Books, Arts & Manners

The Book of J, translated from the Hebrew by David Rosenberg, interpreted by Harold Bloom (Grove Weidenfeld, 340 pp., $21.95)

ONE OF THE staples of the postmodern worldview is the insistence that the forms of civilization are nothing but arbitrary constructs without reference to any underlying or overarching reality. In literature, the sprawling formlessness of such postmodern novels as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow reflects the repudiation of any kind of aesthetic structure, while the stupefying accumulation of detail, typical of these novels, manifests a resistance to any kind of discrimination among the various levels of human experience. In criticism, deconstruction has become the tool by which traditional works can be vitiated of the meanings that have accrued to them so that, presumably, we may be forced to confront the raw, primitive, undifferentiated chaos upon which the fabricated order of our lives is built.

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Carol Iannone

Carol Iannone writes on literature and culture.

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The Book of J, translated from the Hebrew by David Rosenberg, interpreted by Harold Bloom (Grove Weidenfeld, 340 pp., $21.95)

ONE OF THE staples of the postmodern worldview is the insistence that the forms of civilization are nothing but arbitrary constructs without reference to any underlying or overarching reality. In literature, the sprawling formlessness of such postmodern novels as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow reflects the repudiation of any kind of aesthetic structure, while the stupefying accumulation of detail, typical of these novels, manifests a resistance to any kind of discrimination among the various levels of human experience. In criticism, deconstruction has become the tool by which traditional works can be vitiated of the meanings that have accrued to them so that, presumably, we may be forced to confront the raw, primitive, undifferentiated chaos upon which the fabricated order of our lives is built.