Word: blakes
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...same "experience" as the original. It is the critic's bias against the reproduction that somehow makes it "worse." If the reproductions offer the same experience as the original, why shouldn't they be considered worthwhile? For centuries artists have reproduced their art--engravers like Albrecht Durer and William Blake made rough woodblocks of their originals and printed dozens of copies to sell. They certainly didn't consider it demeaning...
Norman and Nancy Blake--Jonathan Swift...
Harold Bloom's earlier studies of William Blake and W.B. Yeats, both impressive works of literary criticism, should have taught him to beware these dangers. But in The Flight to Lucifer. Bloom's latest work, the author's zeal to communicate an obscure but not inherently tedious theory of religion overwhelms him, and he does not live up to his chosen role of myth-maker. Bloom clothes his doctrinal argument in a flimsy mantle of epic fantasy. He would probably have done better to write an essay than this dreary mess...
Whatever fascination The Flight to Lucifer holds lies in the historical and philosophical interest in Gnosticism itself, not in Bloom's bankrupt dramatization of it. The Gnostics envision a complete reversal of Biblical myths on the order of Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In their version, the Old Testament's creator-God becomes the evil Demiurge, who created the physical world to imprison man and estrange him from the true God--who is not part of Creation at all, but an alien being to whom men with true knowledge, or gnosis, seek to return. The doctrines make provocative...
Bloom is obviously over-learned. Perhaps if you studied The Flight to Lucifer with the care the author devoted to Blake and others, it might yield allusions, internal consistency, and lots of symbolic geometry. But Bloom doesn't make the effort attractive enough; his book lacks any felicities of description, characterization or narrative. For one thing, its 52 chapters, each four to six pages long, leave no room for any sort of rhythm in the plot. Even worse, the book's brevity makes a mockery of its epic pretensions...