Harold Bloom and A Voyage to Arcturus

The well-known literary critic Harold Bloom passed away yesterday at the age of 89. I will leave it to others to comment on the breadth of his career and on his qualities (or at times the lack thereof) as a critic, save to note that David Bratman has written about Bloom's failure to understand Tolkien in this post.  Here I'd like to explore Bloom's curious relation with David Lindsay's novel, A Voyage to Arcturus (1920).

In Bloom's Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (1982), there is a chapter on "Clinamen: Towards a Theory of Fantasy," in which Bloom  makes a number of surprising comments about Lindsay's book. In fact the whole chapter centers on Bloom's view of A Voyage to Arcturus, an eccentric view nonetheless.  Here are a few of Bloom's early comments (before he waxes into his main argument):

David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, first published in 1920 in England, is a very unevenly written book, varying in tone from preternatural eloquence to quite tedious bathos. Yet I will assert for it a greatness that few contemporary critics might grant, and part of that greatness is the book's near-perfection in a particular kind of romance invention, as once it would have been called--the kind we have agreed to call fantasy. (p. 200)

The deepest affinities of Lindsay's mad sport of a book are with Lewis Carroll's apocalyptic release of fantastic energies and desires, though what emerges as purified wonder in Carroll manifests itself as horror and torment in Lindsay.  Try to imagine Through the Looking Glass as it might have been written by Thomas Carlyle. and you will not be far from the verbal cosmos of David Lindsay. (p. 201)

But Bloom's most revealing comment comes several pages later:

In regard to Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, I have experienced a relationship marked by a wild fondness and an endless ambivalence, itself productive of my own first attempt at literary fantasy, published in 1979 as The Flight to Lucifer, a book very much in the Arcturan shadow. (p. 207)

The Flight to Lucifer was Bloom's only novel, and I believe his only published work of fiction. Indeed it was written very much in the shadow of A Voyage to Arcturus, for it is basically a dull and lifeless re-write (even to its title) of Lindsay's book along even more expressly and didactical Gnostic lines. After its 1979 hardcover publication and the subsequent 1980 trade paperback, the book has never been reprinted. Soon after this Bloom disavowed the book.  In an interview in 2015 he noted "I had to pay the publisher not to have a second printing of the paperback. If I could go around and get rid of all the surviving copies, I would."

Is the book as dire as all that suggests?  Sadly, it is.