
Harold Bloom: Anti-Inkling? - lermontov
https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/5203/harold-bloom-anti-inkling/
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sjackso
It's worth providing the context in which CS Lewis praised 'A Voyage to
Arcturus:' it's in a list of what he considered the best mythopoeic fiction.
The quote below is from Lewis' essay 'On Science Fiction,' available e.g. in
his collection 'Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories'

> Specimens of this kind [of fiction], at its best, will never be common. I
> would include parts of the _Odyssey_ , the _Hymn to Aphrodite_ , Much of the
> _Kalevala_ and _The Fairie Queene_ , some of Malory (but none of Malory's
> best work) and more of _Huon_ , parts of Novalis's _Heinrich von
> Ofterdingen_ , _The Ancient Mariner_ and _Christabel_ , Beckford's _Vathek_
> , Morris's _Jason_ and the _Prologue_ (little else) of the _Earthly
> Paradise_ , MacDonald's _Phantastes_ , _Lilith_ , and _The Golden Key_ ,
> Eddison's _Worm Ouroboros_ , Tolkien's _Lord of the Rings_ , and that
> shattering, intolerable, and irresistible work, David Lindsay's _Voyage to
> Arcturus_. Also Mervyn Peake's _Titus Groan_.

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

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vixen99
Lindsay coins terms for two new colors, jale and ulfire but you'll need to be
on Arcturus to see them. An amazing and far-reaching fantasy.

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

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

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

A freudian twist

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rjkennedy98
Plainly not true. Bloom just particularly despised them for their neo-
Christianity, which makes sense as he was a jew, most of whose family was
massacred in the holocaust.

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

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

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steve19
I think it's unfair to even say "at most peripherally involved". There should
have been greater opposition to hitlers rise to power (such as the Catholic
Church treaty with hitlers Germany), but that's about it.

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

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

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

\-- Adolf Hitler

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

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

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

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

