politicization" is a tell - he pushes the modern autonomous notion of literature, disconnected from meaning, culture, or beauty.
Blake is a telling muse - his visionary world was deeply anti-Christian and universalist. The language and vision is "Western" but the message is occult globalism. Blake's "prophetic" status is self-generated - products of his own imaginative subversion of his inherited tradition. Truth claims without any claim on truth is right back to the luciferian version of secular transcendence - the being your own god part.
It is not credible that each book on the extended was carefully weighed against other popular contemporaries through some rigorous analytic process. Bloom is a prodigious reader, but also a full-time professor with countless graduate students to supervise and author of some 41 books and however many other pieces. The same themes and subjects keep recurring in his writing - a pattern you see when intellectual lives are defined by areas of sustained interest. But not the constant change you'd expect from someone working through canon formation in different historical and cultural traditions. Look closer and you see the books are all ones you'd expect to find on modern literature reading lists. The omissions and specific book choices were "controversial", but none of the names really challenge the axioms of the early 20th century English department.
The authorized timeline. Think how many times you've encountered some version of this. It's like inherited wisdom. Now look closely at the 20th century. And seriously ask how these choices define Literature in English. How do you get authorized by the system?
The canon is based on reputation - "the test of time" so to speak - which is perfectly normal in itself. The question is who administers the test? If someone is choosing canonical books by repute, where does the reputation come from?
You can probably see where this is going.
Our first insight into authorized thought.
Reputation is set entirely by the authorized institutions and critics. That is...
Despite recognizing the limitations of institutional criticism, Bloom remained a career system man - his fundamental thought patterns and understanding of reality were shaped by the assumptions of the modern university. His opposition was with a certain current, but he accepted the objective reality of the grid. This comes through in his own terminology. What he opposes is the "politicization" of literature - something anyone should be able to get behind, but with certain connotations within the hermetic discourse of the academy. He wants to get rid of the cultural Marxism to return to an imaginary vision of literature as an abstract, ontologically autonomous domain of independent genius creators communing only with each other. That is, the same fake autonomy that drove Modernism in art and literature since the early 20th century. In the same institutions that were promoting real Marxism openly.
A Ceremony of the new Republican Religion of Reason in Notre Dame, Paris, 1793, engraving
Postmodernism wasn't the politicization of some autonomous temple of reason. It was a logical outcome of pretending that vanity and posturing could turn "reason" into a temple in the first place.
The canon is canonical because the apparatchiks of the modern academy declared them to be. It is ideosyncratic because Bloom made arbitrary choices - a Hellenistic canon without Longus? Or really anything of the Arcadian tradition outside of Sidney? But the choices come from the authors selected on institutional discursive grounds.
Put aside the big list and consider the central authors. Here's the list
from Infogalactic:
In what universe do Woolf, Joyce, and Freud (!!!) belong in the same "Western Canon" as Shakespeare, Dante, and Goethe? That's not a rhetorical question because we know the answer. In the English departments of Modern universities. And this brings to the roots of Bloom's "traditionalism" and one-time affiliation with the Yale School deconstructionists.
Deconstruction was different in the US and Europe.
Derrida meme
Deconstruction originated in the integrated humanities of France as a mix of linguistics, literary criticism, semiotics, and philosophy. But the migration to America was mainly through English and Comparative Literature studies. That is, people with little understanding of the larger theoretical framework.
Bloom wasn't technically a deconstructionist - more of a fellow travaller who became concerned over the direction of the clown car. But two of the big patterns in his thought -
autonomy and
influence - are compatible to a degree with deconstruction and also build out of the Modern discourse. But while Derrida was thinking materialist linguistics through Heideggerian ontology, Bloom was thinking Romantic genius and Gnostic enlightenment through the institutional canon.
Consider these factors more closely, starting with gnostic thought.
William Blake, Albion Rose, 1794-1796, color printed etching with hand-drawn additions in ink and watercolor, British Museum
Bloom's gnosticism is something he has always been open about, from his piece for Washington Post Where Democracy Dies in Darkness in 1979 through Omens of the Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection, 1997 to the aforementioned The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2016. His concept of "salvation through knowing" is profoundly anti-Christian, but of little concern to someone whose own views are gnostic (click for a fannish but informative piece on the subject).
Like this take on the Vitruvian Man as humanity freeing itself from material ties. A self-powered ascension that gives Blake a Gnostic odor. Note the absence of any symbol of external order like you find in the original.
Here's how Blake's subversion aligns with gnosticism, whether or not he was self-declared "Gnostic" in the historical sense.
Leonardo, The Vitruvian Man, around 1490, pen and ink with wash over metalpoint on paper, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice
Leonardo shows a relationship between man and the cosmos, where symmetry, harmony, and proportion - that is, visinble signs of logos - connect the two. To a gnostic, the notion of "cosmic order" is a material prison that must be overcome for full self-divination. Blake removes the geometric signs of logic for spray of formless color - pure emotion - that radiates out from the figure rather than being something the figure exists within. Even the symmetry of the original is broken.
William Blake, The Four Zoas, hand-colored plate from his Milton: A Poem, 1811, New York Public Library
Blake's appeal to Bloom boils down to a mix of two things: prophasizing a subversive religion of his own creation - the Four Zoas - and the sheer force of his artistic personality. "Spiritual preceptor on the one hand, and on the other hand a very great aesthetic phenomenon. to use his terms from an illuminating interview on his alternative spirituality. The second is important - Bloom is an insightful and passionate reader with a deep well of experience and does respond to emotional force. Blake - daemonic visonary and inverted genius is a natural fit.
And he was definitely a fan of Blake - not just in interviews, but in his published output as well:
Publication record brings us to the foundation of Bloom's traditionalist appeal - he is a prolific critic that passionately supports the Western literary canon. Now we've already seen how his gnosticism, - belief that gnostic thought is the true source of wisdom places him at odds with the historical reality of the West. If a gnostic self-aggrandizer is the arbiter of Western literature, the Cathars were spokesmen for Medieval Christendom. It's that inverted, and reminincent of another authorized "conservative" sweetheart - the Lobster Pope. And like Peterson, Bloom was also an unrepentant shill, recycling the same pompous irrelevancies in rushed book after book. Read a few of them and you'll see lots of names but few ideas.
Three series from Amazon. The level of critical insight in these is textbook - it would be easy to believe grad students assembled them. And this isn't organic in any rational universe. Bloom was a pre-internet era phenomenon, but the formula - the sudden appearance of a "traditionalist" with an occult-tinged message that collapses under any intelligent scrutiny who quickly transitions into a clearly-inorganic branding blitz is familiar. It's largely forgotten because it didn't work, but it is easy to see the effort to associate "Bloom" with "Western literature" in the public mind.
And as noted above, Bloom's canon was ready-made - the same points about a handful of historical authors who resonated with him personally rehashed over and over, and filled out with a splattering of selections from the standard Modern autonomous literature reading list.
Hilda Doolittle (Bloom's Major Poets), Chelsea House Publishing, 2002
The aptly-named Doolittle was an avant-garde atavist connected to Ezra Pound and other early modernists. Completely inconsequential, her "rediscovery began in the 1970s, and coincided with the emergence of a feminist criticism that found much to admire in the questioning of gender roles typical of her writings. Specifically, those critics who were challenging the standard view of English-language literary modernism based on the work of such male writers as Pound, Eliot and James Joyce, were able to restore H.D. to a more significant position in the history of that movement". In other words, empty, Postmodern, academic discourse
You can't oppose "the school of resentment" and "the politicization of literature" and call this turd a "major poet". They're they only possible grounds for her to even be remembered!
Unless you're a self-deifying lucerifian shill looking to turn a quick buck while perpetuating the same discourse you pretended to oppose.
Gnosticism and authorized discourse are two of the factors, Blake brings us to the third - Bloom's Romanticism.
Bloom's academic beginnings set the course for his career. He got his academic start as a Romantic literature specialist. Here are the early entries from his bibliography from Infogalactic:
Intellectually, Romanticism is a mess because it is a loosely connected set of reactions to the tight structures of Enlightenment rationalism and not a coherent movement in itself. The general history is that once it became obvious there are whole realms of human experience that reason can't account for, creative types turned to irrational subjects - emotion and individuality over logical ideals. The problem is that emotion and individuality are so broad they can cover almost anything, and the Romantic era is filled with deeply-felt ideas that are incompatible and even contradictory. Romanticism is something that appears in hindsight - a collection if individual creators all following their own feelings seem atomized at the time, but united as a in their subjective rejection of the Enlightenment world view.
Click for a post on basic patterns in Romantic "thought".
Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, The Shipwreck, 1793, oil on canvas, Southhampton City Art Gallery, England
The wild power of nature, mysterious ruins, unbalanced arrangements, sharp contrasts in lighting, misty, unclear setting and story, dramatic action. and human triviality in the face of reality are all Romantic features. Utopianism, historical revivalism, nationalism, universalism, the occult, nature reverence bordering on pantheism, insanity, etc. aren't included here. It's too broad to sum up.
This breadth comes out in the fact that that both Bloom and Tolkien's worldviews have strong Romantic strains, despite being opposite ideologically. Both actually opposed Modern literary formalism
and Eliot in particular on essentially Romantic grounds. It's just that emotion-driven reaction to fake Enlightenment rationalism covers so many possibilities that total opposites can coexist under its general rubric.
Carl Gustav Carus, Memory of Naples (Moonlight over the Mediterranean), around 1832, oil on paper mounted on millboard, private collection
It prefigures Postmodernism in some ways for the rejection of rules and interest in subjective feelings and responses - "subconscious" subjects long before Freud established the term.
Bloom's Romantic leanings actually explain why Freud - a lying, sociopathic pervert and totem of de-moralized, ontologically-absurd secular transcendence - makes the short list of the Western Canon. It is for his "literary" presentation of the unconscious and not any "scientific" accomplishment. From a Romantic perspective, simply attempting to lay the subconscious out in writing is vastly more significant than the accuracy of the conclusions.
As a post-Enlightenment movement, Romanticism was different from earlier emotion-driven aesthetics. It was cut off from the church by the anti-Christian and atheistic posture of "intelligent" discourse. Like Rousseau on childhood. There were exceptions - Friedrich was a Christian Romantic - but the institutional narrative is atheistic supernaturalism. The reaction to Enlightenment was to replace one fake secular transcendence -
Reason! - with others, finding "natural" causes for ontologically super-natural things. The occult posts have traced some of this out. For an authorized Romantic, the subconscious was a philosopher's stone - the magic key that can give you the complete human condition while claiming pure materialism. Plus, it puts the ultimate source of all that there is within us - we are all secret kings.
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, The Dream of Ossian, 1813, oil on canvan, Musée Ingres, Montauban, France
Tolkien's Romanticism was different - the historical nationalist type - a turn from Enlightenment universalism and Modernist autonomy for an expression of a people. Official discourse sees Romantic nationalism as an embarrassing offshoot mercifully extinguished in World War I..
His academic background in European languages and history, his deeply meaningful narratives, and his desire for an English legendarium all connect to this strain of thought. But Tolkien was also a rigorous historical realist and Christian rather than a self-promoting luciferian. He drew on the actual Western tradition to create something new - to add to the organic flow of actual history. The result is a sprawling corpus that sings the heritage and history that inspired it while seeming entirely fresh and original.
Contrast that with endlessly repeating the same flaccid conclusions that are actually hostile to the tradition they purport to define. Tolkien's Romantic streak is positive - it attempts to build organically on historical cultural realities to the best of our understanding of them. Bloom's is the gnostic magus, attempting to force the entire Western tradition into a de-moralized box of his own design. One is sincere, the other subversive.
So gnostic Romanticism filtered through the Modern university. Consider this quote from the same interview linked above: "
For me, Shakespeare is the Law, Milton the Teaching, Blake and Whitman the Prophets".
Roland D. Sawyer, Walt Whitman, The Prophet-Poet, Four Seas Company, First Edition edition, 1918.
The notion of Whitman as prophet is hardly novel - Sawyer's book has been continually reprinted, as recently as 2018. Blake is the great totem of luciferian Romanticism. Milton a Puritan revolutionary who expressed the fallen condition of humanity from a Christian perspective with a poetic grandeur matched only by the King James Bible in English. And Shakespeare is the closest thing to a universal literary genius, but not an epic poet or a visionary.
For this to be some kind of Law - Teacher - Prophet relationship, the connection has to be something outside of content, style, or authorial worldview.
That is, "Literature" as an objective, autonomous thing in itself.
Bloom and Tolkien both opposed the main trend in early 20th century literary criticism - just from opposite historical ends and completely different reasons. If we stay at long range, the term Formalism will do for this quintessentially Modern perspective, although it has a number of metastases. The defining feature for our purposes is the bizarre command that literary criticism be limited to the work itself as an autonomous artifact. No consideration of authorial perspective, context, purpose, beauty, morality, reader reactions - just endless gnomic parsing of structure and device.
Paul Cézanne, The Gardener Vallier, 1906, Tate London
If this sounds like our posts on architecture and art, it's the same demented delusion that cultural artifacts are ontologically disconnected from the culture that made and used them. It's pure Modernist idiocy adapted to the literary arts. In painting it's reducing all that art is - subject, meaning, beauty, etc. - into the endless "study" of formal aspects like shape and color. In literature it's the fantasy of artistic autonomy + structuralist approach to language.
Formalist literary criticism peaked in America with the so-called New Criticism of the mid 20th century.
Bloom and Tolkien both disliked Formalism because it cut literary works off from anything externally meaningful, but they disagree on what those are. For Tolkien it was the deep historical memories and folkways of an organic national culture. For Bloom it was the visionary genius of artistic creativity - both the subversions of his favorite authors and the ultimate power of the gnostic critic.
One is the material level on a vertically-integrated ontology, the other is Flatland.
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, Oxford University Press, 1973
Bloom's road to critical prominence and the Yale School kicked off with an original theory he worked out in the 70's, starting with his canonical The Anxiety of Influence in 1973.
This is the idea that literary greatness comes from an author's artistic struggle with great artists of the past. Creativity is an act of what he called misreading - where someone like Blake hits his heights through wrestling with Milton and so forth. It doesn't matter how different they are - what's important is that Blake is responding to Milton.
The content is irrelevant.
Bloom rejected the New Criticism's insistence on the autonomy of the individual work, but replaced it with the autonomy of literature as a disconnected, autonomous string of individual works and gnostic subverter-authors. This concept of author as
individual creative spirit or "daemon" that wrestles originality out of heroic struggle with titanic predecessors is fundamentally Romantic-luciferian secular transcendence. One that is only conceivable as the basis of a canon in a post-Enlightenment institutional world where autonomous artist-genii were credible.
Albert Bierstadt, Landscape, 1867-1869, oil on canvas, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH
The sublime was a Romantic form of secular transcendence derived from the Roman critic Longinus. It refers to feelings of overwhelming awe like religious emotion. But in Flatland, it is an irrational subjective response to nature or some other material phenomenon.
So when Bloom calls himself a Longinian critic in opposition to formalism, he is looking to replace the artificial sterility of the Formalists with an incoherent appeal to secular transcendence. Consider
this quote:
"To be a Longinian critic is to celebrate the sublime as the supreme aesthetic virtue and to associate it with a certain affective and cognitive response. A sublime poem transports and elevates, allowing the author’s “nobility” of mind to enlarge its reader as well."
There isn't much wrong with the quote on the surface - sublime aesthetics do elevate the reader. This is the sort of quote that appeals to the traditionalist... so long as you don't ask about the aesthetic terms that define this sublimity. The
quote continues:
"The inescapable condition of sublime or high literature is agon: Pindar, the Athenian tragedians and Plato struggled with Homer, who always wins. The height of literature commences again with Dante, and goes on through Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton and Pope. Implicit in Longinus’s celebration of the sublime - “Filled with delight and pride we believe we have created what we have heard” - is influence anxiety. What is my creation and what is merely heard? This anxiety is a matter of both personal and literary identity. What is the me and the not-me? Where do other voices end and my own begin? The sublime conveys imaginative power and weakness at once. It transports us beyond ourselves, provoking the uncanny recognition that one is never fully the author of one’s work or one’s self."
Bloom's literary greatness is like Bloom's "Literature" in general - a fictional autonomous gnostic-Romantic secular transcendence of anxious agonistic struggle against inherently-uncertain identity. The anxiety over external influence is only credible if you accept that personal reality - that is, identity - is solely determined by relationships within Literature as an autonomous, self-generating discourse. This falls apart when you consider that authors have other motivations - anyone surprised to hear
Bloom was me too'd noted Yale feminist Naomi Wolf? Must not have been the author of his own self. But does explain the deconstruction connection.
Recall Derrida's famous quote:
The original French "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" translates more literally as "there is no outside-text", but this version is better English. It is a reference to his idea that reality is textually constructed and determined - the end-point of the autonomous nonsense of Modernists of all stripes.
The picture suggests Calloway golf shirts and stock Miatas may be exceptions.
Bloom comes closest to deconstruction when he pushes a concept of Literature where the canon is pre-selected by established discourse and authorial identity uncertain. There is no author outside of the discourse is not as radical as Derrida, but it is a difference in kind. If you were unkind, you might say it's the sublime sublimated to the authorized critic.
Bringing us back to the idea that opposing Postmodernism and opposing the politicization of literature are somehow the same thing.
Apparently if you claim your autonomous discourse isn't political enough times, it becomes true, itself a Postmodern concept of discursive reality. Observing the impossibility of artistic creation outside of the culture that creates it doesn't even rise to the level of political insight. But it is necessary for the discursive gatekeepers - authorized names like Bloom was - to jack and de-moralize the Western literary tradition. To replace art as the expression of logos and history with the vain ramblings of a soon-to-be-forgotten solipsist. So what are the politics in this fake a-political autonomy?
William Blake, Satan in his Original Glory: 'Thou wast Perfect till Iniquity was Found in Thee'', 1805, watercolor, Tate London
The Western Canon supplements anxiety, influence, and agon with Bloom's gold standard of literary greatness - really the only thing approaching analytical coherence - the creation of internally self-aware characters. Shakespeare is the absolute master, and others are ranked accordingly. Milton gets such high marks for his rebellious Satan - Bloom follows Blake's Gnostic misreading of the arch-enemy as self-driven knowledge seeker, and his degeneration and solipsism signs of internal "growth".
Characters with fully-realized interior lives that develop coherently through the narrative are signs of literary skill and worthy of praise. But they are insufficient grounds to adjudicate the canon of Western literature. And this is ideological - that is, political - in that it declares that the highest artistic value an artist can strive for is replicating mundane human expience. What Milton called creaturely realism above all else. What does it say when your canon is recursive self-idolatry?
Shakespeare is the greatest because Hamlet is the most perfect of a host of perfectly internally-rendered characters.
Robert Thew after Henry Fuseli, Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus and the Ghost, 1796, engraving on ivory wove paper published by John Boydell, Art Institute of Chicago
Set aside the fact that internal growth is an odd metric for assessing a literary imagination of Shakespeare's scope. It all makes perfect sense when you define literature as an endless conga line of anxious imitators dancing through a hall of mirrors.
Milton wins his lofty perch because Satan in
Paradise Lost exhibits real internal change. Freud is on the list for the subconscious. Wolfe and Joyce replace authorial clarity with writing that supposedly simulates the subjective nature of life... At which point you realize that any criteria that puts
Finnigan's Wake in the Western canon is just the same tired authorized discourse immortalized in the the Norton Anthology in in de-moralized, ontologically flattened English departments everywhere.
William Blake, Urizen presiding over the decline of morality, frontispiece from The Song of Los, copy B, 1795, Library of Congress
Another of the "prophetic" books. When Blake, Shakespeare and Milton are your heroes, fantasy elements are not inherently problematic. At least not until the authorized canon declares Modernism puts a stop to them. The question is whether the elements can be jammed into a gnostic-luciferian caricature of literary creation based on anxiety, influence, and human self-deification.
Here's a hint: the wellsprings of Blake's creativity run a bit deeper then stressfully subverting Milton...
It's sort of amazing were it not so typical. Despite his long career, Bloom demonstrates exactly no interest in seeking or promoting the essence of the Western canon at all. Only to promote the standard Modernist materialist one with a new spin on secular transcendences past. A fable of struggle and misreading, set in the loosely psychoanalytic mumblings of sage panjandrums in faculty lounges.
He is far worse than useless - an subversive servant of the inverted world lurking in a traditionalist skinsuit while working to sever the West from its culture. And it is worth noting that there is good reason to believe that Bloom has a personal animus towards the fundamentally English Christian perspective that C. S. Lewis shared with Tolkien,
as this interesting review claims. It is certainly consistent with Bloom's Gnostic-luciferian take on meaning in the world. It comes down to a question Lewis himself once framed as a choice between the side of the lion and the side of the witch. You can decide the answer.
Harold Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, Continuum, 2005
Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2016
Just finding wisdom with “the indispensable critic” according to globalist mouthpiece The New York Review of Books
That was a long side-trip, but necessary to understand why Western institutions were so easily overrun by Postmodernism. Their whole fake Flatland epistemology was the petrie dish that made Postmodernism possible. Even a "traditionalist" canon was grown in a culture where fake autonomy, solipsism, and magical thinking had long replaced observation, logic, and faith. The Modern universities are expressions of that preening vanity, and any categories designed in those terms are incompatible with vertical logos on any level. The difference is one of degree within the same centralized globalist discourse in the service of the same globalist masters.
Tolkien is the complete opposite - his literary vision is born from the confronting his world as honestly as possible historically and intellectually. For him, tradition isn't a recursive academic box or the limits of imagination, but something much like the Band's own description. A living, shifting, organic heritage that defines the ideals, aspirations, and identity of a Western nation. Something that develops over time through material engagement with real experiences and abstract concepts. It has formal, social, political, and philosophical elements, making it as impossible to succinctly define as the nations that create them. You know a tradition through experience - reading and reflection - and not the summary reading lists of de-moralized discourse peddlers.
J.R.R. Tolkien, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, edited by Christopher Tolkien, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015
The sort of deep study that in Tolkien's case extended to mastery of Germanic and old English languages. Consider the different levels of cultural awareness represented by the commentary of a philologist and historian who had just translated Beowulf himself, and glossing someone else's translation to "prove" why your interpretation happens to map perfectly onto the de-moralized Modernist notion of Literature.
This post has gotten really long - diving into the Silmarillion will have to wait. But no one wants to end with Bloom, and besides, the whole point of the post was to lay out something positive from our look into the roots of the West. Drumming out the frauds is important, but so is authenticity. So we'll wrap with a look at one of Tolkien's few pieces of academic criticism, an essay that lays down the literary vision that his fiction brings to life.
Alan Lee, Bridge to Rivendell
Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories" was delivered in 1939 and published in 1947 and offers a vision of imaginative literature as far from Modernist discourse as it is close to English heritage. Click for a link to the complete article.
What is eye-catching is how sensibly Tolkien articulates his vision. No grand theoretical secular transcendence, no raging solipsism, no confusing jargon or web of nonsense references. Just reasoned ideas that align with human reality. Several are noted below:
1. The connection between language and magic through abstraction.
Quotes from "On Fairy Stories" in
bold blue.
"But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent. And that is not surprising: such incantations might indeed be said to be only another view of adjectives, a part of speech in a mythical grammar. The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water..."
Tolkien's notion of magic is based on distortions and inversions of reality filtered through language. It's like Postmodernism if Postmodernists were honest that their claims that language has power over reality was the stuff of fairy tales.
So we start from the opposite position - one consistent with what and how we can know. Language is an abstract mode of representation based on reality and not the other way around. As infants and historians know. When we pretend that our words actually had the power to change reality, we are no longer in the real world, but in some figment of our imagination.
"When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter's power—upon one plane; and the desire to wield that power in the world external to our minds awakes."
Niahti, Two Trees of Valinor
The Silmarillion tells that before the rising of the sun and moon, the land of the immortal Valar was lit by two great trees: golden Laurelin and silver Telperion. Glorious images from the enchanted power to change reality.
Erulian, Excalibur
Faerie, or "fairy-stories" happen when the transformations and transpositions of fantasy are willed into some sort of existence.
"But in such “fantasy,” as it is called, new form is made; Faerie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator. An essential power of Faerie is thus the power of making immediately effective by the will the visions of “fantasy.”"
Tolkien's "Faerie" is an implicitly Western concept of the supernatural - essentially English and more broadly compatible with European traditions. If the power to make fantasy effective is real, we are in the realm of magic, folklore, and the occult. But Tolkien's "sub-creation" is artistic - original and meaningful literary worlds rather than representations of this one.
2. Fantasy is not "children's" literature
Tolkien's take on children and fantasy is insightful, but a product of his time. There is no way he could have foreseen the degeneracy of today's "fantasy" where real children are sexualized and emotionally and physically repellent "fans" engage in an grotesque soy-fueled parody of perpetual childhood. He is responding to a notion of childhood as a sustained bubble of artificial innocence rather than gradual preparation to make their adult way. The aversion to sanitizing dark and complex stories comes from his awareness that children do have to grow in understanding of the world.
Darrell Sweet, The Riddle Game
Iconic scene from The Hobbit, a children's story with serious themes and no perversion. We will avoid mention of the recent Hollywood abominations.
"Children are meant to grow up, and not to become Peter Pans. Not to lose innocence and wonder, but to proceed on the appointed journey: that journey upon which it is certainly not better to travel hopefully than to arrive, though we must travel hopefully if we are to arrive."
Tolkien's perspective is early 20th century, but the basic idea that serious fantasy confronts meaningful subjects in an adult way is possibly more relevant today, just for different reasons.
"Humility and innocence... do not necessarily imply an uncritical wonder, nor indeed an uncritical tenderness." And the question that leads to the meat of the essay:
If adults are to read fairy-stories as a natural branch of literature—neither playing at being children, nor pretending to be choosing for children, nor being boys who would not grow up—what are the values and functions of this kind?
Alexey Rudikov, The Shadow of Morgoth, 2016, digital art
"For Fëanor, being come to his full might, was filled with a new thought, or it may be that some shadow of foreknowledge came to him of the doom that drew near; and he pondered how the light of the Trees, the glory of the Blessed Realm, might be preserved imperishable. Then he began a long and secret labour, and he summoned all his lore, and his power, and his subtle skill; and at the end of all he made the Silmarils."
The world of the The Silmarillion is divinely created and Fallen for familiar reasons - greed, pride, vanity, and the desire to be one's own god. The themes are fundamental to the West.
3. Replicating the real world and "realism" aren't exactly the same thing in a literary sense.
Tolkien clarifies a traditional understanding of Imagination - the human ability to form mental images of things that aren't actually present with a more recent sense of “
the power of giving to ideal creations the inner consistency of reality”. He differentiates Imagination proper - the mental power of image making - from the quality of the image. How vivid or compelling is "
a difference of degree in Imagination, not kind". "
The inner consistency of reality,” is something else - not imagination but part of the "
operative link between Imagination and the final result, Sub-creation".
Brothers Hildebrandt, Bilbo At Rivendell, 1976
Sub-creation is an interesting word, that works as both a noun and a verb. The Sub-creation is the work of art or the Expression. The images produced in the imagination expressed in an artistic medium. "Literature" can be thought of as a collection of Sub-creations.
Sub-creation as a verb refers to the creative act - in Tolkien's case, the art of writing. The author sub-creates when he puts turns Imagination into Expression.
The process looks like this:
Note that Tolkien's notion of artistic creativity goes back to the roots of Western thought. The idea that human making is a metaphor for divine creation was a medieval commonplace, and consistent with Classical ontology as well. "
Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker."
God as Architect/Builder/Geometer/Craftsman, frontispiece of a Bible Moralisée, 1220-1230, illumination on parchment, Austrian National Library
In other words, Tolkien describes a process that lines up with our vertical ontology - where art is a material-level expression of an integrated Logos. The same idea that we saw in the occult posts on the compasses - human artistry is an image of divine creation. The basis of the observation that evil can't create.
This aligns him precisely with the fundamental concepts of Truth, Beauty, and the Good that Modernism in all its forms worked so hard to de-moralize and destroy.
Fantasy may be made of unreal images, but it only succeeds when it presents those images in a way that is rational and logical to the human mind. That "ring true", despite the fantastic elements. Remember that Tolkien refers to "the inner consistency of reality" - whether the unreal images unfold in ways that make sense and not whether each detail exists in the material world. Logos is as applicable to a story about elves as it is to one about gangsters.
J. R. R. Tolkien, Halls of Manwe on the Mountains of the World above Faerie, 1928, waltecolor. Bodleian Library, Oxford
Early version of the home of the Valar - the gods - in the Silmarillion before the world changed, or Fell.
"
Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make."
This doesn't look so good for today's SJW sci fi and their degenerate "fandom". But the next part is downright prescient.
"
If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence), then Fantasy would languish until they were cured. If they ever get into that state (it would not seem at all impossible), Fantasy will perish, and become Morbid Delusion."
Morbid delusion works for the degeneracy of the Devil Mouse.
4. Artistic creation, and therefore Literature - is an expression of Logos
The connection between Sub-creation and Creation, between artist and God, tells us why Tolkien felt so strongly about the integrity of Fairie stories as a profoundly serious and fundamentally Western vehicle for communicating insights into the world around us. That is, what the art of the West is supposed to do.
Recovery is the word he uses for the way stepping into a Secondary world that feels real gives us renewed perspective on our own. "
I do not say “seeing things as they are” and involve myself with the philosophers, though I might venture to say “seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them”—as things apart from ourselves."
Luthian in the Courts of Morgoth
He is perceptually crushing here. Tolkien's argument for imaginative literature is rooted in an understanding of fallen nature that the diametric opposite of secular transcendence. The fantasy world highlights things that are less clear in our complicated everyday lives:
"
simple or fundamental things, untouched by Fantasy, but these simplicities are made all the more luminous by their setting".
Like the inability of evil to create. Morgoth is enchanted by Luthian's supernatural beauty for the same reason as the Silmarils - he can covet and pervert, but can't make. Swapping vanity and lust for the Good and the True precludes creativity in reality as well, but the fantasy makes it too obvious to miss.
The Band would put it this way without changing the meaning at all - logos is blurry in a valley of shadow seen through a glass darkly. But fantasy doesn't have to conform to our world, freeing the author to remove ambiguity and emphasize specific themes. The strangeness of the fantasy world also pulls the reader out of their everyday mindset and gives them a different perspective on how things can be. This helps see through the distractions and clutter of a de-moralized culture that makes Logos so blurry.
To contrast with secular transcendence:
It should be less and less surprising that the one on the left is no where to be found in the Gnostic-luciferian Canon.
5. Escapism is positive when the world is a de-moralized materialist "prison".
Likewise Tolkien's attack on the critics of "
escapism" with their "tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all". Vertical logos shines through when he takes the Modern notion that de-moralized materialism is the highest value to task. Tolkien's Romanticism is clearest when compares the ugliness of Modern life to a prison with organic community and natural stewardship. This is a direct repudiation of secular transcendence and
Progress! in particular:
Alarie Tano, Eärendel
The greatest of mariners attempts to sail to the Undying Lands of the Valar in a last desperate plea for help against an ascendant Morgoth. But it is hopeless - the Valar have concealed their realm from the world.
steamey, Eärendel and Elwing
Until his beloved Elwing comes to him in the form of dove bearing the a Silmaril. The power of the jewel cannot be denied, and Eärendel, alone among mortal men, reaches Valinor, where his petition is heard and saves the world. Love, commitment, faith, heroic prowess... but no subversion,
"
The escapist is not so subservient to the whims of evanescent fashion as these opponents. He does not make things (which it may be quite rational to regard as bad) his masters or his gods by worshipping them as inevitable, even “inexorable... Why should we not escape from or condemn the “grim Assyrian” absurdity of top-hats, or the Morlockian horror of factories?"
6. Profound “escapisms” offer satisfaction and consolation.
If the highest function or true form of Drama is Tragedy, the Fairy story is the opposite - what Tolkien calls "
Eucatastrophe... the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale). It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief."
Olga Kukhtenkova, Earendil and Elwing, 2004
They live on after the fall of Morgoth in the heavens. Fantasy doesn't just teach, it uplifts. It is Art - it wields rhetoric as well as dialectic in service of logos. If the narrative rings internally true, the clarity and focus allows for an almost visionary revelation.
"
It can give to child or man that hears it, when the “turn” comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art."
The True is central. The turn, the evangelium, doesn't get it's power from being "cool" or having big explosions. That is surface-level - an exciting climax enhances the impact but it isn't the source. At least, not when the Sub-creation is artful enough to deliver insight and consolation. In Tolkien's words: "
The peculiar quality of the ”joy” in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth."
7. The satisfaction and consolation of fantasy expresses "the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe" - the Gospels.
The Gospels embrace "
all the essence of fairy-stories" but raised to History in our primary world. The Creation that gives meaning to all our Sub-creations.
James Martin, Resurrection Morning
Consider this statement on Logos in creation: "
The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the “inner consistency of reality.” There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation.
To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath."
Justin Gerard, Morgoth and the Silmarils
On Fairy Stories gives us a vision of fantasy, and imaginative creation in general, that is compatible with the vertical Logos of the West. It is built out of it. Classical concepts of representation, Christian morals and metaphysics, and creative influences drawn from a deep understanding of European history and tradition. The plan was to look at The
Silmarillion as an example of Western values, but this post has run a bit too long as it is. So we'll cut it here with one thought and save the book for later.
Darrell Sweet, The Fall of Numenor
Things are different in discourse and real life.
Something to remember next time someone is using a credential to pass obvious nonsense. The Silmarillion like The Lord of the Rings is hard to classify. Fantasy the modern genre didn't really exist when Tolkien was writing his legendarium, and The Silmarillion in particular lacks the narrative or stylistic unity of a modern novel. But putting classification first is what discourse does, since at it's commentary more than creation.
If you consider the pre-Modern works on Bloom's list - Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, even Blake - they weren't thinking about conforming to preset forms. They were creating them. Great works of literature are often singular - the Expressions of Imagination in Sub-creation, and not sets of instructions. Bloom was right to praise the sublime imagination when defining literature - it is how art is made from the stuff of tradition. But the influence in the West needn't be anxious - that's the Modern condition. It can be unique and deeply moving in its sincerity.
Like
The Silmarillion.
