Bloom’s Kenosis and the Defeat
Kenosis. Emptiness, to empty oneself. Jesus may have made himself nothing but the rest of humanity does not seem to be able to do so. People ramble about nonsense and sense and babble and ramble. People never seem to never have something to say. But this is not about having nothing to say, this is about bloody Bloom and his bloody ideas. This is about kenosis and the fact that Bloom makes me want to slam my head through a wall. This is about me making Bloom look like a meaningless moron who talks to make himself feel better. It probably will not happen but I am going to try. I may not have this theory thing down pat but I think I have enough of an idea to work with it.
Though I might not.
Now, I am going to do something that is likely to get this paper thrown out immediately, or burned on sight. It is entirely unforgivable in the eyes of the learned officials; I am going to quote Wikipedia. Yes, I know, it is not a reliable source of information. You know what? I. Do not. Care. I can quote who and whatever I want, even if they are wrong, or morons, or if it is sheer nonsense. Besides Wikipedia is a useful source for at least general information. It might not be entirely accurate but it will have enough accuracy or a warning if it is not cited. Wikipedia is not a bad thing, it is just not a acceptable source of information for the collegiate world.
Anyway, kenosis according to Wikipedia:
In literary aesthetics, the term Kenosis also refers to the affect (feeling) experienced by the reader of lyric or poetry forms. It is the experience of the emptying of the ego-personality of the reader into the immediate sensory manipulation of poetics. In this sense, kenosis inflicts an experience of timelessness upon the reader. The term is often contrasted with catharsis (which is the affect created by drama) and kairosis which is the affect created by novels.
A very basic description of kenosis according to Wikipedia. Although I generally use the word vastness or cosmicality, yes I know it is not a word I do not think, instead of “timelessness” though that applies as well. Removing the ego, I, draining it away is bound to make one feel insignificant when laid up against all that, the flotsam and jetsam, that makes up the universe, the sheer weight of the years that have come before you and the years that will follow after your death are innumerable and heavy in a strange way. They weigh on the soul. It is easy to say one has importance on the small scale but once the ego has stepped back that self-importance disappears and a person can be crushed by the incomprehensible All.
However, we need to move on.
Back to the essay. The description is useful, practical and it gives a general idea as to where this is going.. Yes, we are going to discuss kenosis, especially kenosis and Harold Bloom. Bloom is one of the densest writers I have ever read, and I do not mean he has a thick skull. You can get the general idea of what he is saying but then it all goes slipping down the rabbit hole as your brain melts into a puddle of well boiled goo. It is not fun. With half remembered references, extensive quotes, and no clear cut explanations Bloom will lead the reader in a circle without ever getting to the point. At least that is the way it seems to me. The man never says anything straight out and I do not know if he is just doing it to mess with my head or if he is expecting me to know all the crazy stuff he is talking about. He is certainly writing to a specific audience, but oh, well. On with the essay.
So Bloom focuses on kenosis as opposed to catharsis and kairosis, because he focuses on poetry. However he is not only reading poetry, he is also reading novels and drama. Why kenosis? Perhaps he believes that all good literature is poetry.
At any rate, we were discussing Bloom’s little “revisionary ratios,” his third one to be more specific, kenosis. Bloom claims it to be a “discontinuity” between the precursor and the new poet. The new poet while swerving must not only appear to humble himself but drain out his precursor’s own inspiration as well, thus making the precursor’s work empty of meaning and inspiration. The author, in someway or another, takes the precursors work, repeats it, removes all meaning and inspiration from the precursor’s poem all the while writing a better poem than his precursor ever could. That could be difficult.
Samuel Beckett comes to mind. Sucking stones, shudder. Though at the same time the pages and words he gives us are utterly fascinating. They mesmerize even as the negate themselves and remove all meaning from the pages. Joyce and Beckett, opposites yet not. Joyce will hand you everything, even muck, and make it gold even as he is taking it all away. Beckett will hand you gold and make it meaningless. Beckett characters do something, or see something and then, maybe not. Maybe they did not see or hear something because it did not exist, or it does not exist anymore because he has removed its meaning, removed it from existence by negating it. He did, and he did not. Paradoxical, no?
How in the world do you do that? Apparently there is a good dose of humility, self-assurance, and creativity involved plus a good dollop of repetition. The poet rides the line that will make him cease to exist, will destroy him as a poet. He must err in order to be a poet, even if that error destroys him. He must live outside of time and in eternal darkness and torment; this is where a poet exists even in his greatest moments writing his greatest works. This poet, a strong poet will take his precursor’s poem write it , write it better and burn his precursor to ash and his immortality to dust. Then he will take the ash and ingest it, making it part of him, but not him in entirety, no merely the little echo in the back of your head that comments on you work. The Id, perhaps? Why, yes, Bloom agrees, that is the Id. It is that part of a person that is not the person themselves, it is the part of ourselves that demands out basic needs be met, perhaps some would call it instinct. What the Id wants, it gets. The Id demands of the poet that his works be great because that too is a basic need. If the poet fails in that need, he cannot claim the Id of his precursor, but the other precursors that he has claimed will call it failure and the poet will starve. Both literally and figuratively.
No poet is a repeat of another, not even with taking in the precursor as I have suggested happens above, but that is what they want. Those repeats are a form of immortality, like offspring. A person has a child instinctively to continue the race as a whole, personally they wish to hand something down for future generations even if it is only a few scraps of DNA. They wish to have something to love that will outlast them and eventually outdo them in so many ways. Parents, too, have a form of this immortality, and like poets, they will be remembered for their skills and the love that they put into their darlings. Perhaps poets, like parents, want their offspring to be successful even overtaking and surpassing them.
For the more Greco-Freudian portions that happen in this particular portion of Bloomian theory I have only this to say: Freud would say kill your father and take his place as god-king, Bloom would say kill you father, take his place, and be a better god-king than he could have ever hoped to be.
And we move on. Humans like repetition. It is a pattern and human minds latch onto patters like ticks on deer. These repetitions are ticks themselves. They’ll drain you of your blood and leave a nasty disease behind, that will eventually cripple if not out right kill you. There are no cures and the treatments do not always work and generally make you wish you had died anyway. Bloom is like that himself, a nasty case of Lyme disease, or maybe Rocky Mountain spotted tick fever. Yes, both disease cause severe symptoms leaving one weakened if not crippled for years.
I am comparing Bloom to a tick… wow. And getting away with it.
Back to repetition. Repeated patterns draw attention. Even Bloom has his patterns, his name dropping; Blake, Emerson, Shakespeare, Freud, etc. etc. Yet, in his idea of kenosis he means the poet to undo everything ever written (if he goes back far enough in his father complex and pushes hard enough), to make it all meaningless. The poet appears to humble himself, yet remains full assured, yet there is some humility in the act as he not only humbles himself but in humbling his precursor completely crushes their precursors and so on and so forth.
In order to humble the precursor the poet must remove the faults that his precursor had. He must remove them not only from the poetry but from the offspring poet, himself, as well. That father, whose ashes you took into yourself, you must now remove the parts that hold his faults from your self, that part of you that is him must be burned again and must be separated, him from you. It is not longer part of you but a part of him and a poor and pathetic part at that. I suppose it would be a bit like genetic engineering, but instead of starting before conception your starting in the middle of your life, I am not sure that is even possible. Maybe gene therapy. Hmm…
I got sidetracked again, go figure. Back to kenosis. Bloom refers to kenosis as an isolating act. That the poet isolates himself, gives himself a look over, isolates a faulty part and then cuts it off, humbling himself, even as he out does his precursor. But not cutting it off as in removing it entirely. No, I mean cutting off as in keeping it but never acknowledging it. Like a pet cactus. You do not touch it, rarely, if ever, water it or glance at it. You just let it sit and grow. Or shrivel up for want of company and care. So it is really a form of neglect towards the self. So very confusing.
Appearances. Need to clear up, appear humble but do not be humble, but make sure your precursor is humbled. How to do that? How should I know, I am not a poet! But apparently kenosis is about being not what you appear to be. But it is about making your precursor not what he was, and his poetry not was it meant. So it becomes an undoing as if it had never happened in the first place. Apparently this entire thing is about being not. Not good, not strong, not memorable and definitely not meaningful.
Strong poets must believe in themselves, in a cause, or at the very least that they are working towards something greater than themselves, that their entire existence is not wasted and useless. Perhaps useless is not the word, more lacking meaning. Though I suppose if one can find meaning in a grain of sand one can, in fact, find it anywhere. But it is not just meaning, it is beauty. There must be a beauty to the poet’s works as well. There must be something in the poem that can catch the reader and drag them in by the throat and then throw them out in a heap of utter emotional upheaval. I do not necessarily mean upheaval as in crying and weepy or raging or cheery. I mean one must be affected by the works in some manner, must react in someway.
Bloom in his twists and turns and general feeling of that fact that you swear he is trying to confuse you, which he is and you are, leaves the reader with melted brains and only the vaguest of general ideas. I cannot help but wonder at his meanings and wanderings.
My personal views on kenosis are a bit simpler and more along the lines of the unfortunate Wikipedia article. In action, kenosis, begets a response from the reader causing an emotional upheaval. Throughout the reading this upheaval rises and tenses until the climax of the piece where it is then drained completely from the reader, leaving them empty and feeling somewhat insignificant. It is almost despairing, yet at the same time something of an objective apathy. There is nothing left to the reader to be emotional over due to the fact that all emotions have been drained of energy and inspiration. It is, I suppose, like running until you cannot and dropping in an exhausted heap. You have no energy to respond to anything with, nor even to think clearly. But it is not despair, and it is never depressing. It is only that all that was, is and could be no longer exist; it has been wiped out and written over with something new. It obscures.
Reading Bloom is a bit like that. One becomes so exhausted, or at least I do, with working through his increasingly complicated theories and dense wording, one drops and can no longer even manage the turning of a page. The inspiration is gone, the energy largely lacking, one is left feeling as if one has no meaning at all.
That, is what Bloom’s theory of kenosis is doing, the offspring poet removes all meaning from his precursor and leaves their shade empty. That shade will fade into obscurity know by only a few faithful followers who disagree that the offspring has succeeded his sire, has defeated his precursor on the chosen field and out done him. Those faithful few and his failures, those who tried to out do the sire will remember an know and drown in jealousy at the successor, until they too, shall fade out of memory. That I suppose is the ultimate success; completely erasing the existence of the precursor, until only old ghosts, silent in their graves remain, unseen and unheard by the people of the present.
Have I succeeded in draining Bloom of all his ego and inspiration? No, most likely not, for he has, as is usual, left me in an exhausted heap and wondering at my daring. What had I been thinking? Oh, yes, I was running off of desperation, frustration, and temper. Desperation, as this essay is due in less than four hours; frustration, as this man frustrates my understanding of him and theory; and temper, which generally runs hand in hand with frustration. I am typically an even tempered person but this calls has shown me that this is not so. My own faults have been exposed rather than this precursor that I am following. How apropos.
Bloom has kicked me in the teeth and laughed at me, left me feeling drained of thought and energy. How can I dare to hand this essay in? Because I must. I would rather hate to fail as I am graduating next weekend and this essay is my final and a good chunk of my grade. Thus I will leave you, in defeat, and become a shade myself. For a while, at least. I am not going to give up just because theory makes me want to beat my head against the wall. That would be proving that I am a weak writer and I absolutely refuse to accept that. So, now I will dust myself off and fare forward, ready to face whatever is placed before me.
Enough! This has been “done to death by a slanderous tongue.”
-Much Ado About Nothing (V, iii, 3-4)
