It's a bit surprising to come across Harold Bloom's confession that the literary work that has been his greatest obsession is not, say, Hamlet or Henry IV, but a relatively little-known 1920 fantasy novel. After all, Bloom is our most famous bardolater. When I took an undergraduate class with him at Yale, he announced his trembling bafflement before Shakespeare's greatness in almost every lecture. In the course of his career, Bloom has named a handful of other literary eminences who compel from him a similar obeisance—Emerson, Milton, Blake, Kafka, and Freud are members in this select club—but one does not find David Lindsay on this list.
Yet, in his 1982 book Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism, Bloom writes of Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus: “I have read it literally hundreds of times, indeed obsessively I have read several copies of it to shreds.” The much-shredded book has, he says, “affected me personally with more intensity and obsessiveness than all the works of greater stature and resonance of our time.” In fact, Bloom wrote his own fantasy novel—The Flight to Lucifer, published 40 years ago this year—in apparent response to Lindsay's. “I know of no book,” he writes, “that has caused me such an anxiety of influence, an anxiety to be read everywhere in my fantasy imitating it.”
What is it about A Voyage to Arcturus that so captivated Bloom? Though it never had much mainstream success, Lindsay's genuinely strange and unsettling novel surely belongs on any list of the 20th century's most significant works of fantasy. The trendsetting British fantasy novelist Michael Moorcock, writing in 2002 on the occasion of one of the book's republications over the years, called A Voyage to Arcturus a “Nietzschean Pilgrim's Progress” and praised its “compelling, almost mesmerising influence.”
A Voyage to Arcturus opens with a drawing-room séance interrupted by three strangers: the threatening Krag, his glum companion Nightspore, and the novel's protagonist, Maskull, who joins the first two on a journey to the planet Tormance. While exploring Tormance, which is ruled by an entity known as Crystalman, Maskull ends up sprouting a series of odd new limbs, eyes, and sensory organs. His often-fatal encounters with the planet's inhabitants read as mythic allegories of everything from the search for God, to the relationship between the sexes, to the artistic process.
Bloom, though, views Lindsay's novel as a kind of spontaneous Gnostic scripture. In his reading, Crystalman is the oppressive god, or demiurge, who according to Gnostic theology keeps us locked in the material world and ignorant of our radically free natures. Whether or not this is what Lindsay had in mind, in The Flight to Lucifer Bloom makes the Gnostic content didactically explicit.
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