Harold Bloom’s Rage to Read, “The Daemon Knows,” and Multiple Personality in Literary Creativity

Since this Sunday’s front page of The New York Times Book Review will feature the following essay on Harold Bloom by Robert Gottlieb…

Robert Gottlieb. “The Rage to Read.” January 31, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/23/books/review/bright-book-of-life-harold-bloom.html

…I will take this opportunity to reprint my post on a book by Bloom that Gottlieb does not mention:

December 11, 2015

"The Daemon Knows" by Harold Bloom: He refers to daemons as supernatural, alternate personalities, who produce and/or appreciate creative works.

“What lies beyond the human for nearly all of these writers is the daemon, who is described and defined throughout this book. The common element in these twelve writers…is their receptivity to daemonic influx. Henry James, the master of his art, nevertheless congratulates his own daemon for the greatest of his novels and tales” (1, p. 4).

“Whitman had no poetic method except his self, though I should say ‘selves,’ as there were three of them: ‘myself, Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs,’ and also ‘the real Me’ or ‘Me myself,’ and the nearly unknowable ‘my Soul’ “ (1, p. 54). “The ‘real Me’ or ‘Me myself’ is an androgyne, whereas the persona Walt is male and the soul is female” (1, p. 57).

But Whitman said that he had more than three personalities:

“Do I contradict myself?

Very well then…I contradict myself;

I am large…I contain multitudes” (1, p. 68).

“Shakespeare entertained a bevy of daemons: Hamlet, Falstaff, Iago, Cleopatra, Macbeth among them. They did not possess him, though Hamlet and Falstaff edged closest. It is a nice question whether daemonic Ahab possessed Melville. The twelve great writers centering this book were all possessed…” (1, p. 122).

“Where is Melville the man in Moby-Dick? Split at least three ways (Ishmael, Ahab, narrator), he is somewhat parallel to Whitman, who in 1855 also is tripartite…” (1, p. 125).

“Daemonic agency is the hidden tradition of American…narrative (Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, James, Faulkner)…In narrative, the protagonists are possessed by daemons, conquistadores somehow ordering a chaos of unruly other selves” (1, p. 135).

“The obscure being I could call Bloom’s daemon has known how it is done, and I have not. His true name (has he one?) I cannot discover, but I am grateful to him for teaching the classes, writing the books, enduring the mishaps and illnesses, and nurturing the fictions of continuity that sustain my eighty-fifth year” (1, p. 156).

Hart Crane…Like John Keats, he had a truer sense of other selves than most of us can attain” (1, p. 158).

“Emerson, a scholar in the broadest sense, formulated what he chose to call ‘the double consciousness’ “ (1, p. 165). Search “double consciousness” in this blog.

“I conclude by expressing a lifelong sense of personal gratitude to Hart Crane, who addicted me to High Poetry. He taught me that my own daemon desired that I read deeply, appreciate, study, and clarify my response to his work. In doing so, my long education began and is ongoing” (1, p. 496).

1. Harold Bloom. The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime. New York, Spiegel & Grau, 2015.